COVID-19 deaths reveal startling vaccination statistic in Indiana

EVANSVILLE — Robb Walter III was just 42 years old when he died last weekend, his father says, of COVID-19 pneumonia — unvaccinated.

Walter — "Bulldog" to friends and family — left behind a girlfriend, a band he was playing in, a job he loved and parents who are telling the world on Facebook not to make their son's mistake.

"My wife and myself, we had our shots but since he had COVID early last year he didn't think he needed the vaccine," Robert Walter II said of his son, who lived in Southern Illinois.

Walter posted a comment Friday on his wife's Facebook page, which trumpets vaccination.

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"(Robb Walter III) was wrong and one of his last words to me was, 'Dad I should had listen to you and (his stepmother). Tell my friends Please take the Vaccine,'" he wrote.

Local hospitals are not disclosing how many of their patients who died of COVID-19 were unvaccinated — but statewide data leaves little room for doubt. Almost all of the Indiana residents who have died of the coronavirus since Jan. 18 have been unvaccinated.

The state saw 3,801 coronavirus deaths between that date and Sept. 16 — 94% of them unvaccinated, according to an Indiana University Northwest analysis. The Indiana State Department of Health uses Jan. 18 as its benchmark because that's the earliest date breakthrough cases could be identified based on the timing of the state's vaccine rollout last winter.

It's largely the same story in Kentucky. The Green River District Health Department, which serves Henderson County, said it isn't aware of local hospitals or counties reporting mortality data for unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. But 85% of Kentucky residents who died of the coronavirus from March 1 through Sept. 22 were unvaccinated.

97.9% of Hoosiers younger than 65 who died were unvaccinated

The IU Northwest analysis shows just how big a difference a COVID patient's age can make.

It reports that almost every one — 97.9% — of the 877 residents younger than 65 who died of COVID-19 was unvaccinated.

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"I knew being vaccinated was helpful, but it's really helpful if you're young," said IU Northwest data analyst Micah Pollak.

Correlations between vaccine hesitancy, youth and the nature of the Delta variant help explain what's happening, Dr. Payal Patel-Dovlatabadi, an associate professor of public health at the University of Evansville, said this month.

With most elderly local residents vaccinated, Patel-Dovlatabadi said, the virus preys on the groups that are left to prey on — people with other health issues and the unvaccinated. Local hospitals say almost every COVID-19 patient in their ICUs and on ventilators is unvaccinated.

And that correlates with younger age groups. Even with the roughly 80% of older Vanderburgh County residents who have been vaccinated, the county's overall rate of vaccination is still just 58.5% of those eligible.

But being fully vaccinated doesn't provide full protection against the coronavirus — especially if you're a senior citizen with a weakened immune system. The average age of the 211 vaccinated Hoosiers who died between Jan. 18 and Sept. 16 was 80, according to state vaccination data.

'Some of the risk factors are just as simple as being moderately obese'

The COVID-19 delta variant's emergence in Vanderburgh County can be traced to June 20, the day the county registered its first recent consistent increase in the average number of positive tests collected per day.

Since then, 51 Vanderburgh County residents have died of the coronavirus, including 14 who were younger than 60. That's 27% — nearly five times the proportion recorded during the November-January COVID-19 peak.

Lynn Maserejian, an Evansville-based registered nurse who has been outspoken about COVID-19, said colleagues report seeing younger patients die with few health issues other than not being vaccinated.

"Some of the risk factors are just as simple as being moderately obese. That’s it — and that’s local," Maserejian said. "People who are overweight and don’t think that it’s a big deal because they’re 30 or 40 years old."

Deaconess Health System has been regularly publishing on Facebook internal data that shows overwhelming majorities of its COVID-19 patients, ICU patients and patients on ventilators are unvaccinated. Deaconess hasn't published mortality data.

Ascension St. Vincent Evansville hadn't published any data until Friday. Then it released a statistic that packs a wallop.

"There have been 234 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Ascension St. Vincent Evansville (between Aug. 1 and Wednesday). 0% of the patients admitted have received at least 1 dose of the vaccine," the local health system said by email.

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Maserejian and Pollak said hospitals might penetrate the consciousness of local residents by publishing data about unvaccinated coronavirus patients who die in their communities, but it's not necessary. 

The point is better made with statewide data, said Pollak, one of Indiana's leading COVID-19 researchers.

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"We're talking about breakthrough cases that are relatively rare, so unless you have a big sample size you're not going to have a good estimate of them," he said. "You need to look at a larger sample size, a longer period and more hospitals to try to draw any conclusions."

Local death data sorted by vaccination would be too likely to create false narratives with week-to-week swings that look large but don't mean much in the long run, Pollak said. There would be other issues.

"At the facility level it just becomes a little too personally identifiable," he said. "If you lost a family member to COVID, would you really want the hospital to be using that information, publicly putting it out there? There’s not really any reason to think statewide data would be different."

In the end, Maserejian said, it doesn't really matter where someone died of COVID-19 when they were unvaccinated.

"It’s the fact that they were unvaccinated, and they died," she said.

Thomas B. Langhorne can be reached by email at tom.langhorne@courierpress.com.