How do death rates from COVID-19 differ between people who are vaccinated and those who are not?

To understand how the pandemic is evolving, it’s crucial to know how death rates from COVID-19 are affected by vaccination status. The death rate is a key metric that can accurately show how effective vaccines are against severe forms of the disease. This may change over time when there are changes in the prevalence of COVID-19 and because of factors such as waning immunity, new strains of the virus, and the use of boosters.

This page explains why it is essential to look at death rates by vaccination status rather than the absolute number of deaths among vaccinated and unvaccinated people. 

We also visualize this mortality data for the United States, England, Switzerland, and Chile. 

Ideally, we would produce a global dataset that compiles this data for countries worldwide, but we cannot do this in our team. As a minimum, we list country-specific sources where you can find similar data for other countries, and we describe how an ideal dataset would be formatted.

During a pandemic, you might see headlines like “Half of those who died from the virus were vaccinated.” 

Based on this headline, it would be wrong to draw any conclusions about whether the vaccines are protecting people from the virus. The headline is not providing enough information to draw any conclusions.

Let’s think through an example to see this.

Imagine we live in a place with a population of 60 people.

Then we learn that 10 people died. And we learn that 50% of them were vaccinated.

The newspaper may read, “Half of those who died from the virus were vaccinated.” But this headline does not tell us whether the vaccine protects people or not.

To be able to say anything, we also need to know about those who did not die: how many people in this population were vaccinated? And how many were not vaccinated?

Now we have all the information we need and can calculate the death rates:

• of 10 unvaccinated people, 5 died → the death rate among the unvaccinated is 50%
• of 50 vaccinated people, 5 died → the death rate among the vaccinated is 10%

We, therefore, see that the death rate among the vaccinated is 5 times lower than among the unvaccinated.

In the example, we invented numbers to simplify calculating the death rates. But the same logic also applies to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Comparisons of the absolute numbers, as some headlines do, make a mistake known in statistics as a ‘base rate fallacy’: it ignores that one group is much larger than the other. It is important to avoid this mistake, especially now, as in more and more countries, the number of people vaccinated against COVID-19 is much larger than the number of unvaccinated people (see our vaccination data). 

This example illustrated how to think about these statistics in a hypothetical case. Below, you can find the actual data for the situation in the COVID-19 pandemic now.

Here we combine the official mortality data by vaccination status published by the United States, England, Switzerland, and Chile. These charts are no longer updated since August 2023.

United States

The United States has vaccinated 81.39 of its population, mainly with the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. The US CDC publishes mortality data by vaccination status.

This chart presents the COVID-19 death rate among unvaccinated people (0 doses received), people vaccinated without an updated bivalent booster, and those vaccinated with an updated bivalent booster.

You can click the “Change age group” button on the top left to explore data for a specific age group.

The mortality rate for the “All ages” group is age-standardized by the US CDC using the 2000 US Census standard population. Rates for specific age groups are calculated as crude incidence rates.

Switzerland

Switzerland has vaccinated 69.75 of its population, mainly with the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. Mortality data by vaccination status is published by the Federal Office of Public Health (data coverage also includes Liechtenstein).

This chart presents the COVID-19 death rate among unvaccinated, fully vaccinated, and those who additionally received a booster dose.

You can click the “Change age group” button on the top left to explore data for a specific age group.

The mortality rate for the “All ages” group is age-standardized by Our World in Data, using single-year age estimates from the 2022 revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects for Switzerland. Rates for specific age groups are calculated as crude incidence rates.

Chile

Chile has vaccinated 92.27 of its population, mainly with the Sinovac vaccine. The Ministry of Health publishes mortality data by vaccination status.

This chart presents the COVID-19 death rate among people who are not fully vaccinated, among fully-vaccinated people, and among those who additionally received a booster dose. 

You can click the “Change age group” button on the top left to explore data for a specific age group.

The mortality rate for the “All ages” group is age-standardized by Our World in Data, using single-year age estimates from the 2022 revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects for Chile. Rates for specific age groups are calculated as crude incidence rates.

England

Country-by-country sources

We’ve compiled here a list of links to similar datasets for many other countries. If you know an official source of disaggregated data not listed here, please send us a message using this page’s “Feedback” button.

Our team at Our World in Data does not have the resources to bring this data into a common global dataset. If others are interested in doing so, an ideal global dataset would pull this data together into a common format, making sure to harmonize the data in terms of methodology and denominator (for example, per 100,000 people), and would include complete documentation of the sources used. This would be a major contribution to public understanding of the pandemic.