In the category of Misleading Reporting 101....
News outlets still aren't reporting COVID case numbers in an honest or informative way. This article references BC's case numbers and also mentions the percentage of hospitalizations for both vaccinated and unvaccinated.
So, from this article and other data I know that 77% of BC population has been vaccinated (33% unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated). Also that 70% of those hospitalized are unvaccinated and that there were around 400 COVID patients hospitalized. And that's where they left it. I also checked BC's population to find it's around 5.2 million.
This DOES NOT paint an accurate picture.
As the following article in The Hill clearly shows, that kind of data is misleading unless you view it correctly. One proper strategy is to calculate the number of hospitalizations (or deaths) per 100,000 from each subgroup in the whole population (about 400,400,000 vaccinated and about 171,600,000 unvaccinated). Note this last group also includes children who can't be vaccinated yet. That is about to change quickly in the coming weeks.
So, taking the numbers from above, my calculator tells me that the number of unvaccinated hospitalized cases is 0.16/100,000 and the number of vaccinated hospitalized cases is 0.03/100,000. My calculator then explained to me that the number of unvaccinated hospitalized cases is 5.3 times the number of vaccinated hospitalized cases. Numbers from the original article nowhere make that clear.
Unvaccinated people are at least 5.3 times as likely to end up in the hospital as vaccinated people. As children get vaccinated in the coming weeks, expect to see that number increase simply because kids haven't been getting sick that often, they aren't often hospitalized from this disease and yet there are about 360,000 of them between the ages of 5 and 12 here in BC.
Media reports need to do better than this.
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