(2021-07-22) Worried About Breakthrough Covid Cases? Here's What To Know

Worried About Breakthrough COVID-19 Cases? Here's What To Know. the current crop of vaccine breakthrough cases doesn't surprise or alarm public health experts. "I haven't seen any signals in the U.S. indicating that they are occurring at the levels that would give us concern that the [vaccine] effectiveness is going down," said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

You can get COVID-19 even if you're vaccinated, but it's rare and likely to be mild

Breakthrough infections, they tend to be mild — they tend to be more like a cold," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, professor of medicine and infectious disease epidemiology at Emory University.

Those mild breakthroughs, according to a New England Journal study three weeks ago, are accompanied by lower viral loads and less — much less — symptoms," added Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

97% of those currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated

as of July 12, out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,492 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from COVID-19, and 75% of them were over age 65.

It's not known yet whether you can spread the coronavirus if you get a breakthrough infection. In general, people who are vaccinated and get infected have less virus.

"We have not seen reports yet of breakthrough cases causing long COVID, thank goodness," said Gandhi of UC San Francisco