What about smokers? What about the obese? What about people who took risks and acquired HIV?

The probability density function (PDF) for being hospitalized due to smoking or obesity is very wide but not tall. The PDF for being hospitalized due to COVID is not wide but is tall.

It is things with not wide but tall PDFs that cause problems with hospital capacity because it generally takes a fairly long time to increase hospital capacity.

Things with very wide but not tall PDFs are much easier to deal with because you've got years to build up capacity for them and that increased capacity will be needed for decades. The latter is important because it means a young person can look at that increased long term need and choose a career in healthcare knowing that the demand will still be there 10-14 years later when they've finished school and residency and will still be their long enough to see them through their entire career.

Our hospital capacity is already built out to deal with public health issue that it already deals with. This is a special case (if you somehow did not notice - how often have you heard about hospital overcrowding in the US before?).

When obesity, HIV and smoking related illnesses are easily transmitted by breathing and (largely) easily avoided by getting vaccinated I'll have a problem with them too

Your comment could not illustrate my point better if you had tried

It doesn't illustrate your point. You, on your soapbox pretend you have it all figured out. You, on the side of science. But as some of the responses have shown, you haven't really thought it through. I agree however, that the media hasn't either. But when was that ever true?

First, apologies for slight snugness of that that reply - probably not needed, and I've received some probably well deserved downvotes for that.

Second, it does prove my point in that the poster referred to the "unvaccinated" as a single group, a position that I'm suggesting results in a very inaccurate set of conclusions (which other responders have commented on) because of skewed cohorts.

Third, I most definitely do NOT have it all figured out - I'm as confused as anybody else on most of this stuff, which is why my post was on a single focused point, and not on issues where I have an opinion, but much less research and data supporting my position.

Lastly, I've read all the replies and thought it was good discussion. I didn't see anything to suggest I hadn't thought it through or disprove my position, just disagreements on how useful it would or wouldn't be, which is fair.

That's a reasonable answer. I appreciate that. I agree on your main point.

Are you worried you won't have care at a hospital because of someone is unvaccinated? Has that ever happened? Are hospitals full where you live? Where did you get a fear like that?

Sorry what? Yes, this has happened many times in many regions during this pandemic. If anything, as governments lean more and more into "let's just call it endemic and give into anti-vaxxers," it's happening more.

And to make it concrete: where I live we're into emergency (as in, stretching the system past its limits) ICU capacity and elective procedures (which, please note, does not mean optional) have been cancelled or delayed en masse for a couple months now as we've been going through our 4th and 5th waves.

People are absolutely regularly having diminished quality of health care due to unvaccinated people catching, as well as spreading, covid.

I don't know where you live but they cancelled those things here as well. Not because of the unvaxed but because 30% of nurses who are triple vaxxed were down with covid.

I mean, I dunno what to tell you but when they start opening up emergency ICU capacity being down 30% of nurses (accepting your premise for the sake of argument) doesn't help but it's not the core problem. The problem is people getting sick with severe illness due to covid, and that is largely unvaccinated people.

Severe outcomes stretch the system more, and unvaccinated people have more severe outcomes.

At any rate, if those nurses weren't vaccinated it's likely more than 30% would be out and a significant portion of them would be dead, so if you want to go down the "vaccines make people sick/more likely to be sick" path then you've just fallen off the rails. The path you have in mind would be a mass death event our medical systems are completely unequipped to handle.

There are 100s of new articles around the country about hospitals near or at capacity and patient care being affected, due to omicron surge. Here is just one:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-20/hospital...

How many times do you typically get hospitalized per year?