Researchers: Over 13,000 lives could have been saved with COVID vaccinations in Georgia

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May 13th, 2022

The FDA is expected to green light new COVID-19 vaccines any day now to help people protect themselves from the latest strains of the virus.
Tori Hood, an emergency room nurse at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, gives 15-year-old Tristan Linscott her first COVID-19 vaccine dose at a pop-up vaccination clinic at the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Georgia in January 2022. (Sam Whitehead/WABE)

One tragic fact about the nearly 1 million people who died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is that a huge share of them didn’t have to.

In Tennessee, 11,047 of the people who died could have survived if everyone in the state had gotten vaccinated. In Ohio, that number is 15,875. In Georgia, it’s 13,598. Nationally it’s nearly 319,000, according to a new estimate.

These figures come from an analysis released Friday by researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health — shared exclusively with NPR — that estimates the portion of vaccine-preventable deaths in each state since COVID-19 vaccines became available at the start of 2021.

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