Covid Icu Bed Occupancy Inversely Related to the States' Booster Rates: A Myth or a Reality

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: The current CDC guidelines recommend COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all eligible individuals to enhance protection. Resources have been allocated to research done regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, and we speculate that there is a correlation between COVID booster rates and number of COVID patients in the ICU. We hypothesize that the states with a higher percentage of the population that received the booster shot will have decreased COVID ICU bed utilization and vice versa. METHOD(S) The percentage of people who received the COVID-19 booster vaccine and the number of ICU beds occupied by patients with COVID-19 per 10,000 population, both stratified by states, were reviewed to determine the pattern of correlation. The data for both the variables was sourced from Becker's Healthcare as it used information from the CDC's data tracker to rank states by their booster rates. The rankings were last updated based on data from July 20th, 2022. The state of Idaho was excluded because the data was not available. Limitations of the study included reporting lags between the states and CDC, the emergence of numerous variants of the virus, and a lack of a standardized timeline across the states. RESULT(S) Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to determine the pattern of correlation between COVID booster rates and the number of COVID patients in the ICU for all US states. Booster rates was set as x and ICU patients was set as y. The data was analyzed while using the formula r = SIGMA((X - My)(Y - Mx)) / ((SSx)(SSy)). X Values were calculated with SIGMA = 2407.7, Mean = 48.154 and SIGMA(X - Mx)2 = SSx = 2308.544. Y Values were calculated with SIGMA = 5112, Mean = 102.24 and SIGMA(Y - My)2 = SSy = 835103.12. The coefficient of determination, R2, was 0.0611. Our obtained R was -0.25 which means no strong correlation was found. The data was analyzed independently by two statisticians and the same results were obtained. The results failed to confirm our hypothesis and suggested that there was no correlation between COVID booster rates and the number of COVID patients in the ICU. CONCLUSION(S) Based on our results, no correlation was found between the states' COVID booster rates and ICU bed occupancy. Further studies are needed to quantify this association if any as highly virulent COVID strains pose a threat to humanity.