ATHENS – Being vaccinated against COVID-19, which health experts said would all but guarantee against being seriously ill – hasn’t worked out in Greece where 54 percent of patients in public hospital Intensive Care Units (ICU’s) are inoculated.

That startling news – after almost two years of urging people to be vaccinated and now easing health measures to allow anti-vaxxers to gather in public spots with everyone else – came from the National Organization for Public Health (EODY.)

Its daily bulletin reported that there were 97 Covid patients on ventilators on June 20, with 45 (or 46 percent) unvaccinated or only partly so, while 92 percent have an underlying health condition and/or are over the age of 70.

Under the EODY guidelines, a person is regarded as fully vaccinated after having one dose of a single dose shot or two of a two-dose vaccine but no information was given if any of the patients had received a third booster, a fourth also being urged.

New hospital admissions were down at 128 in the 24-hour period from a weekly average of 135 admissions a day, while new infections also eased to 4,832 from 5,689 the day before.

But the number of deaths rose to 11 from 8 the day earlier, bringing the nationwide total since the pandemic broke out in March 2020 to 30,099 against the backdrop of tourists pouring in, health measures eased and cases now rising again.