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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.

Are you sure this is true? The data you linked to shows that hospitalization rate for 65+ unvaccinated is 7x 65+ vaccinated. But WA has a great vaccination rate, over 99% for 65+ with one or more shot. So even with 7x the rate, unvaccinated elderly probably aren't massively dominating hospitalizations because it is such a small pool of ppl.

vax rate: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

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The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses.

Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.

I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard

edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated combined. We can definitively say that the hospital case load is not overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.

With or 'because of'?

60% still strikes me as dominating, because the percentage of the US population that is over 60 years of age is way less than 60%.

60% is the number for 60+, unvaccinated and 60+ vaccinated. The claim was the 65+ unvaccinated alone were dominating. Can't be true given the numbers. Specifically the claim was "overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated".

I think the relevant table is on page 13 "COVID-19 hospitalizations in unvaccinated and fully vaccinated individuals in Washington state by age group, February - December, 2021"

It shows that 79% of hospitalizations in the state are unvaccinated people and that of those, 3,000 are under 34, 11,000 are between 34-65, 7,000 are over 65.

So it is indeed largely elderly unvaccinated in the hospital.

So, help me here. If 7000 hospitalized are over 65 and 11,000 are under 65, does that not show that there are 4000 less elderly hospitalized than middle-aged?

If I look at those numbers, the elderly are not "dominating" the hospitals. In fact, that would show that if you looked in a hospital at any given time, there would be more middle-aged than elderly. I get that "per-capita" the rate is higher, but that does not matter to the hospital census.

What am I missing?

Isn’t it 3,000 + 11,000 < 65 and 7,000 => 65?

Yes, which makes it worse. It can't be the elderly filling up hospitals if there are twice as many non-elderly in there.

I was just using middle-aged (39-65) as a direct comparison.

I was including some of the 34-65 crowd in "elderly"

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