https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html shows around 12000 breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization or death. So 173,000,000 vaccinated with 12000 severe illnesses. That is a .006% chance of severe illness.
I'm replying late again because I'm not checking the boards everyday but wanted to respond to this, because this is a little deceiving. I do not disagree that getting vaccinated offers better protection against covid than not being vaccinated, so we agree on that. However, the use of these numbers to determine a .006% chance of severe illness is a little misleading. To really know your risk for severe illness from covid you would have to look at how many breakthrough cases have occurred versus how many progressed to severe illness.
To understand how much the vaccine helps you would then need to look at all unvaccinated people who got covid, and then how many of those progressed to severe illness. The numbers should definitely look better for the vaccinated group, but you likely wont see some drastic over the top comparison. The reason for this is because the vast majority of people who get covid still have just mild to moderate symptoms that do not progress to a severe level. In fact, as the CDC often mentions, their numbers are undercounts because there are a lot of mild or asymptomatic covid cases out there that never get reported because people simply do not get tested, so you end up losing a lot of your very mild cases in the data. The severe cases - the ones that end up in the hospital are almost always counted and reported by contrast. This can cause the data to skew, making morbidity rates look higher than they may actually be for example.
It is not my goal to try and say covid is a nothing burger. However, I do feel it is very easy to get overwhelmed by all the covid overload from the media, the constant numbers, the talk of hospitals overflowing, and to start getting the impression that if you get covid you are in big trouble. It is hard to remain realistic in an environment of fear, and with a media that sensationalizes everything. The fact does still remain however that the mortality rate from covid infection, even among unvaccinated folks, is extremely low. The overall mortality rate due to covid in the USA from the numbers we have is 1.6%. Its important to remember though that the 1.6% is inflated because it includes only reported/known cases of infections. The actual mortality rate will be lower than 1.6% if you could magically capture all the infections where people simply never went to get tested, but that is impossible.
All that said, as my previous post stated, all outcomes are probabilities. If you are an older person, certainly over age 60, getting the vaccine would be highly recommended. If you also had diabetes or are obese, you are at even further risk serious illness. If you choose not to take the vaccine, then you of course are taking an increased risk of being more severely affected by covid. However, be clear that the increases we are talking about arent as you may be lead to think. The vast majority of BOTH camps are not dieing from covid.