A local story from Ohio points out that all the people in the hospital with COVID are unvaccinated. Of course they are.
Vaccine effectiveness is showing up in real-world numbers as local hospitals calculate how many COVID-19 patients have been vaccinated.
“When you look at our hospitals right now, there are about 150 people with COVID in those hospitals. None of them have had the vaccine,” said Hamilton County health commissioner Greg Kesterman.
The exact breakdown of numbers shows in Southwest Ohio there are 142 hospitalized with COVID-19, 36 are in the ICU, 28 are on ventilators. Zero have been vaccinated.
At St. Elizabeth in Northern Kentucky, there are 28 COVID patients, 7 are in the ICU. Zero have been vaccinated.
“This is what we expected to see. This is what the data showed. This is why the science is leading us in this direction,” said UC College of Medicine Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum. “It should be a wakeup call to people who said, ‘I’m not sure about this vaccine.’”
Fichtenbaum led the Moderna studies at the UC College of Medicine.
Proof of performance is showing up in another vaccine statistic locally.
“We knew that our older population is most vulnerable to COVID, and yet right now, those 80 plus have the lowest rate of hospitalization,” said Health Collaborative vaccine specialist Kate Schroder. “It’s next to nothing because we have really high rates of vaccination among the older population.”
Vaccines are available everywhere. They work. To the extent that there are people who are having trouble getting to the vaccine sites, there should be much more outreach. We should keep trying to persuade people to get the shot. But it’s not going to be too long before we have to say that people who get COVID brought it on themselves.
The good news is that the vaccines are effective against all the variants that have been thrown at them. We don’t know if that will hold, but so far so good.