The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle roughly states that 80% of output arises from 20% of people. We all know those superstars in the office who seem to effortlessly produce reams of useful stuff whilst the rest of us struggle to tie our shoelaces.

I’ve seen it first-hand. I’ve worked with scientists who seem to generate the most amazing ideas and insights, every day, whilst I’m still counting the fingers on my hands for the 4th time and hoping I get it right this time.

In the UK press it was reported yesterday that the UK Health Secretary was going all grumpy-old-git at the unvaccinated. Here’s the headline in the Daily Express:

Sajid Javid launches in brutal rant at unvaccinated Brits over 'huge damage' caused to UK

This must be the Pareto Principle at work.

All the trouble we’re in right now, the rising cases, the panic, the calls for cancelling Christmas - it’s all the fault of those naughty unvaccinated people. They’re doing the heavy-lifting here - it obviously couldn’t be the Blessed Cacti of Pfizer now, could it?

Maybe the UK is a special case? Let’s take a peek at the Netherlands, then.

A similar picture can be found in lots of highly-vaccinated places (except, curiously, Sweden - the world’s premier bucker of trends).

Isn’t it strange that we’re seeing nearly twice the peak case rate now, with over 70% of the population fully vaxxed, than we saw back in Winter 2020 with nobody vaccinated?

Maybe it’s just that a whole lot more tests are being done? Unfortunately, there does appear to be something going on, because the share of positive tests is showing an upward trend, and is over 25% as we come into Winter 2021

Odd, isn’t it? How could this be happening with these “safe and effective” vaccines - vaccines that President Brandon said would be 100% effective at preventing infection (yes, he really did say the equivalent of that)?

How could this be being driven by only 30% of the population (many of whom will already have caught, and survived, covid19)? Weren’t these filthy unvaxxed driving it before vaccination too?

Oh, that’s right - nobody was vaxxed back then. We were ALL filthy spreaders and we still didn’t manage to make it quite this bad. Those 30%, the diseased unjabbed, have really upped their game, haven’t they?

Must be soooooooo much worse in places with lower vaccination rates, right?

Here’s the situation in South Africa with only about 25% of the population fully vaccinated.

Same kind of situation. The share of positive test results has been trending up and is at about 30%, so something is going on. But it’s not significantly different to what we’re seeing in the Netherlands. Except for the fact we can see that the rise in cases in SA is not being accompanied by a concomitant rise in deaths, whereas it is in the Netherlands.

Obviously, we can’t rely on just 2 examples - but it does indicate that maybe we should be looking to see if there’s a correlation between vaxx rates and outcomes. A paper published in September, Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States, showed that any correlation is hard to find.

In fact there’s a weak positive correlation here, which is worrying indeed.

I don’t know what the current situation is, but just from checking the worldwide charts it doesn’t appear to be substantially different now (might even be worse and showing a stronger positive correlation?)

What’s clear, though, is that we’re NOT seeing an example of the Pareto Principle at work here. The unvaccinated are not driving this pandemic at all. If anything, the “crisis” (such as it is) is occurring because we’ve vaccinated so many.

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