General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Only 36% in USA have been fully vaccinated. 28% in my state. Why nobody in masks in supermarkets? [View all]Ms. Toad
(33,992 posts)112 people is the ACTUAL number of deaths in breakthrough cases. No math or rounding involved.
But anytime you divide those countable individuals by another countable number of individuals, and you lop off digits, you turn it into an approximation (regardless of which place you round it to), unless the calculation naturally ends at some point without a remainder.
100% is an approximation, which is accurate only to the nearest 10. To the nearest 1, it would be 99%. To the nearest .1 it would be 98.8%. Those calculations are based on actual numbers of breakthrough cases and actual numbers of deaths.
To say it works out to 100% is misleading, because people ordinarily round to the nearest 1 - which would be 99% - and even 99%, and 98.9% are inaccurage because they are approximations.
Approximations are particularly troublesome here, because you are talking about 5 million people who are vaccinated
Assuming 5% of vaccinated individuals have breakthrough infections, that means 250,000 breakthrough cases. If 100% of those are protected from death, that would mean no deaths at all. If only 99% are prevented from death, that means 2500 deaths. Certainly a different number than 0.
When the potential numbers you are working with are large, minimizing the rounding is critical to even get close to a realistic number of actual, real person, deaths.