Unvaxxed driving hospital surge

First, I’d like to thank The Chronicle Herald for the excellent daily reporting of the pandemic situation in Nova Scotia. It is usually very helpful to those of us who want to assist the courageous health workers in stopping the spread of the virus.

However, I think that there could be a big improvement in how the percentages are reported. Recently, it was reported that, of those in hospital due to COVID, 74.6 per cent were fully or partially vaccinated and 25.4 per cent were unvaccinated. This is a misrepresentation of what is really happening.

Taking our provincial population as one million, and your reporter’s data that only 10 per cent of the population is unvaccinated, then the following calculations give a truer picture of what is happening:

Vaccinated in hospital: (44 / 900,000) x 100% = 0.005% of the population.

Unvaccinated in hospital: (15 / 100,000) x 100% = 0.015% of the population

It can very easily be seen that those who are unvaccinated are being hospitalized at three times the rate of those who are vaccinated. According to your report, there were 29 new hospitalizations over three days. At a ratio of 1:3, that would be 2.42 hospitalizations of vaccinated persons daily and 7.25 hospitalizations of unvaccinated persons daily. If that rate were to continue for a year, then 883 vaccinated persons would be hospitalized and 2,646 unvaccinated persons would be hospitalized.

In my opinion, it is time for everyone to look seriously at where we may be headed.

Gerri Robertson, Wolfville.