I think something that’s really important to the discussion here is that it has not been ideal that we have always talked about vaccine effectiveness by talking about these numbers out of 100 percent. You say something is 90 percent effective or 80 percent effective when talking about the vaccines themselves, and similarly, when you talk about vaccination coverage, you say you’ve got 90 percent of people vaccinated or 80 percent. But the important figure is actually the inverse of that — it’s the hundred minus that.
Because a place that’s got 90 percent coverage and a place that has 85 percent coverage — those numbers sound similar, but actually one has 50 percent more vulnerable people, which is a huge gap.
Exactly that. And that explains some of the head-scratching that we’ve all been doing over the last couple of weeks looking at the U.S. versus the U.K. and western Europe. People will say, Well, look, the U.S. has got around 95 percent of its seniors protected — perhaps even more than 95 percent of its seniors vaccinated with two doses now.
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