What Hangs in the Balance?

Could you make the decision?

I spent some time on Friday compiling data - from Alberta - and separating it into Low vs High Risk groups on Hospitalizations, ICU admissions and Deaths throughout the 3 COVID - Variants of Concern. I did this following watching the proceedings from the court case reported on over the last couple of weeks and because of the testimony that I watched.

From my understanding, Virologists and Epidemiologists are looking at data like this to help them made decisions on Non-Pharmaceutical-Interventions (NPI’s) for the province and country. These NPI’s are everything from Hand-washing stations, through arrows on floors, capacity limits and business closures.

With the information they obtained, it is used to help forecast up and coming possible waves to feed to Provincial Health Care Providers to ensure hospital capacity and spacing requirements.

There is a lot of conflicting information that surrounds all of the measurements taken and from a local, provincial or federal level, there is a realization that there is a global pandemic going on and that some measures should be taken.

Drilling into the information, I took a lot longer looking at it than compiling and to be honest, I can see the differences in the waves but can’t say that anybody would be able to tell what mandates and vaccines did to improve on any of this. This is only a small part of the data, let’s call it a report card using the different variants as a reporting period. Did we actually improve on anything?

When the next variant comes around…could you look at this and decide the fate of 4.5 million people based on any of the differences made?

The dates used for this were approximated by majority case counts identified under Variants of Concern and chopped up, looks like this:

Starting off with Hospitalizations:

Running through this, I have identified the Vaccination status by provincial numbers, the different variants, the percentages of Hospitalized for each of the different waves and of course separated low risk and high risk by age stratification. Under hospitalizations, what you may notice is that Delta and Omicron are almost identical, noting that we aren’t quite finished with Omicron yet, so this number could still swing higher.

But what looks worse is the Omicron Average in the High Risk Groups is actually higher than the Average for the Entirety of COVID, meaning that the Highest Risk Groups have seen a lot more hospitalizations by average as well as by count from Omicron than is for the entire pandemic as well as in relation to Delta.

Adding to this, if you look at the numbers under Omicron in Red, these are Dramatically Higher in the Under 1 year through the 10-19 year groups.

Under ICU Admissions, you can see the following:

There is a noticeable Decline in ICU Admissions throughout Omicron, making up only 16% of the total ICU admissions since the beginning of the pandemic. You will also note that the Low Risk Groups seemed to always be higher in ICU admission, across all 3 variants but what is troubling is that while the High Risk Groups became higher represented in this. I know…the Unknown shows up as a negative number. That was not an error on my part, it looks like there may have been some corrections done on the side of the province during this time (wink wink).

Why are the High Risk so under-represented in ICU admissions?

It’s due to them already living in Long Term Care or Extended Care facilities and having Personal Health Directives where by if they are already in failing health, they may have decided to not be resuscitated. This is a very violent procedure and for the old and frail, not recommended where by treatment for Medical Condition or Comfort may be more compassionate treatments.

Finally, Mortality:

One thing easy to notice is that deaths following Omicron, to date, is only 16%, so there are some definite improvements on this line, which was known prior to Omicron hitting the province. It was predicted that it would be a more transmissible variant but a lot less severe.

Troubling, in the 5-9 year age group, where no previous deaths had occurred prior to Omicron, did during Omicron. Notable about this is this is the first full wave following vaccinations in this age group, announcement to vaccinate 5-11 year old’s was made in late November of 2021.

Tragic in this, percentage wise, the number of deaths in the High Risk group increased over Delta but hasn’t moved above the Overall Average for the entire pandemic. The High Risk group also makes up 76% of total death from COVID.

Trajectory of the Pandemic did indicate that there would be certain Natural Immunity Gained from previous Variants along with whatever protection was offered by the Vaccinations. It also indicated that the severity of the Variants was lesser with each passing variant.

Looking at just this alone, it is really actually difficult to understand if anything or everything actually did improve on the situation or not. In a last piece of this, what I will include is the percentages of Vaccinated that make up these numbers for the Omicron Variant.

With almost 87% of the population Fully Vaccinated, they make up 84% of the case rate, 70% of Hospitalizations and 70% of the deaths, highest population of vaccinations being in the High Risk groups as identified above with over 80% triple vaccinated and well over 90% fully vaccinated:

While still making up 75% of all deaths in the province during the Omicron Variant.

It’s a lot to look at and chew on.

Morbidity and Mortality in relations to the Mandates is what I will be going over with testimony provided by 2 of the Provincial Witnesses over the next couple of days. I figured I’d give you an idea of what this looks like to lend to your understanding.

One thing that I find most troubling about this is…ICU visits were HALF of Delta through Omicron. Why did we hear about Hospital Shortages in this time, if the numbers were this dramatically reduced?

Given the above information, what do you see as most significant in making suggestions on NPI’s on any possible future variants, because this is what hangs in the balance.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, by email response or on any social media platform you see this posted on.

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