An increasing amount of COVID-19-related deaths are among the vaccinated and elderly, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

The outlet, when examining data from the Centers for Disease Contorl and Prevention (CDC), found that when the notoriously contagious Omicron variant was spreading rampantly at the beginning of the year, over 40% of COVID-related deaths were among vaccinated individuals, with an increase of mortalities in older people. To compare, the vaccinated death rate during the Delta variant's peak in September 2021 was just over 20%.

It is important to note that those who are unvaccinated are still at the greatest risk of dying from the coronavirus. According to the data, those who didn't get the vaccine during the aforementioned time periods had a death rate of around seven times the rate of those who did. Furthermore, most of the deaths among the vaccinated were in those who were not boosted.

In a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this month, it was found that COVID-19 vaccination could have prevented hundreds of thousands of virus-related deaths. Their analysis discovered that more than 230,000 deaths related to the virus could have been averted by prompt vaccination.

“COVID-19 vaccines that are free, safe, and highly effective have been widely available to all adults in the U.S. since early May 2021,” the researchers wrote. “By June 2021, adults in the U.S. could have been fully vaccinated and protected from most cases of severe illness or death due to COVID-19.”

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