Data Visualizations in the News April 21
NYC: Estimated Infection Rates by Antibody Count
Nearly a Quarter of New Yorkers Were Infected Last Spring, Officials Say
Antibody rates among Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are double those of others, new estimates show. The estimates, based on antibody test results for more than 45,000 city residents last year, suggest that Black and Hispanic New Yorkers were twice as likely as white New Yorkers to have had antibodies to the coronavirus — evidence of prior infection.
Hispanic New Yorkers had the highest rate, with about 35 percent testing positive for antibodies, according to the study, whose authors include officials and researchers at the city Health Department and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Among Black New Yorkers, 33.5 percent had antibodies. Among Asian New Yorkers, the rate was about 20 percent. For white New Yorkers, the rate was 16 percent.
Substantial limitations: Of the 45,000 New Yorkers in the study, fewer than 3,500 were Black, a major underrepresentation. And the participants were recruited partly through advertisements online, which the study’s authors acknowledge may have attracted people who believed they had been exposed to Covid-19.
Vaccine Hesitancy
Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters
Vaccine hesitancy is highest in counties that are rural and have lower income levels and college graduation rates — the same characteristics found in counties that were more likely to have supported Mr. Trump. In wealthier Trump-supporting counties with higher college graduation rates, the vaccination gap is smaller, the analysis found, but the partisan gap holds even after accounting for income, race and age demographics, population density and a county’s infection and death rate.
A recent poll showed that older Republicans were less resistant to becoming vaccinated than younger Republicans.
It’s possible that some of the differences in vaccination rates are driven by distribution issues and eligibility rules, said Jed Kolko, the chief economist at Indeed.com, who has studied partisan aspects of the pandemic. But as eligibility becomes more universal, “the more the differences will be about hesitancy alone,” he said.
Vaccine Efficacy
Efficacy is a measurement of how much a vaccine lowers the risk of an outcome.
What Do Vaccine Efficacy Numbers Actually Mean?
Should I still worry that the vaccines are less effective against some variants?
Part of the problem is that we misinterpret what efficacy really means. When someone hears the term “70 percent efficacy,” for instance, they might wrongly conclude that it means 30 percent of vaccinated people would get sick. That’s not the case. Even if a vaccine loses some ground to a variant, a large portion of people are still protected, and only a fraction of vaccinated people will get infected. Here’s why.
To understand efficacy, consider the data from the Pfizer clinical trials. In the unvaccinated group of 21,728, a total of 162 people got infected. But in the vaccinated group of 21,720, only eight people became infected. That’s what is referred to as 95 percent efficacy. It doesn’t mean that 5 percent of the participants (or 1,086 of them) got sick. It means 95 percent fewer vaccinated people got infected compared to the unvaccinated group.
CDC: Vaccine efficacy or vaccine effectiveness
Vaccine efficacy and vaccine effectiveness measure the proportionate reduction in cases among vaccinated persons. Vaccine efficacy is used when a study is carried out under ideal conditions, for example, during a clinical trial. Vaccine effectiveness is used when a study is carried out under typical field (that is, less than perfectly controlled) conditions.
Vaccine efficacy/effectiveness (VE) is measured by calculating the risk of disease among vaccinated and unvaccinated persons and determining the percentage reduction in risk of disease among vaccinated persons relative to unvaccinated persons. The greater the percentage reduction of illness in the vaccinated group, the greater the vaccine efficacy/effectiveness. The basic formula is written as:
Risk among unvaccinated group − risk among vaccinated group
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Risk among unvaccinated group
Confidence Interval
One way of thinking of a confidence interval is that we can be 95 percent confident that the efficacy falls somewhere inside it. If scientists came up with confidence intervals for 100 different samples using this method, the efficacy would fall inside the confidence intervals in 95 of them.
Confidence intervals are tight for trials in which a lot of people get sick and there’s a sharp difference between the outcomes in the vaccinated and placebo groups. If few people get sick and the differences are minor, then the confidence intervals can explode.
What’s more, all the vaccines look as if they have a high efficacy against more serious outcomes like hospitalization and death. For example, no one who got Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine had to go to the hospital for a Covid-19 infection 28 days or more after getting an injection. Sixteen people who got the placebo did. That translates to 100 percent efficacy, with a confidence interval of 74.3 percent to 100 percent.
Making matters more complicated, the vaccines were tested on different groups of people at different stages in the pandemic. In addition, their efficacy was measured in different ways. Johnson & Johnson’s efficacy was measured 28 days after a single dose, for example, while Moderna’s was measured 14 days after a second dose.
Covid-19 Migration
How the Pandemic Did, and Didn’t, Change Where Americans Move
it did indeed appear to prompt an unusually large flow of urban residents out of New York and San Francisco, two regions with a high share of jobs that can be done remotely even after the pandemic is behind us.
But about 30 million change-of-address requests to the U.S. Postal Service in 2020 show that with these two very visible exceptions — and a few smaller ones — migration patterns during the pandemic have looked a lot like migration patterns before it. Some smaller regional metro areas and vacation hubs benefited. But in general, areas that were already attracting new residents kept attracting them. Those that were losing migrants lost more. And there are few examples, at least in the data so far, of previously down-and-out regions drawing people in.
The graphic below shows that the metro areas that gained the most net movers in 2020 — or lost the most — are almost entirely the same as those in 2019:
In some places, though, it’s clear that things were very different in 2020. A few smaller metros with significant oil-industry employment, like Williston, N.D., and Midland and Odessa, Texas, saw bigger outflows in 2020 than in 2019, a reflection of the declining fortunes of the energy sector more than the pandemic. And net in-migration increased most in 2020 in smaller metros around New York City, like those anchored by Hudson and Kingston in New York State; Torrington, Conn.; and Pittsfield, Mass.
Census Covid-19 Data Hub
Long Covid
Airplane Safety
How Safe Are You From Covid When You Fly?
To understand how risky it may be to board a flight now, start with how air circulates in a plane.
Happiness Index
What Makes a Happy Country?
Finland, for the fourth consecutive year, topped a list of countries evaluated on the well-being of their inhabitants. “Really?” Finns ask.
When governments around the world introduced coronavirus restrictions requiring people to stand two meters apart, jokes in Finland started circulating: “Why can’t we stick to the usual four meters?”
The World Happiness Report uses data from interviews of more than 350,000 people in 95 countries, conducted by the polling company Gallup. The rankings are not based on factors like income or life expectancy, but on how people rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale.
“Finns, she said, are pros at keeping their happiness a secret.”