Should we worry that there was a COVID outbreak among vaccinated people at a nursing home in Kentucky? – Warm air

Should we worry that there was a COVID outbreak among vaccinated people at a nursing home in Kentucky? – Warm air

by

Outbreaks appear to be exacerbated during vaccinations, are they? Last week, the CDC told us that it found only 5,800 confirmed cases of COVID out of 66 million people vaccinated, a rate of .008 percent. If the rate is universal, there should be no infections in a nursing home of a few dozen people. There must be at most one pure one.

Then seen, there is an outbreak of some kind among any vaccinated group, as it strongly indicates that there are far more unmarked “breakthrough infections” among vaccinated than the CDC knows. In the case of the nursing home in Kentucky, they had a group of vaccinated residents and staff along with a group of vaccinated, so they went ahead and tested everyone. Look, they found a bunch of asymptomatic infections among those who were vaccinated.

So maybe the ‘true’ infection rate among the vaccinated is more like 0.8 percent instead of .008. Maybe it’s even higher and the CDC is still in the dark.

On the other hand, virologists celebrate the data of the nursing home because it proves that the vaccines offer strong protection, even if the conditions for a truly devastating outbreak are present. The case concerns an elderly population living in a nearby area amid an outbreak that infected dozens, and to give the upper hand, the virus that infected them appears to have several mutations that make it more dangerous. make as the common coronavirus. A year ago, a situation like that would have cut through the house. In this case, only one vaccinated resident dies. Most did not even have symptoms.

The outbreak involves a variant of the virus with multiple mutations in the ear protein, of the kind that make the vaccines less effective. Vaccinations and health workers at the Kentucky Institution were less likely to be infected than those not yet vaccinated, and they were much less likely to develop symptoms. The study estimated that the vaccine, identified as Pfizer-BioNTech, showed efficacy of 66 percent for residents and 75.9 percent for employees, and that it was 86 to 87 percent effective in protecting against symptomatic diseases.

In the Kentucky outbreak, the virus variant is not on the CDC’s list of being considered variants of concern or interest. According to the authors of the study, the variant does have different mutations of importance: D614G, which provides evidence of increased transmissibility; E484K in the receptor binding domain of the vein protein, which is also seen in B.1.351, the variant first recognized in South Africa, and P.1. from Brazil; and W152L, which can reduce the effectiveness of neutralizing antibodies.

Raw numbers: 75 of the 83 residents were vaccinated. All eight of the vaccinated were infected during the outbreak compared to only 18 who were vaccinated. Thus, with a nasty variant at work in a group that included older and weaker people, the vaccines still prevented infection in more than two-thirds of the elderly and symptoms in more than 85 percent of the entire group. Of the eight residents who were not vaccinated, two died, but among the 18 who became infected despite the vaccination, only one did so. One public health professor was amazed that the vaccines rise just as well as among a group with weaker immune systems fighting a variant with a threatening mutation:

According to the Times, more information came out of nursing homes from Chicago today. Among 78 facilities, there were 627 infections among residents and staff – but only 22 of them were among vaccinated and two thirds of them were asymptomatic. Another study of “breakthrough infections” at Rockefeller University looked at 417 employees of the school who were fully vaccinated to see how many were infected. Answer: Two, for a rate of 0.5 percent. That is 60 times higher than the .008 percent rate revealed by the CDC last week, but still very small. It goes without saying that the rate of “breakthrough infections” can be higher or lower within different age groups. Among a group of vaccinated elderly people whose immune systems are not what they used to be, even after going up by Pfizer and Moderna, the rate is perhaps one percent or higher. Among a group of healthy young adults who have grown, it may be even lower than .008 percent.

Either way, the rate within both groups experiencing symptoms will be much less than the rate of infection, and the rate requiring hospitalization will still be smaller.

On the other hand, Patterico has a point here. If more vaccinated people become infected than we know, more vaccinated people transmit the virus than we suspect:

I spent the last week experimenting like Fauci with the value of 0.008 percent when they recommended that vaccines stay outside the restaurants until the spread of the community is lower. I still think that advice is too cautious, as the rate of “breakthrough infections” by any standard remains extremely low (as Fauci himself admits). But these infections appear to occur more frequently than the one-to-11,000 ratio implied by the CDC’s data, given the results of Rockefeller U and the Kentucky nursing home. How much more often? * Shrug your shoulders * But you can understand why older people who have been vaccinated can take basic precautions especially when they are indoors and around large groups of strangers, at least until we get a little closer to the immunity of the herd. A one-in-100 chance of infection, we say, differs significantly from one-in-11,000.

I will leave you with this, a reminder that herd immunity is not only real, it is spectacular.

Source