Vaccination against COVID-19 prevented an estimated 16,607 hospitalizations and 4,307 deaths in a single Washington county during the first eight months of the vaccine rollout, according to a modeling analysis published in BMC Public Health. Nearly three-quarters of the prevented deaths were among people aged 65 and older.
The word estimate is doing real work in that sentence. This is a counterfactual analysis, not a count of averted deaths observed by anyone. Researchers took what actually happened and modeled what would have happened had nobody been vaccinated. That method has known limits, and the authors name them.
