Among the more than 75 million people who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States by the second week of April, there were only 5,814 reports of coronavirus infections – an incredibly low number showing how effective the shots are.
Because the vaccines are not 100 percent effective, some breakthrough infections are unavoidable and expected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are still closely monitoring them. The study of the cases will helps experts to make sure the vaccines are expected to work and understands 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 to people who have been vaccinated. Because COVID-19 is a notifiable disease, which means that every case has to be reported to the CDC, the agency will eventually use another system, called the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), to detect breakthrough infections. At present, it is working to ensure that states can include the 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 the group were hospitalized for a reason other than COVID-19 – that is, the disease was not the reason they were seriously ill, but happened to be also tested positive for the virus.
‘Most of these were slightly symptomatic or asymptomatic. This is 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 the outbreaks of COVID-19 in vaccines. One describes a nursing home in Kentucky where 90 percent of the residents and about half of the staff were fully vaccinated. After a non-vaccinated staff came down with COVID-19, a total of 46 people tested positive for the virus. Four cases were fully vaccinated staff members and 18 in fully vaccinated residents.
Especially the Kentucky outbreak has been linked to a variant form of the coronavirus, called the R.1 strain. This has in common a number of mutations with the variant viruses first identified in South Africa and Brazil, which experts say could partially evade antibodies produced by the vaccines.
The R.1 virus infections that occur in vaccines support some of the problems, the CDC said in its report. But the vaccines still worked: residents who were not vaccinated were three times as likely to become infected during the outbreak as residents who were vaccinated. During this outbreak, the shots were about 87 percent effective against the symptomatic COVID-19, the report said.
The second report detected infections in vaccines at 75 nursing homes in Chicago. Of nearly 8,000 vaccinated and 7,000 vaccinated staff, there were only 22 coronavirus infections. Fourteen were asymptomatic and five had only mild symptoms. None of the 22 people transmitted the infection to anyone else. This shows how important high levels of vaccination can be in environments such as old age homes, the report states. Even if a vaccinated person becomes ill, it is unlikely to be a chain of infections that can spread through a facility.
This is the key to stopping the spread of disease in general. People with their shots can still get sick, although this happens very rarely, but most likely they will not transmit the virus to someone else.
Vaccines given COVID-19 may find the experience disorienting, but a close examination of the circumstances surrounding these cases shows how powerful the vaccines are. More than half of the adults in the U.S. had their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. As more and more people are vaccinated, the pool of people catching COVID-19 shrinks gradually, and less of the virus will spread in a community. And if the levels of the virus go down, it is less likely to expose vaccinated and non-vaccinated people to it and less likely to catch it itself.