As a New York Times opinion piece titled “Show Me the Data!” detailed, experts are grappling for answers on Twitter, which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Data are particularly scarce in the contentious area of risk to children, who can’t yet be vaccinated. The U.S. has also failed to do the contact tracing studies that could help identify the activities or venues that pose the greatest risk.
The trouble isn’t entirely the CDC’s fault. Last week Politico revealed that many state and county health departments were failing to collect data on vaccination status of hospitalized patients, so the CDC wasn’t able to obtain the needed data from many areas. These local health departments complained they hadn’t been given the resources to do this reporting. It seemed to be a breakdown in a system that should have required some organization on the part of local health departments and the federal government.
Data matter not just to government decision makers, but, increasingly, to all of us, as we are now expected to use our own understanding of risk to navigate our lives. We’re now allowed to travel, gather and go to restaurants based on our own judgment, while getting mixed messages about whether any of this is reasonable to do if you’re vaccinated.
Most experts seem to agree that big gatherings are a major factor fueling surges, especially ones that bring people together repeatedly, such as weddings or the July Fourth celebration in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But, as Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage and others have pointed out, the risk depends a lot on how much the virus is circulating in a given community, and that’s not always easy to ascertain.
When the media do supply numbers, they are often presented in an ambiguous way, perhaps meant to capture attention more than to inform. News outlets widely reported the CDC’s assertion that 99.99% of vaccinated people didn’t get a breakthrough infection bad enough to go to the hospital—so only .01% needed hospitalization. But Scripps’s Eric Topol points to contradictory numbers showing that 1% of infected people in the Provincetown outbreak were hospitalized.
That’s a difference of a factor of 100—which is pretty big—but there’s some confusion over the denominator. The Provincetown number looks to be based on the percent of hospitalized patients out of all vaccinated people who tested positive, but the CDC’s 99.99% number might be measuring something different—the number of hospitalized vaccinated Covid patients compared with all vaccinated people.
That would be a strange statistic to gather. Even if the unvaccinated are 29 times more likely to require hospitalization, that means their odds still look pretty good, with 99.71% not getting hospitalized.
Too often numbers are thrown around to try to persuade people to get vaccinated—but there aren’t enough numbers to really help people navigate once they are vaccinated. This is no longer just about getting our shots and wearing a mask to the supermarket. The CDC just advised older people not to go on cruises, even if vaccinated, but what about other kinds of trips, or a daughter’s wedding, or just getting together with friends? Should younger people visit our older friends or relatives who are lonely and eager for company?
The most vulnerable among us are sometimes more likely to choose to take risks because they don’t have that much time left. At the very least the government and media owe them the information they need to choose wisely.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and host of the podcast Follow the Science. She has written for the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, Science and other publications.