Science, politics or business

I'm surprised the TV pundits have applauded the State Department's advisory against travel to Japan (link). That decision is not science-driven.

Let's look at the data:

Even with the so-called "surge" in cases in Japan, the case rate per million in Japan is half that in the U.S. as of yesterday. Paradoxically, the chance of an American getting sick in Japan is half than that of an American in the U.S.

Sitting in a country where we have allowed coronavirus to spread readily makes us lose perspective. The case rates in most of Asia are a fraction of what we experienced in the U.S. If we isolate Japan, there is indeed a "surge":

Case rate jumped five times in the last month, and may have topped. At this peak, the rate was still half that of the U.S. case rate - at which level our public health "experts" are declaring the pandemic all but over!

According to the "experts", those case rates mean nothing. The only thing that matters is vaccinations. The Japanese have only vaccinated 2% of their population. One wonders if this is about selling vaccines or getting infected?

***

Not long ago, CDC told us that the benefits outweigh the risks when it comes to blood clots and the J&J vaccine. At the time, they estimated that the risk of blood clots after taking the J&J vaccine was 7 per million. Roughly 30-50% of these cases led to death.

[Harlan pointed out below that the data required to make this point is not quite what I had so I've revised this section as below.]

One reason why the rate of vaccination in Japan (and in many other Asian countries) is low is that people have experienced a much lower risk of dying from Covid-19.

Japan's death rate has not breached 0.8 per million in the entire pandemic. In the U.S., we experienced periods of high death rates, up to 10 per million on some days. A total of 13,000 people have died from Covid-19 in Japan since the beginning of the pandemic while almost 600,000 have in the U.S. Over 40,000 people die from accidents in Japan every year (link).

The risk vs benefit trade-off is different for each country, and in fact, it is different for different age groups, ethnicities, genders, etc.

 

Comments

[Harlan]

The last couple of paragraphs here I think you're confusing two different things. The deaths-per-million from the pandemic are *per day*, while from the vaccine are *per vaccination*. Those are totally different. Over the course of the last year-plus, everyone has been susceptible to that per-day rate 400 times. Overall, the death rate from the pandemic is I think more like 300 per million (just infected people the case-fatality rate is, what, 2000 per million?), while the death rate from the vaccine is, as I understand your analysis, no more than 7 per million.

I really think you should retract or revise this... It's quite misleading...

[Kaiser]

Harlan: To make it more of a fair comparison, we'd have to turn the 7 per million into per day. At the time of the study, vaccinations have only started for a couple of months or so, and initially very few were exposed. So that lowers the number but not by much. Besides, we are missing exposure data on Covid-19. Each injection is a certain exposure to the vaccine while it is not strictly true that every person is exposed to coronavirus every day. So I decided to scrap that comparison.

The basic point is that in many countries around the world, because the deaths they've seen from Covid-19 are low, they don't perceive the risk of Covid-19 the way the U.S. does.