--- title: Why COVID-19 is Still the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated description: These charts show why, despite breakthrough infections and milder symptoms overall, the Omicron variant is a major risk to the unvaccinated. canonical: https://time.com/6138566/pandemic-of-unvaccinated/ author: Emily Barone article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-12T14:21:31.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:18:20.475Z article:section: Health og:title: Why COVID-19 is Still the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated og:description: These charts show why, despite breakthrough infections and milder symptoms overall, the Omicron variant is a major risk to the unvaccinated. og:url: https://time.com/6138566/pandemic-of-unvaccinated/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf649d5f1a6bc7010/698a2168b3fce3a0260c8d35/Omicron-Hospital.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: UMass Memorial Hospital's Covid-19 ICU Department As Cases Rise og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why COVID-19 is Still the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated twitter:description: These charts show why, despite breakthrough infections and milder symptoms overall, the Omicron variant is a major risk to the unvaccinated. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf649d5f1a6bc7010/698a2168b3fce3a0260c8d35/Omicron-Hospital.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # These Charts Show That COVID-19 is Still the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=cb4574aa-1ad3-4b25-a379-e61ba25b7e26&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._ by [Emily Barone](https://time.com/author/emily-barone/) ## Emily Barone Jan 12, 2022 2:21 PM UTC For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts. by [Emily Barone](https://time.com/author/emily-barone/) ## Emily Barone Jan 12, 2022 2:21 PM UTC Over the summer of 2021, as the Delta variant swept the nation, Americans’ experience with COVID-19 bifurcated. Among vaccinated people, cases were low and deaths were rare; at the same time, people with no immunity were getting sick and dying at alarming rates. COVID-19 became the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Then in December, Omicron showed up. Cases have surged in recent weeks, blowing past records set during the Delta wave. Driving this trend is Omicron’s extremely high transmissibility, compounded by waning immunity among vaccinated people who are experiencing symptomatic [breakthrough infections](https://time.com/6130704/breakthrough-infections-omicron/). With cases rising among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, it may seem like the gap between the two groups is narrowing—and that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is now a misnomer. But that’s not the case. Studies from [Pfizer](https://time.com/6126612/omicron-pfizer-booster/), [Moderna](https://time.com/6130247/moderna-booster-omicron/), and [Johnson& Johnson](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/health/johnson-vaccine-booster-omicron.html) show that vaccines continue to offer protection against severe disease. And booster shots stand up to Omicron much like the initial vaccine regimens stood up to Delta. Anecdotal evidence and recent hospitalization data is proving this out. “We’re seeing breakthrough infections at a much higher rate,” says Chris Ruder, chief operating officer for the Kansas City division of the University of Kansas Health System. “Yet those individuals that are vaccinated are not the individuals that are being hospitalized, by and large.” On a national level, the hospitalization picture is incomplete, as not all states publicly track patient vaccination status, and those that do aren’t always consistent with each other and therefore can’t be compared side by side. For example, states account for partial vaccinations in different ways, and may exclude children from their analysis or only track hospitalizations in a select number of counties. Among states that publish recent stats on a regular basis, which offers visibility into Omicron-wave hospitalizations, a few report per-capita admissions, like in the below chart: Other states report the ratio of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated status among currently hospitalized patients, as shown in the next chart: Methodology differences aside, the broad trends indicate that the situation in Ruder’s own hospital system is playing out across the country. Unvaccinated Americans in every region are still driving this pandemic. To be sure, there’s been an uptick in the number of vaccinated patients in the hospital since Omicron arrived. [Recent studies](https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/vaccines-appear-weak-blocking-omicron-infection-shots-may-reduce-long-covid-2021-12-13/) show that immunity from the vaccines wanes over time, which means those who were first in line to get vaccinated last year may be less protected now than those who got their shots more recently. [Booster shots](https://time.com/6127090/fda-booster-doses-16-years/) re-fortify the immune system, but many people hadn’t gotten a booster when Omicron first arrived. In mid-November, just before the variant had established a toehold in many areas of the country, [less than half of eligible