Most COVID-19 Infections and Hospitalizations are in Unvaccinated

CLEVELAND – If you haven’t been vaccinated against COVID-19, there’s another reason to roll up your sleeve.

Preliminary data from Cleveland Clinic suggests most people hospitalized for coronavirus aren’t fully vaccinated.

“From January first to around mid-April, we’ve had around 4,300 admissions to the hospital with COVID. Of those patients, 99% were not fully vaccinated,” said Eduardo Mireles, MD, Director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit.

In addition to showing the majority of COVID-19 hospital admissions were in people who had not received a full vaccine series, another set of data looking at hospital employees shows a similar trend.

Researchers looked at nearly 2,000 hospital workers who had contracted COVID-19. They studied infections in the four months after the vaccine was offered. Results show 99.7% of infections in this group occurred among those who were unvaccinated.

They also found coronavirus MRNA vaccines to be more than 97% effective in protecting against COVID-19.

“This vaccine is highly effective to prevent our community from getting sick, not only our caregivers but the community. We have data on both. It cannot be more clear the message that vaccines work and it’s the key action that we need to do to get back to our normal lives as they were before coronavirus,” said Dr. Mireles.

The research team is currently preparing the data for submission into a medical journal.