In July, a bunch of people in Provincetown, Massachusetts tested “positive”. It’s being called “The Provincetown Cluster”. Around 74% of the people testing positive had been fully vacksinated. The number of people in the sample was less than a thousand, but it was still enough to send most everyone into widespread panic.
People are pointing to the data, and using it to back up whatever assertion they’re trying to make. However, the reported data and observations from the event tell us next to nothing.
To simplify things, I’m going to quickly say that I know “testing positive” isn’t the same thing as “being infected”. But presumably the people were tested because they were exhibiting symptoms, in which case testing “positive” may indicate a likely infection. For our purposes, let’s use the assumption that “positive” means “infected”.
One of the main concerns is that a lot of the people testing positive were vacksinated. Which shouldn’t be a surprise. Nobody ever said that the vackseens would prevent everyone from being infected. They claimed that it would protect people, and then hedged their bet with, “but not every vaccine is 100% effective.”
So, having some vacksinated people testing positive shouldn’t surprise anyone. The real surprise was that most of the people testing positive were vacksinated.
Which shouldn’t be a surprise either. Because there isn’t enough data to know if we should be surprised or not.
Like I said, nobody has claimed that the vackseens are 100% effective. And, we don’t know the vacksination status of every person traveling to and from Provincetown in July.
Because the vackseens aren’t claimed to keep everyone from getting infected, you’d have to expect that the more vacksinsated people exposed to the virus, the more cases you’ll find. If they were real vaccines, then that wouldn’t be the case. But they’re not, so it is.
If hardly any unvacksinated people went to the beach, you’d expect that the infected group would include very few unvacksinated people. Which wouldn’t be surprising.
On the other hand, there could have been many times more unvacksinated people traveling through the area as there were vacksinated ones. In which case the large percentage of vacksinated victims would be surprising.
Unless we know the vacksination status of every person in Provincetown in July, or at least most of them, there’s no way of knowing if we should panic or not.
Now, let’s look at hospitalizations. As of July 30th, there were five instances where people were hospitalized. Four out of the five had been vacksinated. None of the five people died.
At first glance, you might be tempted to say that vacksinated people are four times more likely to be hospitalized than unvacksinated people. But, again, there’s not enough data to come to any conclusion.
We would need to compare medical histories for all infected people from the cluster, and not just the hospitalized people. If everyone infected had been approximately the same amount of healthy, then having four times as many vacksinated hospitalizations might be surprising.
But, if the vacksinated people were generally unhealthier in the first place, seeing more of them be hospitalized shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Keep in mind that not everyone who had been in Provincetown last month has been tested. There are undoubtedly people, both vacksinated and unvacksinated, who would have tested positive had they been tested. So, the number of people in the “cluster” is clearly larger than we’re aware.
Try to make any argument using data from the Provincetown Cluster and I’ll poke a hole in it large enough to drive a truck through.
The Provincetown Cluster is just another example of people using incomplete data to make broad assumptions that support their agenda. I happen to believe that the vackseens aren’t particularly effective. But I can’t use this data to make my point. Because doing so would be irresponsible.
If we had accurate and complete data, the analysis of the Provincetown Cluster may not be surprising to anyone. Or maybe it would. Either way, we’ll never know.
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