Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths showed modest declines compared to August proportions of 14% and 17% respectively. Since hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, however, the rise in breakthrough cases from 14% to 16% may be a harbinger of more bad news in Tennessee.
The data isn't presented in a straightforward manner. Subtract the percentages shown in the table from 100 to get the breakthrough figures. I can imagine some idiot looking at that table, wondering what the hell he's lookin' at.
Vaccines do not make one bulletproof, as story after story makes plain. This is especially the case for the elderly, for whom the risk of death is the highest, vaccinated or not. Waning vaccine effectiveness is only the second biggest concern facing this group.
But in Tennessee you wouldn't know risk of death is highest if you are old anyway, if you relied on Tennessee's COVID statewide dashboard, hilariously entitled "unified command". You won't find death information visualized anywhere, let alone by age. Cases are visualized by age, which is even more misleading to the elderly since cases abound among the younger tranches, not the older.
You really have to hunt for the death data on a different page and download the data in XLS format from a long list of available data sets entitled "Daily Age Group Outcomes- Statewide case outcomes by age group", and then do the math. And do you see the word "death" in there anywhere?
It's really irresponsible. It's almost like Tennessee is trying to hide the deaths from its old people, and throw shade on the vaccines, by publishing the breakthrough data in a weird way, at the same time. A conspiracy theorist would say they're tryin' to get rid of 'em, real quiet like.
I count 13,119 deaths in TN to date from COVID in people 61 years of age or older, which is about 82% of all the pandemic deaths in the state.
Tennessee really, really sucks at this.
