Further confirmation that vaccines work in preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths from Covid comes from the bulletin of the Higher Institute of Health on Integrated Surveillance updated on August 18. Aggregating the data, it emerges that in the last 30 days, 66.5% of Covid diagnoses, 74% of hospitalizations, 80% of ICU admissions and 72.5% of deaths in the Italian population involved people who they did not receive any vaccine doses.
The numbers of the effectiveness of vaccines
The age group most affected by hospitalizations was 40-59 years. This is 1,701 people. Of these, 85.5% are not vaccinated. For ICU admissions, the critical range is 60-79 years. Also in this case 75% are not immunized even with one dose. Similar trend for deaths. The largest number concerns those over 80. There are 110. But in this case the percentage of victims without vaccine is lower: 59.1%. While 36.4% (40 people) were vaccinated with two doses.
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What is the paradox effect
Why? Is this a fact that may lead to doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing deaths? The answer is no. In fact, when vaccinations in the population reach high levels of coverage, the so-called paradox effect therefore the absolute number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths can be similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated, due to the progressive decrease in the number of the latter. And the effect is beginning to be seen precisely in the over 80 age group, where vaccination coverage is higher, around 90%.
The case of the over 80s
For example, among the over 80s, the number of hospitalizations among vaccinated people with a complete cycle (456) exceeds that of non-vaccinated people (equal to 331). But those over 80 who are fully immunized are 4.1 million. Those without even a dose only 320 thousand. This is why, calculating the hospitalization rate in the last 30 days from these data, the ISS report shows that this for the unvaccinated is more than nine times higher than for vaccinated with a full cycle (103.3 vs 11.1 hospitalizations per 100,000 inhabitants).
Analyzing in the same way the number of ICU admissions and deaths in the over 80s, the ISS notes that the ICU admissions rate of full-cycle vaccinated people is seventeen times lower than unvaccinated (0.4 vs 7 , 5 per 100,000 inhabitants) while the death rate is eight times higher in the unvaccinated than in the full cycle vaccinated (12.5 vs 1.6 per 100,000 inhabitants).