One of the arguments against using HHS region level, or state level data, is that the pockets of unvaccinated individuals are very small and compact. If that's the case, and we have pockets of highly connected edges (people), that are persistent (community), then why can't we look at those pockets as individual edges in a coarser graph, and then look at the vaccination rates on a larger scale?
If you look at unvaccinated people as a community with uniform (little) interaction with vaccinated 'communities' you may be right, however, in that case you make the rather large assumption that unvaccinated people only exist within those communities. However you can imagine that the communities of vaccinated people (larger cities) are interspersed with unvaccinated individuals. If you only look at community-based rates you ignore this latter interspersed group which would in fact have a larger influence on transmission or herd-immunity.
If the clusters of unvaccinated individuals do not repeatedly break apart (if they're not transient) then any interaction between that community and the larger population would simply be the same as the interaction between an unvaccinated individual and vaccinated individuals, would it not, Victor Geraedts?
It seems to me that it's only if the community would frequently split apart that we couldn't treat each unvaccinated community as a single node in a coarser graph. Of course, it's going to be an imperfect simplification, but most simplifications are imperfect.
Not necessarily, as an unvaccinated individual within such as cluster may have different characteristics than an unvaccinated individual outside the more 'traditional' clusters... A group (subnetwork) of unvaccinated individuals within an unvaccinated community will consist of nodes with many edges within their own community and little edges outside of their own subnetwork, whereas unvaccinated individuals living within communities of mostly vaccinated people with have many more edges with both vaccinated- and unvaccinated people (and will definitely have a higher network-degree as well).
> Unvaccinated individuals within an unvaccinated community will consist of nodes with many edges...
This makes no sense. The individual is the smallest node that can exist. An individual cannot exist of nodes.
But you are correct that the unvaccinated individuals will have many connections with other unvaccinated individuals, but very few vaccinated individuals from the genera population. That's the point. They're a semi-isolated cluster. That means that they'd be cocooned and could be treated as a single node in a coarser graph.
It's the high connectivity between members of the antivax community and low connectivity between that community and the rest of the population that allows them to be treated as a single node.
It really is a cultural thing. In the Netherlands we have communities of unvaccinated individuals due to mostly religious regions (usually in the less-habitated areas), whereas in the larger cities there is an increasing and unfortunate tendency to not get vaccinations for different reasons (due to e.g. trust-issues concerning pharmaceutical companies etc.). This latter group has different characteristics and given their location (i.e. within larger cities), they are not as cocooned as the first group.
That's fair. However, at least in general, the rhetoric is that these communities are incredibly tightly clustered with high connectivity. The closer that is to the case, the better the approximation works, but I think it's reasonable to draw conclusions from HHS region and state level data, because of these assumptions, and lack of available higher resolution data.
Only if we had higher resolution data that properly painted a different picture should we really assume differently.
Lim kuan Joo, I explained what I was looking for, in the intro.
One of the arguments against using HHS region level, or state level data, is that the pockets of unvaccinated individuals are very small and compact. If that's the case, and we have pockets of highly connected edges (people), that are persistent (community), then why can't we look at those pockets as individual edges in a coarser graph, and then look at the vaccination rates on a larger scale?
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