Saturday, October 16, 2021
More proof - stopping COVID's damage in Wisconsin starts with getting vaxxed.
Yesterday, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services gave their monthly update that compares the COVID pandemic among vaccinated and unvaccinated Wisconsinites. And the gaps are wide and noticeable.
So if you are an unvaccinated adult in Wisconsin, you are 3 to 5 times more likely to get COVID, and if you're a student under 18 (the group which drove the COVID spike as schools started back up), you are 7 to 12 times more likely. Seems significant.
And for those getting COVID, it is much more likely that the unvaxxed end up in the hospital.
That's a rate between 11-19 times more for all age groups between 25 and 64. And the only group of vaxxed people who have any notable level of hospitalization are those over 65, who are more likely to end up in the hospital for any illness.
Not surprisingly, the death rates are also very different. To the point that pretty much the only way people under 65 will die of COVID is if they are unvaxxed.
Any question that getting the vax makes outcomes a lot better with COVID? Not here.
While there has been some progress in getting the rate of new cases down in the last week, the geographic disparities still exist. Rural, less-vaxxed, Republican-voting counties continue to have the get the highest rates of new cases.
I hope that the recent approvals of boosters continue the trend of downward cases as the weather cools, and if the vaccine can be approved for kids 5-11, that's another highly-susceptible group that can get more protection. The evidence from the Wisconsin DHS seems pretty clear - if you want to limit the damage from COVID, getting vaccinated is going to go a long way toward doing so.
Related - my Uncle was up at his cabin in Vilas County 2 weeks ago, and got hit with a stroke. He was able to call the local ambulance and they were able to transport him, but he wasn't able to go to any hospitals in Minocqua or Wausau or anywhere else nearby, because they were all filled up with COVID cases.
ReplyDeleteThey had to take him 2 hours away to Green Bay to be treated, and to eventually have surgery. He is recovering now (albeit still in GB as of today), but the carelessness of COVID-iocy doesn't just affect those individuals and their families. And it's time it gets called out as such.
Last winter, when I was still young, starry-eyed and naive, I was shocked by something a coworker told me. His wife was an administrator at a local (Milwaukee) hospital, and she and her staff were overwhelmed by COVID patients. That’s not the shocking part. He then specified that the vast majority of COVID patients packing that Milwaukee hospital were “from small towns up north.”
ReplyDeleteI don’t know why it surprised me. It was just the latest example of how “city folk” carry and sometimes literally save “country folk”—and not the other way around, as the yokels seem to think. Sorry about your uncle. Hope he’s doing well.