Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that some 5,600 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized while coronavirus-positive — though a quarter of them were there for other reasons and learned they had asymptomatic infections once tested in the hospital. When compared with the more than 2 million new hospitalizations this year, that’s a tiny fraction — just as the number of deaths among the vaccinated is a tiny percentage of all covid-related deaths.

This is the goal: Individuals will get vaccinated so that everyone is less likely to get infected, and in the unlikely event that a vaccinated person is infected, the prognosis is significantly better. So, with 69.4 percent of American adults having received at least one dose of a vaccine, we might expect a greater percentage of new infections to avoid hospitalization or death.

Since the current surge in cases began at the beginning of this month, the number of hospitalizations and the number of patients sent to the intensive care unit has tracked with that surge. The number of deaths, though, hasn’t.

When overlaid, we see that the pattern for deaths is, so far, not tracking with cases and hospitalizations.

Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller