This time, because we haven’t vaccinated everyone, it’s the holes in the sieve that are of different sizes. Vaccination provides a second sieve underneath the first, to prevent people from dying. The risk was massively skewed towards older people. Before COVID vaccines came along, the people that fell through the holes represented the people who would die of COVID. The balls that make it through the first sieve are hugely skewed towards older age ranges, represented by the smaller ball bearings. The older you are, the more likely you are to fall through the holes. But some of the smaller balls fall through. Most people who get COVID will not die (most balls get caught in the sieve). Now imagine there’s a sieve that catches many of the balls. The balls representing the older groups are smaller, representing a higher risk of death.

In each age category, there is also a variation in the size of the balls. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume there are roughly equal numbers of ball bearings in each age group. One way to imagine the risk is as a rain of differently sized ball bearings falling from the sky, where the ball bearings are the people that get infected with COVID. Currently, infections are highest in the youngest and lower in older age groups. The risk of infection is not the same for all age groups. There are caveats to that simple calculation. Given the same risk of infection, we would still expect to see more double-vaccinated 70-year-olds die from COVID than unvaccinated 35-year-olds. However, the 20-fold decrease in risk afforded by the vaccine isn’t enough to offset the 32-fold increase in underlying risk of death of an 70-year-old over a 35-year-old. Even conservatively assuming the vaccines are no more effective at preventing death than hospitalization (actually they are likely to be more effective at preventing death) this means the risk of death for double vaccinated people has been cut to less than one-twentieth of the value for unvaccinated people with the same underlying risk profile.ĬOVID infections are currently highest in young people. PHE data suggests that being double vaccinated reduces the risk of being hospitalized with the now-dominant delta variant by around 96%. This dramatic variation of the risk profile with age means that even excellent vaccines don’t reduce the risk of death for older people to below the risk for some younger demographics. An unvaccinated 70-year-old might be 32 times more likely to die of COVID than an unvaccinated 35-year-old. The 35-year difference between a 35-year-old and a 70-year-old means the risk of death between the two patients has doubled five times – equivalently it has increased by a factor of 32.

The risk of dying from COVID doubles roughly every seven years older a patient is.

Dying light only head shots