Back in September, we got a big new data download from the CDC. It showed that, during the spring and summer, unvaccinated people had been 10 times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus, and 11 times more likely to die. Those were big numbers that placed the importance of vaccination in stark relief.

After the introduction of boosters, we now have yet another category to compare to the unvaccinated: the boosted. And the gap is greater still.

The Los Angeles County data showed that, at the tail end of the period in which the delta variant was predominant, unvaccinated people were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than boosted people. Once omicron became predominant in early December and cases rose, the gap shrunk. But it was still a 23-fold difference — greater than the gap in the larger study from earlier in the year.

The CDC also recently provided data from a larger study — similar to the spring-and-summer data from last year. In data for 25 different jurisdictions covering the last three months of 2021, it found the death rate was 53 times higher among the unvaccinated than the boosted.