1 in 5 of every new COVID case involves vaccinated people, and the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated are increasing. Preliminary data from seven states show 74% of breakthrough cases are among adults aged 65 or older, especially those with compromised immune systems.

“Remember when the early vaccine studies came out, it was like nobody gets hospitalized, nobody dies,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told The New York Times. “That clearly is not true.”

In contrast, Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times that increases in breakthrough infections “demonstrate how well these vaccines are working and that they’re preventing hospitalization and death, which is really what we asked our vaccines to do.”

Data on breakthrough cases vary from state to state, with California recording 1,615 hospitalizations of people with breakthrough infections as of August 8, 2021. While that is just 0.007% of nearly 22 million fully immunized residents, the data in six other states show breakthrough infections accounted for 18% to 28% of recorded cases and 12% to 24% of COVID-19 patient hospitalizations.

SOURCES:

Drugs.com August 18, 2021

CDC COVID-19 Data