It's a medical miracle how vaccines developed within one year against the wild strain of COVID have maintained 90% efficacy against hospitalizations against an onslaught of variants. coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-break…
Risk reduction is how most of medicine works. Few things in medicine work 100%.
Few things work 90%.
You see the same effect in other places as well. Here is deaths by vaccination status from Switzerland. ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-b…
Chile has similar data showing the high efficacy of vaccines in preventing deaths in both delta and omicron waves.
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As I have indicated the US is so large geographically that the overall time to peak and fall down for the country as a whole will be longer that South Africa or the UK. But each state will likely behave like the east coast states.
Prior Covid also offers protection. But vaccines augment that protection even more.
Omicron may have lesser propensity for lung involvement, but it's not zero. We see people getting seriously ill. We see deaths. It's luck of the draw. The risk is not worth it.
A lot of questions to my recent tweet on South Korea ask how did they do so well?
Its a combination of great talent & leadership, uniform non-politicized messaging, border control, effective test/trace system, high compliance with masks, distancing, & vaccination.
A strategy.
Many replies I got say it best. And I'll highlight some of them.
South Korea continues to be the role model. I hope they can sustain their science driven strategy which so far has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
It's Korean American Day. 👏🎉
Even if Omicron causes a problem in South Korea, they have already won. At this point 93% of adults are fully vaccinated. Over 40% have been boosted. So their deaths and hospitalizations will stay much lower than here.