NEW: people worry when they hear "40% of hospitalisations are fully vaxxed", but this chart shows that's actually good news.

The more people you vaccinate, the higher their share of hospitalisations, but the *total* number in hospital is a fraction of what it would otherwise be

9 year old child with COVID pneumonia.
Florida

How much should you worry about getting COVID if you’re fully vaccinated?

A helpful graphic:

And if you’re not vaccinated?
Here’s the graph:

With 90% of American seniors now fully vaccinated, the overwhelming majority of the country's mortality risk has been, simply, eliminated. Even given Delta and flatlining vaccination rates, it is already a very different pandemic now. A thread (1/x).

There will be new cases, some of them severe and some leading ultimately to death. And there of course complications beyond death—even beyond hospitalization and severe disease.

If vaccination rates got close to 100%, we might be able to bring those numbers, in the future, close to zero. But even now we have probably eliminated 90% of all potential mortality from COVID-19. This makes it a very different kind of disease than we encountered last year.

First, "they kids are safe. Believe it or not, they always have been."

"It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu."

Them: Is there any other vaccine in history that required three doses in a year and yet still didn’t prevent transmission of the virus it was meant to protect against?

Me: Your childhood vaccinations would like a word with you.

Before I forget, reminder that your TDap: Tetanus-Diphtheria-Pertussis (every 10 years) are technically a repetitive vaccine series or rather boosters during adulthood. HPV is another vaccine that could fit here as well.

“Even the measles vaccine, which is incredibly effective, fails to protect about 3% of vaccinated individuals who are exposed to the virus. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine-hailed a medical miracle- was 80% to 90% effective at preventing paralysis caused by the polio virus.”

“Breakthrough cases don’t mean that the vaccines aren’t