“Re-infections are extremely rare within 90 days of the original infection,” Georgiou said. “This suggests that the antibodies that cause someone’s immune system to the infection are effective for at least 90 days.”
According to the CDC, it is still unclear whether anyone with the COVID vaccine can still spread the virus to others.
“Although people are vaccinated, they can pass it on to someone else if they are not quarantined if they are exposed to COVID, so it is a calculated risk of the CDC,” said Dr. Georgiou said. “We know that people who are symptomatic with COVID are more likely to send than people who are asymptomatic, and therefore there are the criteria in it, that you should be asymptomatic. It is also part of the criteria that you always wear a mask bearing and social distance, so I think the CDC balances the pros and cons of the difficulty of quarantining and takes into account these other facts. ‘
The CDC urges those who are vaccinated to continue to wear a mask and social distance.
In Oregon, health officials reported that four people had COVID, at least 14 days after receiving their second dose of vaccinations. The Oregon Health Authority said each person is asymptomatic or has mild symptoms.
An OHA spokesman told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS: “We are working with our local and federal public health partners to investigate these cases and determine their origin. Genome sequencing is underway, and we expect results this week. We can confirm that two of the four cases were associated with a care environment for congregations. ‘
We have dr. Georgiou asked about the matters.
“It tells us that no vaccine is 100 percent effective,” she said. “What we need to know is how many people were vaccinated in Oregon because there are four people. What’s the denominator? That’s what we need to know here.”
The Pfizer vaccine is about 95 percent effective, while the Moderna vaccine is about 94 percent effective.
A CDC spokesman told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS: “In the trials, the two authorized vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, had 94% + efficacy, but this means that a small number of COVID-19 breakthrough cases occurred participants who have been vaccinated, so we expect that to happen. ‘
The day before the vaccine was approved in December, Pfizer said data on the effectiveness of the vaccine against asymptomatic distribution would be collected in the coming months.
“We do not know the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing asymptomatic COVID,” she said. “From a practical point of view, it was easier, for the speed we needed to complete these trials, it was easier to get people to sign up and get tested if they had symptoms of COVID. It would be very difficult, very would have been expensive and would have taken much longer to test all 40,000 people from time to time whether they were symptomatic or not, but just randomly tested. ‘
She said it is important to be vigilant, even if cases, hospitalization and deaths in Minnesota are down.
“I hope that we will continue to see the decline and that it will be as low a baseline as possible, because what I expect, what the CDC expects to happen in March and April, we will see another upswing,” she said. said. “And that’s because this British variant is spreading across the country. It’s already in 40 states, with more than 1,000 cases, and we know it doubles every ten days.”
According to dr. Georgiou has limited data on these variants, but based on studies it is believed that the current vaccines are just as effective against the British variant. However, it may be less effective against the South African and Brazilian variants because it contains an additional mutation.