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By Aradhana Aravindan and Chen Lin
SINGAPORE, July 23 (Reuters) – Vaccinated people accounted for three quarters of COVID-19 infections in Singapore over the past four weeks, but they were not becoming seriously ill, according to government data, as vaccinations accelerated rapidly leaves fewer people unvaccinated.
While the data shows that vaccines are very effective in preventing severe cases, it also highlights the risk that even inoculated ones can be contagious, so inoculation alone may not be enough to stop transmission.
Of the 1,096 locally transmitted infections in Singapore over the past 28 days, 484, or about 44%, were in people who were fully vaccinated, while 30% were partially vaccinated and just over 25% were unvaccinated, according to the report. data from Thursday.
While seven cases of serious illness required oxygen and another was in critical condition in intensive care, none of the eight had been fully immunized, the health ministry said.
“There is continuing evidence that vaccination helps prevent serious illness when a person is infected,” the ministry said, adding that all fully vaccinated and infected people have had no symptoms, or only mild symptoms.
Infections in people who have been vaccinated do not mean the vaccines are ineffective, the experts said.
“As more and more people are vaccinated in Singapore, we will see more infections occurring among those vaccinated,” Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore ( NUS).
“It is important to always compare this to the proportion of people who remain unvaccinated … Suppose Singapore reaches a rate of 100% fully vaccinated … then all infections will come from those who are vaccinated and none from the unvaccinated.”
Singapore has already vaccinated nearly 75% of its 5.7 million people, the second in the world after the United Arab Emirates, according to a Reuters tracker, and half of its population is fully vaccinated.
As countries with advanced vaccination campaigns prepare to live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease, they are focusing on preventing death and serious illness through vaccination.
But they wonder how to differentiate public health policies, such as the wearing of masks, between those who are vaccinated and those who are not.
Singapore and Israel, for example, recently reinstated some restrictions to tackle an increase in infections caused by the highly contagious Delta variant, while England lifted almost all restrictions this week, despite a high number of cases.
“We have to accept that we all have to have restrictions, vaccinated or unvaccinated,” said Peter Collignon, infectious disease doctor and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital in the Australian capital.
“It’s just that the restrictions are likely to be higher for unvaccinated people than for vaccinated people, but that can still mean they have mask warrants inside, for example.”
Data from Singapore also showed that infections in the past 14 days among vaccinated people over 61 years of age were around 88%, more than the figure of just over 70% for the group of vaccinees. younger.
Linfa Wang, a professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, said older people have weaker immune responses when vaccinated.
In Israel, which also has a high vaccination rate, about half of the 46 patients hospitalized in serious condition in early July had been vaccinated, and the majority were from risk groups, authorities said.
It was not immediately clear whether data from Singapore reflected the reduced protection offered by vaccines against the Delta variant, the most common form in the wealthy city-state in recent months.
Two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca are almost as effective against Delta as against the previously dominant Alpha variant, according to a study published this week.
Singapore uses Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in its national immunization program.
Friday’s 130 new locally transmitted infections were below this week’s 11-month high. The recent increase in cases has prompted authorities to restrict social gatherings in an attempt to boost vaccinations, especially among the elderly.
(Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan and Chen Lin in Singapore; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez)
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