The occurrence of nursing home deaths after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination has created quite a stir, causing Norway to reconsider whether to vaccinate the most frail members of nursing homes, and raising concern in people all over the world. This has fed some of the fear-based vaccine hesitancy in many who are think that vaccines are inherently unsafe, or at least are hesitant to be vaccinated right now based on the perceived newness and exoticness of the mRNA technology and the unprecedentedly fast development, clinical study, and emergency approval of the vaccines.
As it became clear that these vaccines were going to earn emergency approval, I was concerned about talk that the most frail members of society in nursing homes would be in the first groups vaccinated. While these are clearly those at most risk of death from COVID-19, their demographic was not included in the phase 1-3 trials -- while the Pfizer and Moderna had reasonable proportions of subjects >65, it is not clear that any of them were nursing home residents. Thus, I was also concerned when seeing these deaths and wondered whether it was reckless to vaccinate this vulnerable population.
According to this article in Bloomberg on January 16, 2021, there have been 29 deaths in Norway in nursing home residents >75 years old from the day of vaccination up to 4 days post vaccination. The article is also careful to note that officials state that it is not clear whether the vaccination was a cause or contributing factor to these deaths, but of course most individuals in the public would naturally think that they must be somehow related to the vaccine and its side effects.
In this blog post, I will evaluate whether this number of deaths is more than one would expect on a given day even sans vaccination. The Bloomberg article mentions that in Norway, there are ~400 nursing home deaths per week, which is ~57 per day. As documented in statistica.com, and in the table below, there were ~32,000 nursing home residents in Norway in 2019.
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/norwegian-nursing-home-deaths-after-vaccination-are-in-line-with-what-is-expected-by-random-chance