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COVID-19 / Given asymptomatic patients, how reliable is the Pfizer vaccine's efficacy?
« on: 19/11/2020 17:51:35 »
Here's a question that was sent in by Richard:
My understanding of the Pfizer/BioNTech efficacy claim is that it is based on eg 9/94 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 infections in the active/placebo groups. I'm struggling with this simple data handling as it should be 9:83?
A simple t-test would show a highly significant difference so that piece of news is good.
However, no data is probably ever going to emerge re the frequency of asymptomatic virus patients in the two groups, so is it acceptable to take 90% efficacy as a given?
My understanding of the Pfizer/BioNTech efficacy claim is that it is based on eg 9/94 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 infections in the active/placebo groups. I'm struggling with this simple data handling as it should be 9:83?
A simple t-test would show a highly significant difference so that piece of news is good.
However, no data is probably ever going to emerge re the frequency of asymptomatic virus patients in the two groups, so is it acceptable to take 90% efficacy as a given?