Of the more than 75 million people completely vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States by the second week of April, there were only 5,814 reports of coronavirus infections – a staggering number that shows how effective the fires are.
Because vaccines are not 100% effective, some infections discovered were inevitable and expected. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is closely monitoring them. The study of these cases will be help experts ensure that vaccines work as expected and understand any factors that make a vaccinated person more likely to get sick.
The CDC currently has a national database in which state health departments can send reports of any case of COVID-19 to people who have been vaccinated. Because COVID-19 is a notifiable disease, which means that each case must be reported to the CDC, the agency will eventually use a different system, called the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS), to find revolutionary infections. At this time, work is being done to ensure that states can include vaccination history in NNDSS reports.
Nearly a third of the infections found reported to the CDC were asymptomatic. Only 396 people were hospitalized, and a third of the group were in hospital for a reason other than COVID-19 – meaning the disease was not the reason they were seriously ill, but only tested positive for the virus.
“Most of them were slightly 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. NBC News.
Two new CDC reports released today provided more details about outbreaks of COVID-19 in vaccinated individuals. One described a nursing home in Kentucky, where 90 percent of residents and about half of employees were completely vaccinated. After an unvaccinated staff came down with COVID-19, a total of 46 people tested positive for the virus. Four cases were in fully vaccinated staff and 18 were in fully vaccinated residents.
Especially Kentucky The outbreak was linked back to a variant form of coronavirus called line R.1. It has a number of mutations in common with virus variants first identified in South Africa and Brazil, which experts believe could be partially evaded by vaccine-producing antibodies.
R.1 virus infections found in vaccinated people support some of these concerns, the CDC said in its report. But the vaccines continued to work: residents of the unvaccinated nursing home were three times more likely to become infected during the outbreak than vaccinated residents. During this outbreak, the shots were effective at around 87% against symptomatic COVID-19, the report found.
The second report looked at infections in vaccinated people at 75 nursing homes in Chicago. In almost 8,000 vaccinated residents and 7,000 vaccinated employees, there were only 22 coronavirus infections. Fourteen were asymptomatic and five had only mild symptoms. None of the 22 people seemed to transmit the infection to anyone else. This shows how important high levels of vaccination can be in environments such as nursing homes, the report said. Even if a vaccinated person becomes ill, it is unlikely to trigger a chain of infections that could spread through a unit.
This is the key to stopping the spread of the disease in general. People who have the photos may get sick, although it happens very rarely, but they probably will not transmit the virus to anyone else.
Vaccinated people receiving COVID-19 may find the experience disorienting, but in-depth investigations into the circumstances surrounding these cases show how powerful the vaccines are. More than half of US adults received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. As more and more people are vaccinated, the group of people who will catch COVID-19 is steadily shrinking and fewer viruses will circulate around a community. And when virus levels drop, vaccinated and unvaccinated people are less likely to be exposed to it and less likely to catch it on their own.