The coronavirus pandemic continues in the United States — and it looks like a lot of the spread and transmission is among unvaccinated people.
Is COVID-19 spreading among the vaccinated?
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, recently told CNN that fully vaccinated people can become infected with COVID-19. However, the symptoms are easier to deal with if you’ve been fully vaccinated.
- “This is largely a problem when it comes to severe disease, the disease that requires hospitalization, it’s among the unvaccinated. It really is pretty unusual to have a vaccinated person be hospitalized,” he said.
Which fully people vaccinated get infected?
Schaffner said that “older” and “very, very frail” people will be infected with COVID-19, regardless of vaccination status.
- “They never were able to respond to the vaccine, and we have the occasional immunocompromised person whose immune system also couldn’t respond optimally to the vaccine,” Schaffner told CNN.
So, to put it simply, Schaffner said: “So the unvaccinated continue to be the big highway of transmission. The vaccinated, they’re little side streets. Let’s not get preoccupied with that. We need to get more people vaccinated.”
Do fully vaccinated people die from COVID-19?
It has happened, but it’s rare. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 99.999% of fully vaccinated Americans did not have a breakthrough COVID-19 case that led to hospitalization or death.
- There were 6,587 COVID-19 breakthrough cases among 163 million fully vaccinated, as I wrote for the Deseret News. In those cases, 6,239 cases led to hospitalization, and 1,263 led to death.
Should fully vaccinated people wear masks?
The delta variant has changed the game when it comes to the spread of the coronavirus. Dr. Todd Vento, an infectious diseases doctor at Intermountain Healthcare, told the Deseret News that the contagious variant makes it important for people to wear masks — regardless of their vaccination status.
- “It doesn’t take the place of common sense. It doesn’t take the place of masks and social distancing, We still have to do those. We have to do those even more now because we’ve got a much more aggressive virus that goes between people much more easily. Masks do work to prevent that,” Vento said.