The risks of dying from Covid if you are vaccinated [View all]

[Tomconroy]

.I'm reproducing an excerpt from David Leonhardt's The Morning newsletter. Unfortunately I can't provide a link. Based on extensive research out of Oxford University, the risks of dying from Covid pre Omicron if you are vaccinated are comparable to the flu. However that is not entirely good news. If you are older the risks of dying from the flu are significant. The Oxford research indicates that a healthy infected 75 year old woman has a 1 in 220 chance of dying from Covid if fully vaccinated. The elderly are still at significant risk from Covid even if vaccinated. You don't want to know about the risk to the unvaccinated.
Anyway, here are a couple of paragraphs:

Encouragingly, there are reasons to believe that Omicron’s death rate may be lower. Three new studies released yesterday suggested that Omicron causes milder illness on average than earlier versions of the virus. “I would guess that the mortality risk with Omicron is much smaller” than with earlier variants, Dr. George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, told me yesterday.

One reassuring comparison is to a normal seasonal flu. The average death rate among Americans over age 65 who contract the flu has ranged between 1 in 75 and 1 in 160 in recent years, according to the C.D.C. Pre-Omicron versions of Covid, in other words, seem to present risks of a similar order of magnitude to vaccinated people as a typical flu. Some years, a flu infection may be more dangerous.

With Omicron, “I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me. “I think it’s moderate at most.”