COVID-19 Update: Tuesday, May 11th, 2021

Breakthrough Infections - What you need to know. And a new VOC.

Last night in one of my classes a student brought up breakthrough infections and it seemed like a great topic to discuss here. So here is what you need to know about Breakthrough infections.

1. Let's start with a refresher that no vaccine works 100% of the time in 100% of the people. Some people, for some reason we cannot explain, get vaccinated and never develop immunity. Of course, they wouldn't know this unless they were then tested for immunity. So sometimes, the vaccine simply does not create the desired effect in the person. How many people does this happen to? We don't know - because unless the person is tested for antibodies, we wouldn't know it happened. It is not common, but it happens and typically in a group of 25 people there will be at least 1 person who has experienced this. For example, think about people who got chickenpox twice. Not the norm, but it happens.

2. Next refresher, it takes time for your body to develop immunity. So you don't get the shot and voila. Generally speaking, it takes 2 weeks for your body to develop full immunity after completing a vaccine series. So any exposure during that gap can still result in illness. And....if you had exposure before getting vaccinated you are going to be sick - the vaccine won't stop that.

3. Final refresher, the COVID vaccines specifically may not protect against all variants. So even if you get vaccinated, you may have trouble with a particular variant. The idea, however, is that you may still get sick, but you are unlikely to get severe illness, hospitalization, or die. Of course, it is still possible (see #1) but it is unlikely.

   1. Speaking of variants, the variant from India has now been upgraded to a VOC - while we anticipated this would happen, it is now official. While this variant is in the US, the dominant variant here right now is the one first detected in the UK. You can see more about all the different variants and how prevalent they are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/variant-surveillance/variant-info.html this will also provide you an update on what constitutes a VOC or VOI. Or you can take a look at the prior post I did on that.

4. The CDC is tracking breakthrough illness (the term used to describe people who are fully vaccinated but still get COVID). The website with all the information is here: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html You can see from the chart that most breakthrough infections are happening in women and those over 60. Note that 27% were asymptomatic. And of the 835 hospitalizations, 241 of those were NOT for COVID. Essentially, someone was hospitalized for something else and when tested (which is protocol right now) they tested positive for COVID. Only 594 people have gotten the vaccine and still ended up in the hospital for COVID, meaning 6.4% of breakthrough infections were severe enough to require hospitalization. There have been 132 people who have died, but 20 of those were NOT related to COVID - meaning they died from something else even though they had COVID. At first glance you may think, well this is about the same as the rate of hospitalization and deaths we are seeing in the general population, so why get vaccinated? But keep in mind these numbers are from a subgroup of total infected individuals. If you compared them to the total number of people who have been hospitalized or died the percentages drop dramatically, your chance of dying from COVID after being vaccinated drops to roughly 1/100th of 1% or 0.01% chance. That's pretty low. Your risk of dying from COVID if you are not vaccinated is 1.78% in the US and higher elsewhere.

   1. Worth noting that Pfizer is now officially approved for those 12 and up. You can start seeing those vaccines roll out as early as Thursday of this week in some areas for those who choose to vaccinate.

If you enjoy a good data dive, you can research to your heart's content on COVID related hospitalization data here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_5.html and you can find all things COVID data here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

FINAL THOUGHTS: I want to encourage you today to respond with kindness, it can diffuse a situation when hostility will generally only breed more hostility. Now don't mistake kindness for weakness - to the contrary, it requires great strength to show kindness in situations where you would rather not. Be strong, be brave, be kind. Let's hope your day is such that you don't need this advice...but just in case.