Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
Well done, Mick! You passed my test.
So, elephant stamp? early mark this afternoon?
Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
It was a chap from the Doherty Institute. He did in fact say "7,000" ICU beds rather than 7,500 and his comments about them still being overwhelmed were in relation to 50% of the population being vaccinated rather than 80%. The Institute's modelling supports a relaxation of restrictions at 80% (but 90% for some demographics).
That sounds (typically) overly conservative. There's not a bad analogue for letting it rip at or below 50 percent vaccination rates - the Netherlands. They were at about 45 percent of the adult population fully vaccinated when they lifted essentially all restrictions back in mid-June. Unsurprisingly, cases spiked rapidly such that after a month they started reimposing restrictions. Nearly 90 percent of their cases are delta-variant. Of note though is that hospitalisations and ICU admissions did not blow out on them. Their case prevalence rate is sitting just below 1 percent (about 171,000 active cases) and they are seeing hospitalisation and ICU admission rates of 0.28 percent and 0.1 respectively.
Applying that ICU admission rate here, we'd need 2.4 million active cases (nearly 10 percent case prevalence) just to fill our baseline 2,400 ICU beds. Even if you were to be super conservative and double the Netherlands ICU admission rate that means you would have to see a case prevalence rate of 4.7 percent; even entirely unvaccinated countries on their worst days weren't seeing that sort of number but they weren't dealing with the delta-variant back then either.
You get a sense that your vaccination target for going, and planning on staying, lockdown-free is between 50 - 70 percent of the adult population fully vaccinated. You'd probably want to err towards the high side of that range.