'It’s a human tragedy': 30 unvaccinated, 12 vaccinated COVID-related local deaths reported since August

An inside look of the ICU unit at Windsor Regional Hospital in Windsor, Ont. on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2020. (Michelle Maluske/CTV Windsor)

Windsor, Ont. -

The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit has released more local data on COVID-related deaths and vaccination status.

WECHU acting medical officer of health Dr. Shanker Nesathurai said Thursday morning that since August, there has been 42 deaths related to COVID - 30 were unvaccinated people and 12 were vaccinated.

He says the small percentage of the people who are vaccinated and dying of COVID have concurrent health conditions.

"What we're seeing as a clinical trend in Windsor-Essex is, of the vaccinated people that are dying those people have significant medical comorbidity and examples of that is they had cancer that was treated in the past or they've had a stroke in the past," he says.

He says it’s tragic that some otherwise healthy unvaccinated people succumbed to the virus.

“We have a group of unvaccinated people that could have lived for a long time, many of them could have lived for a long time, save for the fact that they didn’t get vaccinated” says Nesathurai. “It’s a human tragedy, that we have people who are dying of a disease, that for the most part can be preventable, that death can be preventable.”

He says many of the deaths could have likely been prevented with vaccination.

"From a population, health and individual level, we have people who are dying, who don't need to die and it's well within our reach as a community to try and protect their health," he adds.

A woman in her 50s from the community is the latest death reported on Thursday. WECHU doesn’t release vaccination status of specific cases. In total, there were 478 COVID-19 related deaths reported in the region since the beginning of the pandemic in March, 2020.