Rideback wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 4:37 pm
A good piece from LA Times on impact of being vaccinated, California specific but makes the point.
'Good evening. I’m Karen Kaplan, and it’s Tuesday, Feb. 1. Here’s the latest on what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
Considering how readily the Omicron variant spreads, a lot of people have been wondering whether COVID-19 vaccines are still of any use. To answer this question, let’s take a look at the COVID-19 death tolls in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The southern part of the state recorded more than 2,400 COVID-19 deaths in January, when Omicron dominated the coronavirus landscape. That’s equivalent to 10.6 deaths per 100,000 residents.
The Bay Area, meanwhile, had just over 300 COVID-19 deaths last month. That works out to 3.7 deaths per 100,000 residents.
What accounts for the fact that the COVID-19 death rate was nearly three times higher in Southern California than in the Bay Area? Vaccines.
“Because of our high vaccine rate, and because of our booster rate, we are not in a situation like other parts of the country that have lower vaccination rates, where there are very high numbers of death, where they’re not able to staff their hospitals adequately,” Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s director of health, said at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting.
He’s not the only one who thinks vaccines deserve the credit, my colleagues Rong-Gong Lin II and Luke Money report.
The difference in death rates in the two parts of the state “can largely be accounted for by these important differences in percent [of people] vaccinated and boosted,” said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla. “Undoubtedly, other factors contribute, but their impact is likely much less.”
A man in glasses, plastic gloves and mask administers an inoculation to a woman in a mask.
Ivonn Cruz gets a shot of COVID-19 vaccine from Micheal Federico at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
In Los Angeles County, 69.8% of all residents are fully vaccinated, and 46.4% of them have gotten a booster shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Orange County, those figures are 69.8% and 50.2%. They’re lower in San Diego County and the Inland Empire — only 56.7% of Riverside residents and 55.6% of those in San Bernardino County are fully vaccinated, CDC data show.
Travel north a few hundred miles and you’ll find that 82% of San Franciscans are fully vaccinated and 63.9% of them are boosted. In Santa Clara County, the most populous county in the Bay Area, 84.1% are fully vaccinated and 57.9% of them are boosted.
With higher vaccination and booster rates, the Bay Area experienced fewer coronavirus cases in January, and that lower case rate resulted in a lower COVID-19 death rate, said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist at UCLA.
This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Health officials and other experts have told us a time or two that the best way to reduce one’s risk of developing a severe — or fatal — case of COVID-19 is to get up to date with COVID-19 vaccinations. In early January, Californians who were unvaccinated were 6.9 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and 16.9 times more likely to die of the disease compared with Californians who were fully vaccinated, according to the state Department of Public Health.
And compared with Californians who are fully vaccinated and boosted, those who are unvaccinated are 22 times more likely to die of COVID-19, the health department says.
A team from the L.A. County Department of Public Health published a report Tuesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that compared COVID-19 hospitalization rates among unvaccinated, vaccinated and vaccinated-and-boosted residents. If you look at Figure 1, you’ll see a graph that shows hospitalizations have always been higher for unvaccinated individuals, but the gap took off like a hockey stick about a week after Omicron became the dominant coronavirus strain.
Here’s another way of looking at it: If everyone in L.A. County had been up to date with their vaccinations and boosters, the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients during the Omicron wave through mid-January would have been 98% lower than it actually was, according to modeling estimates from researchers at USC. Surely, that would have translated into many fewer deaths as well.
By the numbers
California cases and deaths as of 5:35 p.m. on Tuesday:
As of Feb. 1, California has recorded 8.385,920 coronavirus cases and 79,284 COVID-19 deaths.
Track California’s coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts — including the latest numbers and how they break down — with our graphics.