Among the more than 75 million people who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 against COVID-19 in the second week of April, there were only 5,814 reports of coronavirus infections – an astonishingly low number that shows how effective the shots are.
Because the vaccines are not 100 percent effective, some breakthrough infections were unavoidable and expected. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are keeping a close eye on them. Studying those cases will help experts make sure the vaccines work as expected and understand all the factors that make a vaccinated person more likely to get sick.
Currently, the CDC has a national database where state health departments can send reports of cases of COVID-19 in people who have been vaccinated. Because COVID-19 is a notifiable disease, meaning every case must be reported to the CDC, the agency will eventually use a different system called the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) to find breakthrough infections. At the moment, it is working to ensure that states can include vaccination history in NNDSS reports.
Nearly a third of the breakthrough infections reported to the CDC were asymptomatic. Only 396 people were hospitalized and a third of that group was hospitalized for reasons other than COVID-19 – that is, the illness was not the reason they were seriously ill, they also happened to test positive on the virus.
Most of them were mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic. That’s exactly what we were hoping for, ”said Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University College of Public Health in Ohio. NBC News.
Two new reports from the CDC published today provided more details on COVID-19 outbreaks in vaccinated people. One of them described a nursing home in Kentucky where 90 percent of the residents and about half of the staff were fully vaccinated. After an unvaccinated staff member came up with COVID-19, a total of 46 people tested positive for the virus. Four cases involved fully vaccinated executives and 18 were fully vaccinated residents.
Especially the Kentucky The outbreak was traced to a variant of the coronavirus, the R.1 line. It shares a number of mutations with the variant viruses first identified in South Africa and Brazil, which experts believe can partially evade the antibodies produced by the vaccines.
The infections from the R.1 virus found in vaccinated people support some of those concerns, the CDC said in its report. But the vaccines still worked: Unvaccinated nursing home residents were three times as likely to be infected during the outbreak as vaccinated residents. During this outbreak, the shots were about 87 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19, the report found.
The second report detected infections in vaccinated people in 75 nursing homes in Chicago. Of nearly 8,000 vaccinated residents and 7,000 staff members, only 22 were infected with the corona virus. Fourteen were asymptomatic and five had only mild symptoms. None of the 22 people seemed to pass the infection on to anyone else. That shows how important high vaccination levels can be in settings such as nursing homes, the report said. Even if a vaccinated person gets sick, it is not likely to cause a chain of infections that could spread through a facility.
That’s the key to stopping the spread of disease in general. People who have their shot can still get sick, even if it happens very rarely, but they probably won’t pass the virus on to anyone else.
Vaccinated people who receive COVID-19 may find the experience disorienting, but the close examination of the circumstances surrounding these cases shows just how powerful the vaccines are. More than half of adults in the US have had their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. As more and more people are vaccinated, the pool of people contracting COVID-19 is steadily shrinking and less of the virus will circulate through a community. And when levels of the virus drop, both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are less likely to be exposed to it and less likely to contract it themselves.