By Danny Westneat, Seattle Times, June 5, 2021

This being America, it was probably inevitable that we would turn the scientific breakthrough of a pandemic-ending vaccine into a game show.

It’s like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” with cash prizes, or “The Price is Right,” where you can “come on down!” to get a jab and a chance at an Xbox or free flights to Cancún or gift cards redeemable for topsoil (yes, really, topsoil).

Whatever works. It’s a little strange, though, that there’s not more hoopla around what’s happening with the vaccines themselves.

“For those of us in public health, it’s nothing short of amazing,” Dr. Jeff Duchin, the chief health officer for Seattle and King County, told me the other day.

I had called Duchin to ask about a startling claim he made recently. At a weekly health briefing, he offhandedly remarked that of King County’s recent COVID-19 cases, 97% had occurred in unvaccinated people.

It effectively meant the only people still catching coronavirus here in King County are people who haven’t gotten the shots. It also means the disease that just a few months ago threatened the entire nation is now almost exclusively circulating among a shrinking few.

What happened is Duchin had been noticing that disease transmission seemed to be increasingly located in spots around the county where vaccination rates were low.

“It’s a very clear result,” Duchin said. “It leads to a basic conclusion: Who’s left to catch COVID-19? People who are unvaccinated.”

This isn’t an isolated finding. Across the state, the Washington State Department of Health reports that between April 3 and May 29, there were 1,358 “breakthrough” cases in which someone who was fully vaxxed still caught COVID. But during that same period, the state reported 63,751 cases among the unvaccinated — which is 98% of the total.

“We’re getting to the point where it’s a tale of two societies,” says Dr. Umair Shah, the state health secretary.

Shah reported this past week that unvaccinated people between ages 45 and 64 are now being hospitalized for COVID at rates 21 times higher than the vaccinated.

“It’s throughout the country that you’re seeing this split,” he said. “You have one society that is protected fully and is starting to go about its business … and another that is still at high risk of transmission and infection.”

Recently the hospital in Bend, Oregon, reported that it had seen 500 COVID patients since March — and 98% of them were unvaccinated.

The implications are clear. One is: Get vaccinated, if you can.

“We will have to live in equilibrium with a level of disease that results from having a proportion of the population unvaccinated,” he said. Meaning: Periodic outbreaks, hospitalizations, deaths, potentially cycling for years.

Or: If 97% protection can’t entice you, then … come on down! Can we interest you in some of that topsoil?

[seattletimes.com]