This statistic looks encouraging, but is not really useful without knowing the rate of unvaccinated people who dodged COVID during the same time period. I'm guessing that is pretty high, as well.
To estimate the number of unvaccinated cases you can simply use the *all* new cases, since the 5800 vaccinated cases represent only 0.1% of all new cases since the end of January.
Let's try to get a *lower bound* on the probability of being infected if you were not vaccinated. For that we will somewhat overestimate the size of the susceptible group by including everyone who did not have natural immunity at the start of our vaccination program. That means we'll lump fully and partially vaccinated people into our susceptible group. This grossly overestimates our denominator, but saves us having to think about things like partial vaccination. Remember we're looking for a lower bound so denominator that's too big is OK.
Using February 1 as the rough start of the US vaccination program, the total number of susceptible people is the US population (328 million) minus people who have had cases up that point (27 million): 301 million. The number of cases in our susceptible group since the start of our program has been 5 million, of which a negligible number are people who were vaccinated.
This gives us a lower bound of the probability of infection for a non-vaccinated person in that period of 5 / 301, or 1.7%, which is certainly larger than 0.008%.
Need the unvaccinated infection rate to compare (Score:5, Insightful)
This statistic looks encouraging, but is not really useful without knowing the rate of unvaccinated people who dodged COVID during the same time period. I'm guessing that is pretty high, as well.
Re:Need the unvaccinated infection rate to compare (Score:3)
To estimate the number of unvaccinated cases you can simply use the *all* new cases, since the 5800 vaccinated cases represent only 0.1% of all new cases since the end of January.
Let's try to get a *lower bound* on the probability of being infected if you were not vaccinated. For that we will somewhat overestimate the size of the susceptible group by including everyone who did not have natural immunity at the start of our vaccination program. That means we'll lump fully and partially vaccinated people into our susceptible group. This grossly overestimates our denominator, but saves us having to think about things like partial vaccination. Remember we're looking for a lower bound so denominator that's too big is OK.
Using February 1 as the rough start of the US vaccination program, the total number of susceptible people is the US population (328 million) minus people who have had cases up that point (27 million): 301 million. The number of cases in our susceptible group since the start of our program has been 5 million, of which a negligible number are people who were vaccinated.
This gives us a lower bound of the probability of infection for a non-vaccinated person in that period of 5 / 301, or 1.7%, which is certainly larger than 0.008%.