The Heritage Foundation has a helpful statistical analysis breaking down the risks of coronavirus infections for the fully vaccinated. The bottom line is simple: Fully vaccinated adults have no reason to fear COVID-19 or the delta variant.
Even as coronavirus cases rise across the country, it is clear that vaccinated adults are not the ones being hospitalized or dying from the virus. Vaccinated adults might experience a breakthrough infection, but it is highly, highly unlikely that they would fall seriously ill from it, which is the entire point of vaccination. We’ll never stop the virus from spreading — it is, after all, contagious — but we can minimize the risk of serious illness and death as much as possible.
If you are fully vaccinated, you’re much more likely to die in your car on your way to work than from COVID-19. You’re more likely to die from choking on your food at lunch than you are to be simply hospitalized by COVID-19. And you are much, much more likely to die from any one of the comorbidities plaguing people, such as obesity, heart disease, and cancer, that take more lives in a year than COVID-19 ever has.
I would go one step further and argue that most people who have not been vaccinated, for whatever reason, do not face nearly as big a risk from the virus as the media suggest. Younger populations with few underlying health issues are more likely to contract COVID-19 and naturally fight it off than they are to die from it. A think tank in Michigan, for example, found that even before vaccines were available to the public, Michiganders 55 years old or younger were more likely to die in a traffic accident than from COVID-19. For Michiganders younger than 45, the risk from COVID-19 became even smaller:
People under 25 had an even smaller chance of dying from this new disease, measuring just 0.0005%, or 1 in about 180,000. The risk of dying in a car crash in 2019 for this same group was 0.006%, or 1 in about 17,000. This means that traffic accidents were about 11 times riskier for young people than COVID-19.
I say all of this not to discourage vaccination, but to point out that the hysteria being pushed by much of the media is not supported by facts. It’s easy to get caught up in the fog of fear, but fear is no longer justified. It’s time we stopped living in it.
