Staff Photo by Matt Hamilton / Nursing supervisor Nadine Stone fills syringes with vaccine at First Baptist Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, on March 30.We cannot be lulled by our successful COVID-19 vaccines or by the fact that our coronavirus case numbers are down.
Cases are still happening here, in both our city and our region, as are hospitalizations and deaths. Hamilton County just a week ago surpassed a grim milestone of 500 deaths.
The good news is that even unvaccinated residents of our region are experiencing reduced COVID-19 transmission, thanks primarily to the vaccination of others.
Yet those unvaccinated people among us remain both at higher risk for illness and hospitalization, and they are being infected at higher rates than the full population of Southeast Tennessee and Northwest Georgia. That said, they now are the primary drivers of the region’s ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, contributing to the continued spread of the coronavirus, according to a Times Free Press analysis of county-level COVID-19 case and vaccination data from the region.
“Clearly, the vast majority of people who are finding their way into the hospital today with COVID infection are people who are unvaccinated,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “The whole purpose of the vaccine is to keep us out of the hospital, and you can imagine that the number of people in the hospital would really plummet even further with COVID if the rest of the population were vaccinated.”