As the new COVID-19 BA. 5 variant is leading to a surge in cases across the country, the bulk of the suffering is falling on the unvaccinated, who are much more likely to get sick and die, data shows.
People ages 12 and older in the US who weren’t vaccinated had a nine-time greater “risk of dying” in May when compared to those who had at least one primary series of vaccines by Modern, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
“People who were unvaccinated had a greater risk of testing positive for COVID-19 and a greater risk of dying from COVID-19 than people who were vaccinated overall,” the CDC website reads.
Of those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and a booster dose, just 0.23 per 100,000 cases led to a fatality between September and May, compared to 1.60 among the unvaccinated.
The correlating figures for those who received the primary series and booster shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were similar, at 0.21 and 0.15, respectively.
In April, 0.13 deaths were reported per 100,000 cases compared to 0.65 for those who had not been inoculated, CDC data shows.
Unvaccinated Americans ages 5 and up, meanwhile, were nearly twice as likely to test positive for the virus and had a six-times greater chance of dying in May compared to those who sought treatment. Their risk of testing positive grew to 2.3 times that of vaccinated people with a booster dose in June, data shows.
Some 634 new deaths were reported Wednesday, roughly double the 7-day average of 351, but far lower than surges that recorded 2,700 in February and 3,300 in January 2021.
The data comes as health officials in Los Angeles County – the nation’s most populous, with 10 million residents – will reinstate a broad indoor mask mandate on July 29 if current hospital admissions continue.
“We are not closing anything down,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told reporters Thursday. “We are not asking people not to gather with the people they love. We’re asking you to take a sensible step, when there’s this much transmission with a highly transmissible variant, to go ahead and put back on a well-fitting high-filtration mask when you’re indoors around others.”
Some 67% of the US population is fully vaccinated, while 78% have received at least one dose. The figure rises dramatically to 91.7% among seniors ages 65 and up, CDC data shows.
With Post wires