Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

pleased to share our recent work w/
@ArielKarlinsky
,
@ojwatson92
,
@LucaFerrettiEvo
, &
@ArisKatzourakis
.
tl;dr we found continued circulation of SARS-CoV-2 from late jan 2020 to sep 2021 in iran despite >100% attack rates in 11 provinces. 1/
https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.21264540v1

2/ a particularly worrying sign that natural infection didn't do much to stop the spread in many provinces despite several waves of infection. another key finding was that the estimated IFR increased by a factor of ~2 over the course of the epidemic (from wave 1 to 5).

3/ we show that nationwide excess mortality (EM) follows the same pattern as confirmed covid deaths but is higher by a factor of ~2. As the epidemic progressed, the timing of the peak EM across different provinces were more in sync, suggesting local measures didn't stop the surge

4/ across different ages, the third wave in oct 2020 & the current wave with Delta had the largest impact on younger age-groups. Age-stratified excess mortality also shows a log-linear increase in population fatality rate with age (signature of covid IFR).

5/ more importantly, we see a significant drop in population fatality rate for >75 age-groups during the Delta wave very likely due to a good vax coverage for individuals in these age-groups (not so much for the rest of the population -- only ~3% were vaxxed before Delta)

6/ we also compared our analysis to the number of confirmed & suspected daily hospital admissions in each province. this data is in very good agreement with the pattern of province-level excess mortality.
black=suspected orange=confirmed hospital admissions (look at the peaks!)

7/ in fact the agreement between hospitalisation & EM is so good that the ratio of confirmed nationwide hospital admissions to confirmed deaths matches the ratio of province-level suspected hospital admissions to excess mortality (huge under-reporting in some provinces).

end/ finally, and this is the key point, at the same time that Manaus was experiencing >75% attack rates, some provinces in Iran had equally high ARs. Since then, some provs reached >100% AR but natural immunity DID NOT stop the spread --> Everyone should get vaccinated ASAP!

Authors

Mahan Ghafari1*, Ariel Karlinsky2, Oliver J Watson3, Luca Ferretti4, Aris Katzourakis1*

Affiliations

1 Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2 Department of Economics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
3 Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London, London, UK
4 Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

*Corresponding author.
Email: mahan.ghafari@zoo.ox.ac.uk (MG); aris.katzourakis@zoo.ox.ac.uk (AK)