Four Steps to Fewer COVID-19 Outbreaks | Step 1: Get Vaccinated!

In this short series, we cover four key strategies that will help reduce the likelihood of a COVID-19 outbreak in your organization.

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Liz Ruark
Four vaccine viles

As of September 20, 2022, this post will no longer be updated.

Vaccination is everyone’s best protection against COVID-19. Even in the face of highly transmissible variants, they remain hugely protective against severe disease and death, which was the goal for them from the beginning.

How protective? According to July 2021 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 0.01% to 0.54% of vaccinated people will get infected (that’s 1 in 10,000 to 5 in 1,000). Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that you’re about 25 times less likely to get seriously ill or die from the Delta variant of COVID-19 if you’re vaccinated than you are if you’re unvaccinated.

And – no surprise – vaccines are your strongest COVID-19 mitigation strategy in workplace and school settings. The higher the percentage of fully vaccinated people you have, the less your organization needs to rely on testing to reduce the risk of an outbreak.

For businesses, that means increasing vaccination rates among employees can translate to big cost savings. According to the Workplace Testing Planner, for a 250-person company, increasing the percentage of fully vaccinated employees from 25% to 75% could translate to up to $35K per week in savings on testing.

August is National Immunization Awareness Month, and — exciting news! — the FDA has fully approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. So seize the moment and get vaccinated — if you haven’t done so already — and encourage the rest of the folks in your organization to do the same. It’s good public health, good business, and good for keeping kids in school.