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MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) – Since the start of the pandemic, only 26 of the 11,600 people in Alabama who have died from COVID-19 have been fully vaccinated, public health official Scott Harris said on Friday.
And most of the nearly 2,000 COVID-19 patients currently in public hospitals are also unvaccinated, he said.
Harris released the numbers as the state tries to increase late vaccination rates. Health officials say recent cases leading to serious illness and death could have been largely prevented if people had been vaccinated.
The state has seen a sharp increase in cases and hospitalizations, prompting further warnings from health officials about precautions such as wearing masks, in addition to the continued call for vaccinations.
“I think it’s correct to say that we wouldn’t see those kinds of numbers if we had more people vaccinated,” Harris said. “Again, the number of cases is determined by people who are not vaccinated, which is unfortunate. “
On Friday, the number of people hospitalized stood at 1,923, the highest the state has seen since the end of January. There were around 3,000 COVID-19 patients in public hospitals at the height of the pandemic, and health officials have expressed concern that the state could quickly return to that number. Harris said 93% of the state’s intensive care beds are full.
“It has been reported to us by hospitals that virtually all of these patients are unvaccinated patients,” Harris said. He said the state was working with the Alabama Hospital Association to get final numbers.
Alabama has seen the seven-day moving average of daily new cases almost triple over the past two weeks, from 1,133 on July 21 to 3,167 on August 4.
Alabama is one of the least vaccinated states in the country. The state ranks last for the percentage of people fully vaccinated with 34%. In Alabama, 44% of people have received at least one dose of the vaccine, a figure that ranks the state fifth from last.
Harris said health officials have identified 6,427 people who contracted COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, but the vaccine remains effective in preventing serious illness and infection.
While there has been a sharp increase in cases and hospitalizations, deaths have yet to follow – or at least not yet. Most of the deaths from COVID-19 in Alabama were reported before the vaccine became widely available. Almost 11,000 of the deaths occurred before April 1.
The seven-day moving average of daily deaths in Alabama has fallen from four on July 21 to nine on August 4 in the past two weeks, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
Deaths are usually a late indicator of the severity of the pandemic, and reported deaths typically increase several weeks after an increase in cases and hospitalizations when some of those hospitalized patients are not recovering.
Shifting the pandemic to younger patients and moving away from older groups – who have higher vaccination rates – could mean better survival rates. Harris said it’s still not clear whether deaths will increase in the same way they did earlier in the pandemic.
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