One of Staten Island's first COVID-19 vaccines is given at Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The United States coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination effort saved more than 240,000 lives and prevented nearly 1.2 million hospitalizations during in a six-month span from December, 2020 to the end of June, 2021, researchers reported Tuesday.
The model, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, simulated the trajectory of the pandemic under a no-vaccination scenario and a program that only achieved half the daily vaccination rate of the actual rollout completed in the country. From there, scientists compared infections, hospitalizations and deaths compared to the simulated trends under the U.S. vaccination program.
Even against an effort that cut the pace of vaccinations in half, the U.S. vaccination rollout prevented more than 77,000 deaths and 336,000 hospitalizations, the study said.
“Our analytical model suggested that the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program was associated with a reduction in the total hospitalizations and deaths by nearly half during the first 6 months of 2021,” the researchers said. “It was also associated with decreased impact of the more transmissible and lethal alpha variant that was circulating during the same period.”
After the first vaccines were authorized in December of 2020, researchers said vaccination efforts through the first six months of the year helped avoid 14 million new coronavirus cases.
By June, around half of U.S. adults were considered fully vaccinated, data shows.
“Vaccination prevented a wave of COVID-19 cases driven by the alpha variant that would have occurred in April 2021 without vaccination,” the study’s authors wrote, discussing the strain of the virus that was first discovered in the United Kingdom and became dominant in the U.S. in early April.
Scientists involved in the study said the research is pivotal to informing future vaccination strategies.
The most recent study corresponded with other research that indicated the extremely high effectiveness of currently-authorized COVID-19 vaccines, which prevented around 44,000 hospitalizations throughout the five boroughs by the summer of last year, the Advance/SILive.com reported.
Johns Hopkins University data indicates more than 840,000 people have been killed by COVID-19 in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic.
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