Vet covid deaths nosedive

VA data banks show huge shift, analysts find;
lowered risk linked to more inoculations


The high death rate among aging veterans hospitalized for covid has plummeted from near 20 per cent to about 6 Per cent Veterans Administration experts say. By comparison, they said, season flu deaths for hospitalized veterans run at 3.8 percent.

JAMA article on covid peril
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749

The researchers are affiliated with the  VA's Clinical Epidemiology Center in St Louis. In their article, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Yan Xie, PhD; Taeyoung Choi, MPH; Ziyad Al-Aly, MD write that:

in a VA population in fall-winter 2022-2023, being hospitalized for COVID-19 vs seasonal influenza was associated with an increased risk of death. This finding should be interpreted in the context of a 2 to 3 times greater number of people being hospitalized for COVID-19 vs influenza in the US in this period.3,4 However, the difference in mortality rates between COVID-19 and influenza appears to have decreased since early in the pandemic; death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 17% to 21% in 2020 vs 6% in this study, while death rates for those hospitalized for influenza were 3.8% in 2020 vs 3.7% in this study. The decline in death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 may be due to changes in SARS-CoV-2 variants, increased immunity levels (from vaccination and prior infection), and improved clinical care.

The increased risk of death was greater among unvaccinated individuals compared with those vaccinated or boosted—findings that highlight the importance of vaccination in reducing risk of COVID-19 death.

Study limitations include that the older and predominantly male VA population may limit generalizability to broader populations. The results may not reflect risk in nonhospitalized individuals. The analyses did not examine causes of death, and residual confounding cannot be ruled out.

For further discussion, see Igor Chudov's newsletter: https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/huge-veterans-study-covid-and-flu