(2021-07-26) Breakthrough Infections Explained

COVID-19 Breakthrough Infections, Explained. You may actually have heard about this big cluster in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They have this massive 4th of July celebration every year. And this year, apparently, was even more massive than usual — longer lines, more crowded bars, more partying. And at the end of it, there were a lot of infections — 256 right now. And about 2/3 of them were among people who had been vaccinated.

None of these people were hospitalized. None of these people were severely ill. But they did have the loss of taste and smell that we were hearing about last year.

one thing that scientists have been reporting about Delta variant is that it leads to a much higher viral load. So people who become infected with Delta seem to have a lot more virus in their bodies than they would have if they had been infected with some other variant. And also, they seem to be infected for longer.

the fact that many of us are behaving differently now — we’re socializing more, we’re socializing without masks, we’ve been told we don’t need to wear them — that may be contributing to this set of breakthrough infections.

The uncertainty really is in how likely somebody who is vaccinated and infected can pass the virus on to somebody else. That’s really, I think, where the uncertainty starts to play a bigger role

Because if a lot of vaccinated people are spreading the virus to others, then it’s another whole source of cases that we hadn’t really considered. That’s a whole other set of infections that we have to worry about.

And on an individual level, some of us have kids and elderly parents

The most important thing we should really do is get those vaccination rates up.

I think we all need to be wearing masks again, even those of us who are vaccinated

This is not what the CDC is telling us. The C.D.C., which is the authority on all these things, is explicitly saying that it’s not advising us to wear masks indoors.

I do want to come back here to the idea that vaccinated people have nothing to worry about to say that they have mostly nothing to worry about. But some vaccinated people have been sick enough to have to miss work. And there is also the possibility of long Covid, which we know so little about. So it’s not that you are entirely risk-free if you’re vaccinated and do get infected.