>NZ is all-in with Pfizer, which Israel says is 39% effective against Delta variant. This is confirmed by a very good pre-print Mayo study saying 42%

Moderna seems to hold a bit better - wonder if that was known when Merkel got Moderna as 2nd heterologous shot or if that was meant to boost confidence in "other than Pfizer".
>
>Impossible to achieve herd immunity or prevent infection crossing quarantine with those numbers,

Said so since Easter 2020

>with herd immunity the justification for every mass vaccination effort in history, until now.

but often justification was not needed, it was just ordered. I prefer to estimate cost of treatment for C19 to be paid by unvaxxed, as current data points at efficiency against hospitalisation, best done via higher insurance cost / reimbursement for vaccination. Abandoning testing not good as time will come when other strain needs to be found in both subgroups.


...
>In NZ, pre-C19 QALY cost was around $45,000 - meaning that's the cost paid for NZ healthcare to save or extend one year of standardized quality life.
>
>Cost of NZ's C19 suppression/elimination strategy based purely on GDP loss (actually based on 25% of GDP loss to acknowledge alternative cost of mitigation versus elimination/lockdown) delivers a QALY cost of $8,500,000. Almost 200 times the pre-C19 cost.
>
>This is roughly equivalent to dedicating NZ's entire annual healthcare spend to extend life for 800 people with heart disease- and that's just looking at GDP, not at QALY deficits from delayed screening or cancer treatment, depression/suicide etc etc.

NOT disputing validity of such calculation at all, but wondering how you reached / calculated

From very fast googling I get GPD 2019 193,6B$, hike it by 3% guesstimate as "expected growth" will give me 213.1 which leaves missing 19.5 as GDP2020 was 193.6, so dampening was less than 10%

Death# 26, 5.1 per million is 100 - 300 tines less compared to other countries. Of course excess mortality is much less than Covid death #, as per Dry Wood idea, but death # ballooned everywhere experiencing Covid wave and *not* entering lockdown to the point of overburdening health service.

Typical Death # est ~34000, 800 seems much to low for an estimate for excess mortality if no/only near GPD-cost free lockdown measures are employed.

What was your Pi*thumb ? (Even if I am no politician...)

>Vaccination status is now included for NHS data (though not split into Delta vs previous variants, unfortunately) but the upcoming Mayo paper breaks figures into months, with July 2021 almost 100% Delta, and also standardizes a 1000-person-day denominator so that counts aren't affected by large or small cohort size. My read of Mayo is that Delta is far less virulent than earlier strains but important to wait for final version since pre-print stuff can be problematic- e.g. recent leaked CDC document on Delta infectiousness that was full of error, but widely quoted ("Delta is as infectious as chicken pox" ... oops, no it isn't)

I compared delta total numbers growing here in near perfect anti-viral weather since end of May against rapidly falling alpha in same period. Autumn 2020 showed the weather effect in wild strain - so I moved my "get vaccinated" forward. Seems delta will create more problems in NZ compared to 2020 August - but the group needing vaccine most (70+) should already be handled, with chances of getting enough 50+ needled.

I wonder a lot more on CDC hospital data - the rise of younger delta patients seems to be higher than than warranted by # of Corona infections per age stratum. Especially as this is not mirrored in NHS data, with kids even more outside expectations in the states.

Global.Health plans to incorporate vaccination data in next line data releases - perhaps then I can refrain from second or thirdguessing reported data trends ;-))

regards
thomas