New Mexico is currently at 48.4% of the eligible population with at least one dose, which recent research indicates is at least 80% effective. Research also indicates that the non-eligible population - children - are not as likely to spread or contract the disease. By mid-May I expect many more states to lift mask mandates, for venues to open at near 100% capacity, etc. People will still be dying from COVID, 80-90% effective still leaves a lot of people vulnerable. But that has not stopped us so far!
CDC study from this week showed 90% effectiveness when doing proactive weekly testing regardless of if presenting symptoms. That is the best data I’ve seen as evidence it prevents even a symptomatic cases as a very high efficacy. Israel data claimed it was highly effective on a symptomatic but their methodology was off (for how they defined a symptomatic)
Yeah, people are reading the effective number wrong. It is very close to 100% in protecting against hospitalization/death, which is what we really care about. If we could vaccinate 100% (perhaps at some time interval), this would be over.
I think it's likely that the real-world protection against death is actually lower than 100%- immune compromised people exist, and are liable to be comparatively poorly protected. And they're not part of the big efficacy trials.
Ideally you can protect them by suppressing the virus by herd immunity, which I think is actually a viable prospect with these vaccines.
Yes, this was seen in the Israel Pfizer data that death protection was around 93%. There are a number of public data points from Israel with sample sizes that dwarf anything done in trials. Shame it’s not mentioned more as it’s incredibly robust (positive) evidence
You can quibble about the date, but there's every reason to believe that as the US eases into summer, restrictions/mandates will largely fade away and it will be the Roaring 20s all over again. I fully expect that not everyone is going to be happy about that but it seems inevitable. International travel without restrictions will almost certainly take longer.
Point being, we've focused vaccination on the most susceptible groups. Vaccinating even 15% of the total population means we've probably vaccinated ~90% of people aged 75+ (with that number being limited by health conditions that contraindicate vaccination).
Some places are at much lower percentages. "Fully vaccinated" varies from ~12% in Utah to ~24% in New Mexico. 17% overall for the US.