Vaccine Saved 250K New Yorkers From COVID, Analysis Shows

NEW YORK CITY — 250,000 New York City residents were spared from getting COVID-19 this year because they got vaccinated instead, a new report shows.

The city's vaccination campaign, which helped over 4.4 million New Yorkers get fully vaccinated, has prevented about 250K new coronavirus cases, 44,000 hospitalizations, and 8,300 COVID-related deaths this year, according to analysis by epidemiologists at Yale University, which was reported by the city's Department of Health (DOH) on Wednesday.

“Our city has been through too much suffering to allow hospitalizations and death to needlessly continue,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, who urged unvaccinated New Yorkers to get the "safe and astonishingly effective" vaccine as coronavirus rates begin to rise citywide — a trend that health officials, Chokshi included, have attributed to the spread of the more contagious Delta variant.

This recent uptick in COVID cases citywide, which is most visible in the city's least vaccinated neighborhoods, has led health officials to double down on their calls for vaccines — especially since new data released by the DOH on Wednesday shows that the virus poses the greatest threat to unvaccinated people.

According to the data, over 98 percent of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths related to COVID-19 this year were in unvaccinated people.

By contrast, under 1.6 percent of COVID-related cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were in fully vaccinated people.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio added to the chorus of officials calling for more vaccines, citing the report from Yale University, and the city's new data.

"Today we have new evidence from a powerful source of just how much impact this vaccination effort has made," he said, adding that vaccines are the reason that "lives were saved, that thousands of cases were avoided, [and] that history was altered."

Just over half of New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, but the DOH acknowledged that "inequities in vaccinate rates persist," pointing to vaccination disparities between Black and white New Yorkers.

Whereas 53 percent of adult white New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, only 36 percent of adult Black New Yorkers have been totally immunized.

In an attempt to address this disparity, and continue to expand the city's vaccination campaign, in-home COVID vaccinations are now open to all New Yorkers, and vaccines are still available at hundreds of citywide sites.

"The stakes are so high, and we simply cannot emphasize enough how urgent it is for New Yorkers to get vaccinated," said Chokshi.