Corrected: Post-Jab ICU rates twice the 2020 rate

Post #512

NOTE: This substack post corrects a mistake made here.

When 44,000 COVID cases were examined, it was discovered that, of those 8,255 cases which were severe-to-critical, 25% of them (2,087) were critical. This represents an upper limit estimate of the share of all severe cases which get put into ICU (all critical cases, by definition, go to ICU).

But in a smaller, prospective study following 260 severe cases of COVID over time, only 6.5% of them were put into ICU. This represents a lower limit estimate of the share of all severe cases which get put into ICU.

Using the severe case rate from the original placebo group in the original phase III trial (43.2 severe cases per million person-weeks), you can estimate the baseline rate of ICU admissions which COVID was capable of causing.

The low estimate, using a 6.5% pass-through rate from severe —> ICU, is a weekly rate of 2.8 per million. The high estimate, using a 25% pass-through rate from severe —> ICU, is a weekly rate of 10.8 per million.

Here is how that high estimate compares to ICU admissions rates after COVID jabs:

NOTE: If the lower estimate of baseline ICU admission had been marked on the graph, the relative burden would be even worse than what is depicted above (yellow line would drop)

In 7 nations, after the release of COVID jabs, the weekly ICU admission rate rose to at least 40 per million (3.7 times the implied rate of the original placebo group of the phase III trial). More disturbingly, a few of them spent several consecutive weeks in a row at over quadruple the average rate found in the placebo group of the phase III trial.

All 17 of the nations showing reached at least one point that was twice the rate of the original placebo group, but that in itself would not be cause for alarm — due to weekly fluctuation compared to the average of many weeks.

Even still, the persistence of rates at more than double the original placebo group, all of the way into February of 2022 (when Omicron variant was predominant), indicates that COVID jabs made COVID outcomes even worse than what COVID, itself, was capable of causing.

The jabs certainly did not improve the burden of disease from the baseline burden of it, when using the conservative estimate of the rate of admission to ICU.

Reference

[weekly ICU admissions per million] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-hospitalizations

[of 260 severe cases followed over time, 6.5% went to ICU] — Wang, J., Zheng, X. & Chen, J. Clinical progression and outcomes of 260 patients with severe COVID-19: an observational study. Sci Rep 11, 3166 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82943-5

[of 44,415 COVID cases, 25% of the severe cases went to ICU] — Wu Z, McGoogan JM. Characteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in China: Summary of a Report of 72 314 Cases From the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. JAMA. 2020 Apr 7;323(13):1239-1242. doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.2648. PMID: 32091533. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

[original rate of severe COVID is 2.25 per 1,000 person-years, using the largest-ever sample] — Polack FP, Thomas SJ, Kitchin N, Absalon J, Gurtman A, Lockhart S, Perez JL, Pérez Marc G, Moreira ED, Zerbini C, Bailey R, Swanson KA, Roychoudhury S, Koury K, Li P, Kalina WV, Cooper D, Frenck RW Jr, Hammitt LL, Türeci Ö, Nell H, Schaefer A, Ünal S, Tresnan DB, Mather S, Dormitzer PR, Şahin U, Jansen KU, Gruber WC; C4591001 Clinical Trial Group. Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine. N Engl J Med. 2020 Dec 31;383(27):2603-2615. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2034577. Epub 2020 Dec 10. PMID: 33301246; PMCID: PMC7745181. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7745181/