Quote:
Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus
BC has better full vaccination by almost every metric than Alberta and many other provinces, and superior coverage among those under 40. The 60+ demographic is also sitting well over 80% fully vaxxed in the province (increasing with age). That age is more likely to suffer severe outcomes, but you're comparing already great coverage to shameful coverage in some of the younger demographics.
The younger people that are unvaxxed and out living life the most, are the ones causing these 4th wave surges, that is not even up for debate. When you have uptake numbers in the 25-35 crowd so shamefully low, it's obvious you need to penalize people in order to further raise uptake, and a vaccine card is the way to do it.
The fact appointments are surging after this announcement is pretty clear proof that it works and now is the time to do it before winter hits.
|
I'm not saying that more vaccinations aren't a good thing, but with the way COVID spreads, bumping the vaccination rate for people in their 20s or 30s will only really have a fairly minimal effect on hospitalizations when there are still hundreds of thousands of people in age ranges that have 10-30% hospitalization rates that are sitting unvaccinated.
And in Alberta, the adult age cohorts that have seen the biggest increase in cases since the start of this month have been the older groups:
20-29: 2.74x
30-59: 3.47x
60-79: 5.73x
80+: 9.5x
When you need about 30-50 cases among 20-29 year olds to match the hospitalization risk of 1 case among 60-79 year olds, it's pretty clear where the risk lies. Even just bumping the vaccination rate among 50+ year olds to UK levels would have vastly more impact on hospitals than vaccinating every single person under 40. If vaccine passports aren't going to do that, then there needs to be even more coercive measures for the at-risk population, because that unvaccinated 50+ group is essentially what stands between living relatively normally with a functional healthcare system and not having that.