On a day when California woke up with the lowest rates of coronavirus cases in the continental United States, San Diego County received extra good news on Wednesday: local vaccine supply increased significantly this week and the number of people fully vaccinated who are still the infection was small.
Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology department, said during a weekly coronavirus briefing that as of Tuesday, 203 of the 846,886 people who are fully immunized tested positive for COV2 infection.
That denominator includes only those who are at least two weeks above their final dose.
“We had zero people who were hospitalized, zero people who died. In fact, the majority – 57 percent – had no symptoms at all, “McDonald said. These are people who have been completely vaccinated and have been tested for other reasons because, for example, they were in health care. ”
This is an infection rate after vaccination of about 0.024% in San Diego County.
However, real-world studies have estimated that coronavirus vaccines are approximately 90% effective in generating a strong enough immune response to fight infection. This means that 10% of those who are now fully vaccinated – about 84,000 people in San Diego County – could be infected if they were exposed to the virus. About 1.7 percent of tests have returned positive in the past two weeks, suggesting that there are probably more than 203 people who have been infected after full vaccination. This is good news because their illness was not serious enough to seek medical attention.
Although San Diego’s number is small, it is still about three times the national rate, McDonald said. According to a report released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 5,816 confirmed COV2 infections among the 75 million Americans so far fully vaccinated at a rate of about .008 percent .
The world of public health calls these people – those who still get sick after full vaccination – cases of “discovery” because their immune system has not generated a significant enough response to keep the target pathogen at bay.
McDonald’s was not worried that the low rate found so far in San Diego County is higher than the national rate. He made a difference in that local jurisdictions get data faster, so the San Diego number is simply more up-to-date.
No one, he said, should be surprised that some people still become infected after inoculation. While recent efficacy studies have found that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are 90% effective two weeks after the second dose, leaving 10% without complete protection.
“We expect to see these numbers, they are very, very small and they emphasize how good, honestly, the vaccine works,” McDonald said.
While San Diego County seems to have noticed a total lack of severe disease in local discovery cases, this has not been the case nationwide. The CDC report found that 396 or 7 percent of discovery cases were hospitalized and 74 or 12 percent of them died, although some of those findings were for reasons not considered directly related to the disease.
The county also announced Wednesday that the state has allocated 294,440 doses of vaccine to suppliers across the region this week, nearly 100,000 more than were available last week and the most administered in a single week since March 1. . if this week’s allocation is a one-week record since vaccination began in mid-December.
Nathan Fletcher, chairman of the county supervisory board, said the allocation of the week may or may not be the start of a trend.
“We don’t know yet what it will look like next week, but this is encouraging,” Fletcher said.
The pace of the local pandemic continued its flat trajectory in Wednesday’s report, with 263 new cases and 187 COVID-related hospitalizations reported on Tuesday.
Often criticized recently for its relatively strict level-based position on reopening, California was at the bottom of the case rate list when the CDC updated national figures on Wednesday, averaging 40.3 cases per 100,000 residents in the past seven days. Michigan ranks 483th at 100,000, with Florida at 201 and Texas at 65.9.