Strange goings on in UK Intensive Care Unit admissions compared with overall covid deaths

Summary — while the vaccinated still appear to have some protection against severe symptomatic covid and death, it appears that they’re less likely to make it into ICU if they get seriously ill. Is this a sign of a very rapid disease progression, and if so, is it an early sign of vaccine-associated disease enhancement?

As I’ve mentioned previously, sometimes I see statistics that makes me go ‘hmm’.

Today’s was the recently published statistics on intensive care (ICU) admissions and outcomes for the NHS for May to July 2021.

Rather nicely, they’ve got a section in it on admissions vs vaccination status. I’d note that there are are some graphs in there (figures 26 and 27) that I really can’t work out how they’ve been created given the data presented, but I’ll leave that for now.

Instead, the thing that raised my attention was that the report provides mortality statistics for everyone that came out of ICU, and admission rates for ICU by vaccination status — but they don’t give mortality rates by vaccination status.

Perhaps the resultant question might be better asked as ‘why did they give ICU admission rates by vaccination status?’, to which the obvious answer is: because the rates for the unvaccinated were higher, therefore they wanted to tell everyone about the risks the unvaccinated are taking. Thus the obvious inference is that they didn’t include mortality statistics by vaccination status because there was data in there that they didn’t want people to know…

So — do we have any mortality statistics? Well, not for ICU, but we do have overall mortality statistics for England. This isn’t perfect, because the ICU data is for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (total population about 9% higher than that for England alone) and because the deaths data have slightly different age ranges — but I think it should be good enough for comparative purposes (as the data for both unvaccinated and vaccinated should be equally affected).

The factor that particularly interests me is how ICU admissions relate to number of deaths. Note that we’re not seeing how many people admitted to ICU end up dying — they don’t provide this data. All we can see is the relationship between ICU numbers and total deaths from covid over the same time period. Of course, I’d suggest that there might be a relationship because people that are so ill they might die are the ones that end up in ICU, but we most definitely can’t tell that from the data we’ll be using.

Anyway, onto the analysis. Unvaccinated first:

I’ll quickly explain this table using the data for those aged 10 to 59 (top row). During the three months from the start of May to the end of July 2021 there were 1,428 people admitted to an intensive care unit, and over the same time period 163 individuals in the same age range sadly died. Thus the number of deaths were around 11% of the ICU admission rate. It is very important to note that this doesn’t mean that 11% of those admitted to ICU died — it might have been, but we just don’t know. This is made clear in the data for those aged over 70, where twice as many died as were admitted into ICU — at least half of the individuals in this age range died elsewhere and mortality statistics from intensive care units in general would suggest that it was an even higher proportion died elsewhere.

And the data for the double vaccinated?

Now that is weird. Don’t focus on the absolute numbers — we know that deaths are reduced in the vaccinated for whatever reason, and bizarrely that includes non-covid deaths. We’ve got raw numbers here that aren’t adjusted for the numbers that were vaccinated or unvaccinated in this period — looking at the absolute numbers is likely to mislead as to relative risks. Instead look at the number of deaths per ICU admission and compare with the unvaccinated — there are a significantly greater number of double vaccinated dying for every person that is admitted into ICU, compared with the unvaccinated — indeed, over twice as many for those aged 70+.

As I say, weird. There are a number of potential explanations for this:

• Perhaps intensive care units are refusing the double vaccinated and only welcoming the unvaccinated? This seems highly unlikely to me — the medical profession doesn’t have such biases, even though there might be demands from the public to do the opposite — refuse medical attention to those that have chosen to not get vaccinated.

• Perhaps the medical staff have been ordered to preferentially admit the unvaccinated into ICU to create statistics showing that the unvaccinated are more likely to be admitted into ICU — while this may appeal to the conspiracy theorist in me, I’d say that it is very unlikely — ICU staff are professionals interested in saving lives, and would be unlikely to want to cooperate in any Machiavellian schemes.

• More worryingly, perhaps the vaccinated are more likely to die suddenly from covid, rather than have the time to get admitted into ICU? This is a particular concern, because one of the potential signs of vaccine associated disease enhancement (VADE. I’d note that this includes ADE) is a very rapid disease progression. Severe covid is though to occur as an over-reaction of the immune system (including cytokine storm), which usually takes a week to arrive after the onset of symptoms because that’s the timescale of the response of the immune system that eventually results in the immune over-reaction. In the case of the vaccinated their immune systems are already primed, which might decrease the time that this immune over-reaction would take. I’d note that the vaccinated still appear to have some protection against hospitalisation/death compared with the unvaccinated, but if we are seeing an early sign of ADE or VADE it doesn’t bode well for the future.

Nevertheless, regardless of the explanation it is likely that the vaccinated and unvaccinated have different characteristics when it comes to the progression of the disease from mild covid into severe covid and death. I’d suggest that there is an urgent need to fully explore these differences to reduce the risks that the vaccinated are under.