seniors](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7050e2.htm?s%5Fcid=mm7050e2%5Fw)—of whom 87% had been fully vaccinated at the time—had received a booster. Further, most patients hospitalized as a result of breakthrough infections in recent weeks have had underlying health conditions. Take, for example, the 128 COVID-19 patients at Michigan Medicine, the hospital system affiliated with the University of Michigan, on January 10\. Of the 49 vaccinated patients, only nine were younger than 65, not immunocompromised and didn’t have a significant underlying lung disease. Of the 79 unvaccinated patients, 34 were similarly young and healthy. In New York, one of the first states to get slammed by the Omicron wave, both vaccinated and unvaccinated have seen an uptick in serious COVID-19 cases—but the gap in hospitalization rates between the two groups is effectively widening. Before mid-November, unvaccinated New Yorkers were hospitalized for COVID-19 at about 10 times the rate as their vaccinated neighbors. But since then, they’ve been about 14 times more likely to wind up in the hospital. Even as hospitalizations continue to tick up, some are resisting getting a booster shot, with about 20% of vaccinated adults reporting that they will “probably not” or “definitely not” get boosted in a [November KFF survey](https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-november-2021/). And still many Americans continue to shun COVID-19 vaccines entirely. Studies—supported by real-world [data from South Africa](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122101256X)—showing that [Omicron symptoms](https://time.com/6138293/omicron-symptoms-covid-19/) are less severe may lead people to believe that the shots aren’t as necessary to combat this wave. (In the U.S., the picture remains fuzzy—particularly because some parts of the country are still experiencing both Delta and Omicron.) The problem with this reasoning is that even if the hospitalization rate among infected people is lower with Omicron than with past variants, the enormous surge in cases is resulting in more hospitalizations than ever before. Earlier this month, the U.S. [recorded more COVID-19 hospitalizations](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions) than last year’s peak, before vaccines were widely available. This great influx of patients is overwhelming hospitals, which are stretched so thin that they cannot accommodate non-COVID patients that may need emergency care due to a heart attack or stroke or car accident. “The number of beds and the number of resources that it’s taking to care for patients with COVID is reducing our capacity to care for other things that just normally occur every day,” says Ruder. Compounding the problem is that health care employees have been in short supply. In early September, the American Nurses Association called on the Biden Administration to declare the nursing shortage a national crisis. The White House didn’t follow suit, and since then, it’s only worsened as some systems[ lost employees](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/how-many-employees-have-hospitals-lost-to-vaccine-mandates-numbers-so-far) who were unwilling to comply with vaccine mandates that went into place in recent months. And since the Omicron surge, large numbers of vaccinated health care workers—70% of hospital personnel [were vaccinated](https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553%2821%2900673-8/fulltext) as of mid-September—have tested positive at some point, further reducing the workforce along the way. Nineteen states are grappling with critical staff shortages at a quarter of their hospitals as of Jan. 10, according to a TIME analysis of data from the [U.S. Department of Health & Human Services](https://healthdata.gov/). That’s up from 13 states in early December. The situation is particularly dire in New Mexico, Vermont and Rhode Island, where at least half of the hospitals have hit critical staff levels. Ruder doesn’t mince words when describing the situation in the Kansas City region. “In smaller hospitals and in small rural communities, we absolutely know—and have validation—that patients are not able to transfer to higher levels of care \[at larger hospitals\] because there are no beds. There is not enough staffing. There are not enough resources. And patients are dying.” ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. People are fooled by the speed. Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. But this was truly a moment of the right fix - a brand new kind of vaccine technology - at exactly the right time. I started out in math, and I moved to biology. And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. And so the first part of my career was trying to understand the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. When I first came to Penn from the NIH, pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. We knew that it had great potential. But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. "Do it mama!" (laughter) Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, those were special moments. I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, and they reported that they received the vaccine. There were like 200 elderly in that home. And nobody died. On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. Influenza, even cancer. 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