Dozens of hospitals surveyed by ABC News across the country report the vast majority of ICU patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.
According to the CDC,"vaccine breakthrough cases are expected," and, as a result,"there will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19." But data about ICU patients' vaccination status is not regularly reported or readily available on the federal or state level.
Furthermore, said Kaplan, the very fact that"the overwhelming majority of hospitalized critically ill patients with this viral variant are unvaccinated, should drive our nation to relentlessly pursue vaccination of every eligible individual." The University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital has seen"an explosion of cases," with the number increasing tenfold in the last three weeks, according to Dr. Kierstin Kennedy, chief of hospital medicine.The patients who are currently hospitalized, Kennedy said, are younger than those who were hospitalized during the last surge -- but unfortunately, they are just as sick. The vast majority of those patients are unvaccinated, she said.
"The vaccine is really protective in terms of being hospitalized or in terms of dying, and the people we're seeing that are sick, ending up on ventilators and ending up hospitalized, are unvaccinated patients," Dr. David Wein, emergency room physician at Tampa General, told ABC News.Just a month ago, 37-year-old Amanda Spencer, an unvaccinated mother of two from Ohio, became infected with the virus while on a family vacation in Florida.
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