Bay Area News Group: COVID-19 Deaths In California Among Vaccinated Rose Sharply With Omicron
During a three-week stretch at the height of this winter’s devastating omicron case surge, Santa Cruz County health officials lost 10 patients to COVID-19. All but one were vaccinated, and five had received booster shots.
As the omicron wave recedes, California data reveal an unsettling trend. Compared to the delta variant case surge last summer, deaths among the vaccinated rose sharply with omicron, a variant said by many experts to cause milder illness.
A Bay Area News Group analysis of state COVID-19 deaths found that in the four deadliest weeks of the delta and omicron surges, the number of unvaccinated people who died were nearly identical, and far higher than the totals for the vaccinated.
Even so, three times more vaccinated people died during the omicron peak than during delta’s heyday. (Woolfolk, Blair Rowan and DeRuy, 3/6)
