More on Ontario denominators with corrections for accuracy

Context: A few weeks ago I looked into the Ontario case numbers with the context that case rates were much higher in boosted individuals in every age cohort except for 60 years and older. Strangely, Ontario listed 100% vaccination rate for those older than 70 with 100% of those over 80 being fully vaccinated. As a rule of thumb, there are always defectors, and the Ontario unvaccinated population is no exception. It turned out that Ontario actually rolled back the population numbers they used to the 2020 Statistics Canada data.

No mistake was made and they fully understood the implications of what they were doing. Notably, they aggregated the age groups above 60, which were previously broken down into three groups (60-69, 70-79, 80 and above), because the new, fradulent case numbers no longer be a rate per 100,000. In fact, the new numbers would tend to infinity for those above 80 because there was, supposedly, no unvaccinated people above 80. Thereby, we establish intent in their efforts at data manipulation.

This week a new release of the 2021 Census came out, which featured age distributions in Canada, so I decided it would be a good opportunity to see how close my guesstimates of the current population in Ontario were to reality. Census data, unlike population estimates, are generally clinically accurate. While they may miss some individuals (ie., people under-reporting the people in their households), there is little reason to believe that this would be a large effect.

Of course, the census data would still be outdated, but has another advantage: the reference date for the 2021 census is May 11, 2021. In other words, the data is approximately one year out of date and, as we see the breakdown of population by age, we can assume that the vast majority of people are one year older.

I do not, however, have a good way to account for deaths. Thus, I need to operate under the assumption that the vaccinated and unvaccinated have died in relatively proportional numbers, meaning I will assume that there is new denominator and new numerator when calculating vaccine % in Ontario is the same or similar. This is bound to upset two groups of people: those that believe the vaccine is super effective and those that believe the vaccinated are dying in higher numbers due to adverse events.

To the former group, I will say that there has been less than 5,000 deaths due to COVID since May 11. Most of those deaths were in the vaccinated population, so even with a working vaccine, the difference between the proportion of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations would be negligible. To the latter group, I have no response, and unfortunately, you will have to bear with me. Frankly, exact estimates with the data I have is impossible so there will be knots here and there until Ontario becomes transparent with the data available to them or at least breaks down all cause mortality by vaccination status.

Furthermore, the numbers do not take into account immigration. As I am concerned with the 60 and above age group, I am not overly concerned with this fact. Immigration is generally concentrated in the young and middle aged. While Ontario expected to have a massive influx of immigrants and refugees in the 2021-22 (fiscal) year, possibly reaching on the high end 276,000 individuals, I cannot imagine a scenario where more than 5-10% of those are in the over 60 age group. Again, though, I would expect that this would have little effect on the proportion of vaccinated in the population (immigrants would likely be more vaccinated and refugees less vaccinated), so I will ignore it. The same can be said for within country migration to and from Ontario.

For my purposes, I am just interested in denominator in Ontario that mirrors reality, since their case rate estimates are based on this denominator. My previous estimate was that the unvaccinated were 3.4x underestimated. I did make one calculation inaccuracy (I calculated the true unvaccinated number with percentages rather than going to the Statistics Canada source; Ontario actually considered ~5,000 less people unvaccinated than I suspected), but otherwise, I made a quick back of the napkin guess, so I did not expect it to be fully accurate.

It turns out, I did alright. Based on the census data with a one year adjustment for age, I underestimated the unvaccinated population. The adjusted population for those in their respective age groups (60-69, 70-79, and above 80) is 1,836,445, 1,228,525, and 744,330. Whereas, the 2020 Statistics Canada populations (ie., what Ontario is basing their denominators on) are 1,767,076, 1,136,653, and 659,648. Notable, is the fact that Ontario claims 1,141,827 (of those 70-79) and 675,659 (of those over 80) are partially vaccinated, and 660,520 of those over 80 are fully vaccinated. In other words, they are not just claiming that 100% of those cohorts are vaccinated, but over 100%.

By aggregating the age groups to 60 and above, that number becomes 78,608 not fully vaccinated individuals and even less unvaccinated individuals. But the number based on the census data plus one is actually 324,531 or 4.13x more not fully vaccinated individuals than Ontario claims. Vaccination rates in each respective age group is 92.46%, 91.68%, and 88.74%. Yikes. That is not even close to the Ontario numbers.

So, what does this mean?

The 7-day average of cases per 100,000 that Ontario claims for April 29th is 88.16, but with the new denominator that average would be 21.35. The same 7-day average for the 2-dose and boosted populations are 19.46 and 26.78 respectively.

Death rates for the not fully vaccinated population comes down from a 7-day average of 2.04 to 0.49. Vaccine enthusiasts may take solace in the death rate in the not fully vaccinated population still being higher than the 2-dose and boosted populations (0.21 and 0.15), but at this point we are talking about edge cases.

Edge cases

There are 2,976,924 boosted individuals in Ontario and 507,845 2-dose individuals. So assuming there is some rounding in the numbers (and slight changes in vaccination numbers), we can guess that about 32 boosted individuals and 7 2-dose individuals died in the last 7 days with 11 not fully vaccinated individuals dying in the same time period. If the not fully vaccinated are even moderately more unhealthy, for whatever reason and maybe for the same reasons that they are unvaccinated, then that could easily explain the discrepancy.

In any case, I believe Ontario changing the goalposts is one of the most blatant cases of fraud that can be proven with intent to deceive in Canada so far in the vaccination campaign. The fact that there case rates per 100k would have tended to infinity upon the denominator change and thus, they just aggregated over a wider age range could not have been done without said intent. I would be very interested to know whether the conversation between the director ordering the change and the specialist making the change happened offline because I am sure ongoing court cases would love to see what a FOIP request turns up.

Just saying.