Study: People infected with Delta variant twice as likely to be hospitalized

• Research in India has determined that Delta is 50% more contagious.
• Of those patients, 8,682 were infected with the Delta variant and 34,656 were infected with the original strain. Of the patients with the Delta variant, 2.3% were hospitalized, compared to 2.2% of those with the original strain within 14 days of testing positive.
• 5.7% of those with Delta vs. 4.2% of those with the Alpha variant were admitted to hospitals or attended emergency care.
• Overall, "[t]his large national study found a higher hospital admission or emergency care attendance risk for patients with COVID-19 infected with the delta variant compared with the Alpha variant."

What they're saying: "Results suggest that outbreaks of the delta variant in unvaccinated populations might lead to a greater burden on health care services than the Alpha variant," the study says.

• "Getting fully vaccinated is crucial for reducing an individual’s risk of symptomatic infection with Delta," Anne Presanis, one of the study’s lead authors and a senior statistician at Cambridge, told Bloomberg.

The big picture: These findings agree with those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which in late July determined that infection and hospitalization rates were 5 and 29 times higher, respectively, among unvaccinated people in Los Angeles County than the fully vaccinated.

• “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said in July.

Zoom out: 52% of the entire population is fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.