Hello. Today I want to talk to you about the effectiveness of vaccines, which are also working their
magic
in Spain.
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The first sign of the effectiveness of vaccines in Spain was a graph published with data from Asturias that circulated last week: in nursing homes, which is where vaccination began, deaths were decreasing and decoupling from the general trend.
Here you can see it:
This data alone would not be a definitive proof, because the change could be due to another cause, but knowing what we know about the vaccine trials, and its successes in Israel and other countries, it is almost a confirmation.
And it is not the only one in Spain.
The weekly data that Catalonia offers also send good news.
As Oriol GĂĽell pointed out to me, the data two weeks ago already showed an effect on residences: in those where vaccination had exceeded 70%, active cases were ten times less than in those not vaccinated.
Infections among vaccinated health workers have also been reduced by 80%.
The Catalan Secretary of Public Health, Josep Maria Argimon, said that the vaccine is preventing about 600 deaths per month in residences and showed a graph with its survival rates: for vaccinated residents it is close to 100%, while close to 2% of unvaccinated residents could have died within a month.
These are conclusions similar to those drawn by the members of the Computational Biology and Complex Systems research group at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).
In Catalonia, deaths in residences accounted for 30% or 40% of the total, but with vaccination they are decreasing and now they are less than 10%.
"There is no other factor that can explain these rapid declines, outside the typical margins of the epidemic, other than vaccination," they explained on Twitter.
Positive data also continue to arrive from other countries where vaccination is advanced.
I already mentioned that the effect of vaccines was evident in Israel, but since then that evidence has solidified.
The scientist Eran Segal has updated the data to show that severe cases are falling at the rate of vaccination by age: the decrease is 67% for people over 60 years, 38% for people 50 years and 16% for the younger adults.
That same staircase is beginning to be seen in England.
While in Scotland a study says that vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca are reducing the risk of hospitalization of those vaccinated by 85% and 94%, respectively.
More and more exhaustive studies are arriving.
For example, this newly published work, by epidemiologist Miguel Hernán and other Harvard colleagues, has painstakingly studied the effects of Pfizer's vaccine in Israel.
Their results say that the effectiveness is 87% against hospitalizations and 92% against severe cases.
And we are not talking about rehearsals, but about an observation of what is happening in that country.
In other words, it is not a hypothetical protection, but a measure of the disease and deaths that have been avoided.
Studies like this will serve to solve unknowns.
As Hernán explained to me by mail, the study demonstrates the effectiveness in all age groups, and "against variant B.1.1.7 that did not exist when the trial was carried out."
In addition, it specifies a fundamental aspect: "Compared with the initial clinical trial, this study provides a more precise estimate of the effectiveness of the vaccine for symptomatic disease and severe disease."
In short, the results in Israel - such as those in Scotland, Catalonia or Asturias - show that vaccines are protecting us from the coronavirus.
The hoaxes can say otherwise.
And there will always be people willing to spread them, because a failure of the care market is that many people get more minutes if they say nonsense than if they say normal things.
But thanks to the work of many people - health, administrative and scientific - we have eloquent data to appease that noise.
2. 🏙 Mortality neighborhood by neighborhood
Last week we published an interactive map of mortality in Spain between 1996 and 2015, with an almost street-by-street level of detail.
They are the main results of the most detailed risk atlas in history, coordinated by statistician Miguel A. MartĂnez Beneito.
An image of the city of Valencia in the Atlas
The study, as summarized by my colleague Manuel Ansede, reveals enormous inequalities even on the same street:
"In the Three Thousand Homes in Seville, a train line serves as a border between two worlds. On one side, swimming pools. On the other, with € 5,000 annual income, the risk of dying from lung cancer is 112% higher; for cirrhosis, 214%, for COPD, 230% ".
There is a repeating pattern: a gradual increase in the risk of mortality from the wealthy neighborhoods to the most disadvantaged, with a peak among men in the poorest areas.
There are some exceptions, such as lung cancer in women, which has an inverse pattern: those in wealthy neighborhoods started smoking earlier and this increased their mortality.
3. 🎲 A random game
A characteristic of the modern world is that everything is very complicated, also good sense.
You can peek into any subject, it doesn't matter if it is trains or crochet, and find yourself a universe.
I thought about it after trying a board game, Wingspan, which consists of collecting birds.
Many of you will know that there has been a boom of board games for years.
I hardly know that world, but I was curious to know who had designed the game (Elizabeth Hargrave).
An image of the game 'Wingspan', by Stonemaier, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and with illustrations by Natalia Rojas, Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo and Beth Sobel
I ended up on the Wingspan company website, where they talk about their mission and list the 12 principles that govern their designs.
Reading it, you understand that creating a game is not easy and that those who do it take a lot of trouble.
It is in its principles that the game has "a quick start and an organic ending", that it is "intuitive to learn and retain", or that the board is made of a special material, because "they are tactile experiences".
They leave little to chance: they want the game to allow you to make plans before your turn comes, so that you don't get bored waiting, and they know that the ideal is that the players have “tension, but not hostility”, so that they interact without end up angry.
They are games, but they are not taken as a joke.
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You can write me with clues or comments to my email: kllaneras@elpais.es 📬.