Vaccines Save Lives: Unvaccinated People Make Up 90% of Severe COVID-19 Cases in ICU

The current COVID-19 situation in intensive care units of hospitals shows how vaccines protect people from severe cases and hospitalizations. Around nine out of ten people in ICU are unvaccinated individuals who initially refused to get vaccinated but begged to have it while in hospital.

In London, hospitals are doubling their ICU capacity due to the Omicron wave as it makes up the majority of cases today. The Health Secretary has criticized eligible people who refused the vaccines as they take up hospital beds that could have been used for other patients in need.

Experts Remind People to Get Vaccinated

ICU doctor Professor Rupert Pearse said that unvaccinated people who are in their 20s and 30s are ending up in critical condition due to severe COVID-19. As the Omicron variant becomes the dominant strain in England, making up 71.6% of the cases, health authorities said that they have confirmed 15,000 more cases of the variant making the current total to 90,629 cases in the UK.

Professor Pearse pointed out the vital role vaccines play in controlling the spread of the virus, urging people to get vaccinated. As of now, there are 757 people with ventilators across England among the 6,900 patients.

He added that since most people now are vaccinated, a few patients could get COVID-19 even if they have had the vaccine. But he emphasized that the risk of getting sick, getting hospitalized, and ending up in ICU is higher for those who did not get the vaccine as between 80% to 90% of the patients in the ICU are unvaccinated.

Almost all of the unvaccinated COVID-19 patients who can still talk said that they have been anxious about receiving vaccines or that they did not know who to believe. But the most common thing they say is that whether they could still get the vaccines while in hospital.

For now, the National Health Service (NHS) booster shot rollout is trying to save more lives as they successfully delivered 897,979 vaccines on Monday, December 21, and has now reached a total of 30 million booster doses. NHS clinics are working to change the tide by vaccinating almost 1 million people a day to try to prevent the Omicron variant from infecting more people.

Vaccines Could Have Saved More Lives

Pediatricians recommend that children get vaccinated against diseases, like measles and poliovirus, to prevent them from getting those illnesses. Likewise, infectious diseases experts recommend people get vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines to prevent severe cases and hospitalizations.

As the world surpassed 5 million COVID-19-related death cases, experts said that vaccinations could have lowered that number. A study, titled "COVID-19 Preventable Mortality and Leading Cause of Death Ranking" from the Kaiser Family Foundation, showed that 163,000 lives among the 800,000 death cases in the US could have been saved by vaccines.

Researchers told Healthline that COVID-19 vaccination would have prevented at least 91% of deaths among unvaccinated people. They noted that the overwhelming COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are preventable with vaccines, although they have not yet considered the effects from the recent surge brought about by the Omicron variant. They think it might somehow change their analysis.

Check out more news and information on COVID-19 in Science Times.