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Most COVID Patients Landing in Hospitals Aren't Fully Vaccinated

— Reports from Cleveland Clinic, other health systems starting to roll in

MedpageToday
A hospitalized female COVID-19 patient wearing an oxygen mask and pulse oximeter.

The vast majority of people hospitalized with COVID-19 at the Cleveland Clinic weren't fully vaccinated, the institution .

Among the 4,300 hospital admissions that occurred from Jan. 1 to mid-April, 99% were not fully vaccinated, Eduardo Mireles, MD, director of the clinic's medical intensive care unit, said in a statement.

"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," Mireles said in the statement.

A spokesperson for the Cleveland Clinic didn't have further details as to what percentage of those patients were completely unvaccinated compared with those who'd had a least one dose of the vaccine, but said those results are part of a larger ongoing study. The team is preparing to submit their findings to a journal, the spokesperson said.

Cleveland Clinic also released top-line results from another analysis of 2,000 healthcare workers who became infected with COVID-19, finding that 99.7% of them were not fully vaccinated (defined as being at least 2 weeks beyond a second mRNA vaccine dose).

The findings show "how effective the mRNA vaccines are, and how low the risk of hospitalization is after vaccination," the spokesperson wrote in an email to ľֱ. "Though numbers have declined since the winter, we still have patients being admitted to the hospital and ICU every day for COVID-19. However, our data find the risk of getting infected or hospitalized after receiving the vaccine is [very] low."

The institution's announcement follows recent reports from and that most hospitalized COVID-19 patients weren't fully vaccinated.

Washington state health secretary Umair Shah, MD, MPH, said last month that unvaccinated residents 65 and older were hospitalized with COVID-19 at 10 times the rate of their vaccinated counterparts, .

Similarly, Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut has only treated six COVID-19 patients who'd been fully vaccinated, compared with "hundreds" that haven't been fully vaccinated and have passed through the health system in recent weeks, . Of those six, all were older and most had underlying conditions. None required intensive care and all left the hospital.

"Those are patients who would have been very much at risk for death a year ago, and they left the hospital and survived COVID without a severe course of illness," Deborah Rhodes, MD, a vice president at Yale New Haven Health, told the Courant.

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    Ryan Basen reports for MedPage’s enterprise & investigative team. He often writes about issues concerning the practice and business of medicine, nurses, cannabis and psychedelic medicine, and sports medicine. Send story tips to r.basen@medpagetoday.com.