1) About half of those people in hospitals were vaccinated.
2) Vaccine mandates do not considerably improve vaccination update, especially among elderly who benefit the most from vaccination.
As for the US rules, both countries ignore science on this. Nothing good came out of it.
> 1) About half of those people in hospitals were vaccinated.
Considering Ontario is 90% 12+ fully vaccinated and 85% 5+ fully vaccinated[1], this means somewhere in the neighbourhood of say 15-18% of the population represents 50% of our hospitalizations, likely a lower percentage, since as you note this tends to hospitalize people in older cohorts.
> 2) Vaccine mandates do not considerably improve vaccination update, especially among elderly who benefit the most from vaccination.
Firstly, Ontario's elderly are massively vaccinated. 80+ is 99.99%, 70-79 is 99.99%, 60-69 (which I wouldn't consider elderly these days) is 97.37%.[4] This isn't due to anything very recent either, the rates have been 90%+ two doses for the 70+ crowd since August of last year.
Secondly, if this were true, you would not expect to see upticks in vaccinations coinciding with mandate implementations. Yet in [1], in November of 2021 you see a clear uptake in vaccination doses administered. This coincides roughly when 5+ were authorized for vaccination[2], as well as when federally regulated industries began requiring it.[3]
You can see from the raw data in [4] first doses between Nov 1 2021 and Jan 1 2022 was 468,443 for 5-11s, 28,257 for 12-17s, and 220,641 for 18+. Nearly a third of all first doses during the time period when 5-11 just became newly able to be vaccinated came from Ontario's adults. There was an 88.5% vaccination rate among 18+ at the start of that time period and there was a noticeable dip in vaccinations due to the holidays (you can see this in the booster #s too). You can question the motivations of those people but I think the numbers at least suggest that the mandates do have a part to play in driving people to get vaccinated.
[1]: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data
[2]: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-e...
[3]: https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2021/10/manda...
[4]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...
2) That's true as well and the UK had no vaccine mandates and had the same vaccination rates for elderly. And many countries with very strict vaccine mandates had terrible rates for elderly vaccinations, for example, in Latvia it is less than 75% while vaccination uptake among younger people is higher than that.
The numbers do not show that the mandates considerably improved vaccination uptake among elderly neither in Canada, nor in other countries. I am questioning the motivation of people who try to push vaccine mandates by intentionally obscuring this point and by mixing true statements and projecting them onto elderly which is not confirmed by data.
What you are suggesting here is that a 50% decrease in hospitalizations (or we could argue even lower, say 35%) is not significant. Do I have that correct? You're essentially saying that 2000 fewer people in hospitals, when capacity is around 7000-10000 (depending on staffing), doesn't matter.
> 2) That's true as well and the UK had no vaccine mandates and had the same vaccination rates for elderly. And many countries with very strict vaccine mandates had terrible rates for elderly vaccinations, for example, in Latvia it is less than 75% while vaccination uptake among younger people is higher than that.
Firstly, the UK is not one amorphous thing. There absolutely were vaccine mandates within the UK.[1][2][3] Just not England (at least in the most recent round).
I would be hesitant to ascribe vaccine mandates as the sole cause for any vaccination uptake regardless. Each community is going to have their own reasons to distrust the medicine and the government. Notably in the US the African American community has probably been given ample reason to distrust it. Similarly, you see poor uptake in countries where trust in the government is low.
Mandates will not fix making every last unvaccinated person change their mind, and I think it's important to understand that that's not actually the goal of them. It's to convince some more of the people. Remember the idea of herd immunity is to hit some requisite percentage of the population that will help protect the people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised.
> The numbers do not show that the mandates considerably improved vaccination uptake among elderly neither in Canada, nor in other countries. I am questioning the motivation of people who try to push vaccine mandates by intentionally obscuring this point and by mixing true statements and projecting them onto elderly which is not confirmed by data.
I never claimed it increased vaccination rates among the elderly. As I directly mentioned, the elderly in Ontario were already highly vaccinated. It couldn't have massively increased vaccination rates among the elderly because by the time they were implemented the elderly were already mostly vaccinated. You have created an argument to rail against where there was none.
Let's flip this around: Why are the elderly the only group you're suggesting we care about protecting?
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58422607
[2]: https://gov.wales/get-your-nhs-covid-pass
[3]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-59331597
