Massive Excess Covid hospitalisation rate for vaccinated Under 10s
Under 10s in New Zealand are being disproportionately hospitalized with Covid
A response by the NZ Ministry of heath to an Official Information Act Request has revealed startling data relating to the hospitalisation of children under 10s. The data covers a period beginning on the 1st of Jan 2022 and ending 30th September. For the under 10s it is presented below. Bare in mind when reading this that at present the vaccination rate for children under 10 is only about 25%. Under 5s are not vaccinated at all, and about 50% of 5-12 year olds are vaccinated.
While much of the data is suppressed and all of it is rounded to the nearest multiple of 3, supposedly to protect privacy (or something else?), the conclusion is self evident. If we ignore January (NZ was still relatively covid free in January) there were 2124 Covid hospitalisations. Only 189 (9%) of these were in the unvaccinated. The 25% vaccinated account for 91% of the hospitalisations.
This works out to an approximately 40x greater hospitalisation rate for the vaccinated.
The unvaccinated are being hospitalised with Covid at a rate of 42 per 100,000. The Vaccinated are being hospitalised at 1400 per 100,000 over the 8 month period. That is a higher hospitalisation rate than that experienced by the over 60s for the full year (about 1200 per 100k).
So what is going on here?
Please share and feel free to use this information in your own way.
[Update 3/4/23- please see my update post. I got a follow up from Te Whatu Ora and I take them at face value… Let me know if you think I’m naïve ]
Here’s the Data from the OIA:
https://fyi.org.nz/request/21573/response/83227/attach/4/HNZ00011574%20OIA%20final%20response%20Hospitlizations%20from%20COVID%2019.pdf
[Perturbation is the adding of random noise to data and suppression is not providing data,
where doing so could compromise confidentiality.
For data that is not already provided exactly on the website:
• All values between 1 and 5 are suppressed
• Zero values are provided exactly, except for in sensitive categories where a zero
value may be suppressed to protect other low values
• Values of 6 and above are perturbed using fixed random rounding to base 3
(FRR3).
This entails rounding values to neighbouring multiples of 3.
For example, 11 may
be rounded to 12 or 9.
FRR3 is a best-practice confidentiality method recommended by Stats NZ.]
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This is as disconcerting as the data itself.
Stats NZ have a policy reference for the claim of (privacy and best practice confidentiality) on data which is already de-identified when published?
When metrics are small numbers and are suppressed rounded up or down Stats NZ MOH Medsafe know that analysis and calculations become less precise.
Which it can easily be argued is a key purpose of using 'suppression' (s)