The Minnesota Department of Health said this week that 89 people tested positive for COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated — but officials aren’t overly worried about that number.
What is happening in Minnesota with COVID-19?
The department revealed this week that 89 people tested positive for COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated against the virus.
- Per KARE11, “a small number” of those cases required hospitalization.
Officials said the number may sound alarming. But, the officials said, more than 800,000 people in Minnesota have received full vaccination against COVID-19. So that number testing positive is rather small.
- “That’s well below one-tenth of 1%, an incredibly small number of cases,” Kris Ehresmann, the department’s infectious disease director, told KARE11.
Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn, an internal medicine doctor with Hennepin Healthcare, said no vaccine can provide 100% immunity. The efficacy, she said, is based on every individual's immune system.
- “Some people may not mount enough of a response to the vaccine so that they have that full level of protection that they can fight off this virus without any symptoms at all,” said Lichtsinn.
- She added, “We don’t know yet enough about if there are specific risk factors that make one person more likely than another to have a good response to this vaccine.”
Can you get COVID-19 if you’re vaccinated?
More research continues to appear about how the novel coronavirus can still infect people who have been vaccinated.
- A study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and another one other from the health systems at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that some health care workers were testing positive despite being fully vaccinated.
Experts told The New York Times that all of this data should encourage people to wear masks and keep social distancing since COVID-19 can still get you — even with a vaccine.
- “We felt really strongly that this data should not lead people to say, ‘Let’s all get vaccinated and then we can all stop wearing masks,’” Dr. Francesca Torriani, an infectious disease specialist at U.C. San Diego Health, told The New York Times. “These measures have to continue until a larger segment of the population is vaccinated.”