US lives saved by COVID vaccines

 It is challenging to estimate the number of lives saved by COVID vaccines.

The easiest and quickest way is comparing a country with high a high vaccination rate with a country with a low vaccination rate.

Russia has a low vaccination rate and there are questions about the efficacy of its COVID vaccine.



To be conservative in estimating the number of Americans saved by the vaccines, let us suppose vaccines have not helped Russia, so its excess deaths represent what would happen to a country without the benefits of vaccines. Though Russia's vaccination rate has reached 50%, most of excess deaths occurred when the vaccination rate was below 30.

Russia has 7,154 excess deaths per million by December 30, 2021. If the US had this excess death rate, the total excess deaths would be about 2.4 million. 



The US had 909,943 reported excess deaths by November 28, 2021. Considering the data delay, to be conservative again, let us assume the US had 1 million excess deaths by December 30, 2021, so the vaccines have saved 1.4 million US lives if we assume the difference between the US and Russia can be attributed to vaccines only.



Another way to estimate the number of saved lives is using observed vaccine efficacy.



The vaccines started to save lives by the end of 2020. To be conservative again, let us estimate the saved lives after April and assume the full vaccination rate is 50%. There are about 300K excess deaths, so 300k*14/(14+1) = 280K are from vaccinated and 20k are from vaccinated. Without the vaccines, those fully vaccinated would have had 280k deaths, so the vaccines have saved 260k lives.


The above estimate is very conservative because the most vulnerable are seniors who have a much higher vaccination rate than the average. They have well over 90% vaccination rates in many states.
Let us 60% full vaccination rate to do the estimation again. This is still conservative. In this case, 271K are from the unvaccinated, and 30K are from the fully vaccinated. The fully vaccinated would have 271*0.6/0.4 = 406K deaths without the vaccines, so the vaccines have saved 406 -30 = 376K lives.
The Commonwealth Fund had a well-thought-out study on this. Their numbers:
Reduced deaths by 1.1 million.
Reduced hospitalizations by 10.3 million.




















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