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So, if we’re getting vaccinated at (roughly) 90% uptake amongst the most at risk, and the rest of the adult population is going to be offered the vaccine over the next few weeks, would the majority of these future deaths be among older people who have declined to be vaccinated? Or does the vaccine provide less protection against severe illness than we have, perhaps, allowed ourselves to believe?
rodan-
The modelling makes assumptions about vaccine efficacy against severe disease, disease, and infection for both the AZ & PF vaccines, vaccine uptake rates, and reduction in lockdown measures. As they say "Our results are highly dependent on the assumed (optimistic) vaccine efficacy, uptake, and rollout speed".
There isn't a breakdown of where deaths will occur in terms of the split between those vaccinated and those unvaccinated, or in terms of age profiles. My guess would be that future deaths will still broadly follow the age distribution we've seen up until now, but as you say with additional deaths associated with cohorts who don't get vaccinated for whatever reason and particularly older members of those groups.
The study doesn't suggest that the vaccines are any less effective than has already been shown. It just demonstrates how even slightly imperfect vaccine efficacy has an effect on serious illness across a large population.
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and the rest of the adult population is going to be offered the vaccine over the next few weeks
Five months before the vaccine is available to all adults. There’s potentially a big slowdown in new people being vaccinated at the end of this month as supply will be spoken for by the massive backlog of second doses.
(There are rumours of a large increase in supply which could balance things out. We’ll see)
JoePablo
grams
That's right - the modelling makes no assumptions about returns to lockdown. They model 5 scenarios of release from lockdown where the main difference between each scenario is the rate of relaxation of different aspects of the lockdown. Abrupt ending of all current restrictions at the end of April is predicted to produce another wave. Even the slowest easing ending in early August is modelled to lead to a small wave next autumn