Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Elderly Vaccination

 Hong Kong has a sudden surge in Covid cases after two years of little. Discussion at the thread

It suggests that vaccination of the elderly is very important. Note the difference in what the rates for the blue and red portions are.  It was probably a fair choice in order to compare it to New Zealand, but taken out of that context it would give a false impression.

5 comments:

Cranberry said...

I think you have to include the use of Traditional Chinese Medicine into the calculations. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/20220312/370c328cfbd7453786a19305725f1c2b/c.html

How effective is it against Covid? I haven't a clue. However, its use is supported by the government, so it isn't a case of oldies clinging to antiquated treatments.

(Side note: so funny that I have to identify a motorbike as a tractor, to prove I'm not a robot, because the algorithm thinks it's a tractor.)

Grim said...

Bearing in mind also that the Chinese don't use the same vax as NZ. They've got a bunch of their own; who knows how well any of them work? None of the Western ones are approved for usage there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_mainland_China

Assistant Village Idiot said...

That's true. People in HK may be thinking "why bother?" even if they are pro-vaccine.

As to traditional Chinese medicine, my experiences with it are few. 1) Chinese graduate students who got psychotic and had to be admitted to my hospital. Both of them had multiple bottles of stuff their families had sent that did not list ingredients, only uses and advertising. 2)A psychiatrist friend who was American- Chinese and visted China and spoke with doctors there - not in one of the scientific centers. They would show him scrapbooks of photos of the patients they had treated. Nearly all of them were of venereal disease. Perhaps that's what you go to a doctor for in the boonies, using traditional medicine for other things.

Grim said...

I lived in China for a while in 2000-1. The traditional medicine is really pretty good at delivering the placebo effect, which is substantial; and it has some basic and interesting insights about the way in which blood vessels and neural cords run, and how pressure/puncture in the latter can relieve pain in other areas. (The connections are often surprising; the theory about how they are connected via elements is, I expect, a 'just so' story.)

It's effective because there's thousands of years of practice, and people have worked out what works. It's not as effective against a novel virus for the obvious reason, then, that there's not thousands of years of experience to draw upon.

Zachriel said...

Heck of a graph. Thanks.