At one point in 2022, I read some anti-vax disinformation that claimed that most people who had died of Covid-19 in the last month had received two vaccine shots and a booster, and therefore the vaccine was killing people. Upon checking the numbers, I discovered that it was true that most people who had died of Covid-19 in the past month were, indeed, people who had had three shots. But some context is necessaryby mid2022, the vast majority of the population in BC had been vaccinated against Covid-19, and most of those had had a third "booster" shot.

We can't interpret counts without knowing denominators. So let's get the full data from March 2022 to examine this more closely. For example, in the age 70+ group (call them "seniors" for convenience), 41,425 people remained unvaccinated, and among those 17 had died of Covid-19 in the past 4 weeks. On the other hand there had been 40 deaths among the 592,189 seniors who had received boosters.

(a) Estimate the relative risk of death for seniors who had received a booster relative to those who were unvaccinated (i.e., no vaccine is the denominator).

(b) Find a 95% Wald and Score confidence interval for this relative risk.

(c) Re-report the results, expressing them as percentage change in risk for boosted seniors.

(d) Draw conclusions: do the data suggest that receiving Covid-19 vaccine with a booster is associated with a reduced risk of death from Covid-19 compared to remaining unvaccinated? What causes you to say this?

(e) Estimate the corresponding odds ratio for odds of death, and use the template to interpret the results in a sentence.

(f) Find just score CI here. Just report the numbers.

(g) Are the numeric estimates and CIs for the OR similar to those for the RR? Why do you think this is the case here?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Answer a Using the following calculation we can determine the seniors who received a booster shot co... View the full answer