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Like any virus, SARS-CoV-2 has been mutating constantly since the beginning of the pandemic. Until November of 2020, though, that didn’t seem to matter. That’s when scientists in the United Kingdom noticed an alarming change: The virus had mutated in a way that made it more transmissible. Within a month, similar reports were emerging from places around the world. Suddenly, it seemed the virus was changing at an alarming rate.

SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t actually been mutating faster, though. Instead, by letting it spread around the world, we’ve just given it more and more opportunities to mutate as it replicates. The result is that, after countless random mutations, there are signs that the virus is beginning to adapt to our natural defenses. And because it’s completely normal for a virus to change over time, we shouldn’t expect it to stop. The only real way to stop those changes is to stop giving the virus so many opportunities.

by Edouard Mathieu and Max Roser

November 23, 2021 - Last updated on December 27, 2021 Our World In Data

During a pandemic, you might see headlines like “Half of those who died from the virus were vaccinated”.

It would be wrong to draw any conclusions about whether the vaccines are protecting people from the virus based on this headline. The headline is not providing enough information to draw any conclusions.

Let’s think through an example to see this.

Imagine we live in a place with a population of 60 people.

Then we learn that 10 people died. And we learn that 50% of them were vaccinated.

Now we have all the information we need and can calculate the death rates:

We therefore see that the death rate among the vaccinated is 5-times lower than among the unvaccinated.

In the example, we invented numbers to make it simple to calculate the death rates. But the same logic applies also in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Comparisons of the absolute numbers, as some headlines do, is making a mistake that’s known in statistics as a ‘base rate fallacy’: it ignores the fact that one group is much larger than the other. It is important to avoid this mistake, especially now, as in more and more countries the number of people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 is much larger than the number of people who are unvaccinated (see our vaccination data).

This example was illustrating how to think about these statistics in a hypothetical case. Below, you can find the real data for the situation in the COVID-19 pandemic now.

Here we bring together the official mortality data by vaccination status published by the United States, England, Switzerland, and Chile. These charts are updated weekly, if new data has been published by the official source.

England has fully vaccinated 70.2% of its population, mostly with the vaccines produced by AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Mortality data by vaccination status is published by the Office for National Statistics.

This chart presents the COVID-19 death rate among unvaccinated people and among fully-vaccinated people.

You can click the “Change age group” button on the top-left to explore data for a specific age group.

All mortality rates are age-standardized by the ONS per 100,000 person-years, using the 2013 European Standard Population with five-year age groups from those aged 10 years and over. “Person-years” take into account both the number of people and the amount of time spent in each vaccination status.

Dr. John Campbell - YouTube

From BMA.org @December 12, 2021

These measures are needed for a health service in a desperately precarious state, already facing a record backlog and waits for hospital treatments, failure to meet emergency ambulance response targets, and escalating pressures on general practice, with 3.1 million more patient contacts per month compared to pre-pandemic (October 2021 vs October 2019). The sudden exponential rise in the Omicron variant – likely to be the dominant variant within days – has added major challenges, given the evidence we have to date suggests reduced effectiveness of double vaccination, requiring a booster dose to improve protection.

One year into the vaccine programme, the new national mission to boost the country will require the entire NHS and social care system to yet again pull together to mount the biggest response possible. The lion’s share of the vaccine campaign to date has been shouldered by GPs and their teams; yet again they have been asked to step up. This additional responsibility comes while they continue to manage significant patient complexity, urgent and acute unmet need in their communities. In secondary care, doctors are likely not only to face a greater number of COVID hospitalisations but also winter pressures which our research found may be the worst on record. The secondary care workforce will face even more pressure with up to 5% of hospital staff shifted from supporting hospitals to the booster campaign.

I want to reassure you that the BMA is calling for you to have the support and protection you need as we face the coming weeks.

Our priorities include:

We must also ensure there are short- and long-term measures to address the punitive pension taxation system so that senior doctors can work extra hours to address the increasing patient demand without fear of a financial penalty. These measures are also vital to reduce early retirement in the profession, which further exacerbates the workforce crisis. We have written to secretary of state for health and social care Sajid Javid this week on these issues, seeking solutions.

I have absolutely no doubt that the effort made by every doctor and every one of our healthcare colleagues will be extraordinary, just as it has been throughout the pandemic.

But the Government needs to make its own efforts too. It says the current situation is an ‘emergency’; that there will be a ‘tidal wave’ of infections.

The vaccination programme is hugely important, but nearly a quarter of adults will not be eligible for a booster by the end of the year due to being unvaccinated, or not having had a second dose in time. It is therefore vital the Government urgently introduces robust infection control measures in the community, especially where people mix in indoor settings.

This includes:

In an already severely understaffed health service there is simply not the capacity for hospitals to cope with expected surges in COVID patients, and for GPs to deliver on the fastest rollout of vaccinations in history without an impact on non-COVID work in primary and secondary care, potentially adding further to the backlog of work.

The total waiting list stands at a record high of 5.98m and continues to grow, and other data points show the alarming pressure points in the system. We need the Government and NHS England to be vocal, honest and open about why priorities are having to change, instead of allowing individual doctors, hospitals and GP practices to face blame, scapegoating or abuse for the reduction in access to routine services.

The Government can be sure that doctors will continue to play their part in tackling the greatest crisis ever faced by the health service. What we need in return is for the Government to play its part, by bringing in reasonable public health measures to contain the spread of this exceptionally transmissible new variant.