Only very recently have some liberals given up on the myth that vaccination and social distancing and masking can keep you from ever getting COVID. Some still hold on to that myth.

To be fair, back when I got vaccinated in the spring, I did so to limit the odds that I would get COVID and give it to others. The data still suggest that the vaccine provides short-term protection from infection and maybe very slight long-run protection against infection. More importantly, vaccination provides long-term protection from serious illness and death.

That is, you should get vaccinated in order to reduce the odds that your inevitable COVID infection — or reinfection — will be serious enough to hospitalize you or kill you.

Yes, a vast majority of COVID cases fall short of hospitalization and death and lead to a full recovery. (Scare stories about widespread “long COVID” seem under-substantiated.) But ask yourself whether whatever downsides you see in the vaccine are greater than the risk of death or hospitalization.

Here are the numbers at this moment.

First off, your odds of hospitalization or death go down by 90% or more if you get vaccinated.

That means your decision not to vaccinate increases by 10 or 20 times your odds of hospitalization or death when you get COVID.

Washington state provides useful data for what this looks like in the real world. If you are between 35 and 64, you have a 1 in 700 chance of getting hospitalized with COVID in a given month if you’re unvaccinated, but a 1 in 12,000 chance if you’re vaccinated.

Again, that’s just in one month. An omicron wave is likely to last two months. We may get more waves after that. But if you just want to think of the next two months, you have about a 1 in 340 chance of being hospitalized with COVID if you’re an unvaccinated middle-aged guy. If you’re vaccinated, it’s 1 in every 6,000.

Would you rather have a 1 in 6,000 chance of having your life derailed by this sickness rather than a 1 in 340 chance?