Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is the best way to stay out of the hospital and to stay alive, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and most medical experts. That hasn’t changed. Further, the CDC encourages people to get the new bivalent vaccine against omicron’s sub-variants, though uptake of that vaccine has been slow, with a little more than 11% of Americans getting it.
Vaccination matters even as it comes to light that more people who’d been vaccinated against COVID-19 died in August than those who’d not been vaccinated, according to an analysis by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). Cox undertook the analysis for The Health 202, which is published by The Washington Post.
The newspaper reports that 58% of coronavirus deaths in August occurred in people who’d been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. Experts stress that despite this finding, an individual’s chances of dying from COVID-19 is much greater if they’re unvaccinated. The fact that more vaccinated people die from COVID than unvaccinated is partly because 80.7% of the population in the U.S. has had at least one dose of vaccine, according to the CDC. Actuarially, that would drive higher numbers of COVID fatalities among the vaccinated.