[ad_1]
A week after crowds descended on Provincetown, Massachusetts, to celebrate July 4 – the holiday President Joe Biden hoped to mark the country’s liberation from COVID-19 – the director of the resort town of Cape Cod said that he was aware of “a handful of positive COVID cases among people” who spent time there.
“We are in contact with the Department of Health and Outer Cape Health Services and are closely monitoring the data,” Alex Morse told reporters.
The announcement was not unusual, with around half of the country still unvaccinated and outbreaks of the virus appearing in various states.
But within weeks, health officials appeared to be on to something much bigger. The epidemic quickly reached hundreds and most of them appeared to be vaccinated.
MORE: Vast Majority of ICU Patients With COVID-19 Unvaccinated, ABC News Survey Says
As of Thursday, 882 people were linked to the Provincetown outbreak. Of those living in Massachusetts, 74% were fully immune, but officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms. Seven people were hospitalized.
The initial results of the survey conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared to have huge implications.
Before Provincetown, health officials assumed that it was extremely rare for a vaccinated person to be infected with the virus. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t end up passing it on to others, like children too young to qualify for the vaccine or medically vulnerable people.
The idea that vaccines would stop the transmission of the virus was largely behind the CDC’s decision in May suggesting that vaccinated people could safely go out without their masks indoors and in crowds, even though others were not vaccinated.
MORE: Biden To Promote Incentives For Vaccines And Announce Requirements For Federal Workers
But that hypothesis was based on studies of earlier versions of the virus. Delta was known for its “hyper-transmissibility”, or as a former White House adviser put it “COVID on steroids”.
“What has changed is the virus,” said Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to Biden.
When a vaccinated person becomes infected with the delta – called a ‘breakthrough infection’ – “the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant,” Fauci said in an interview with MSNBC Wednesday.
Everything now indicates that the investigation into the Provincetown outbreak is part of the new evidence behind the CDC’s decision to ask Americans to put their masks back inside, even if they are vaccinated.
“In recent days, I have seen new scientific data from recent outbreak investigations showing that the delta variant behaves uniquely differently from past strains of the virus that cause COVID 19,” the director of the COVID 19 said on Tuesday. CDC, Rochelle Walensky, in announcing the new recommendations.
“Information on the delta variants from several states and other countries indicates that on rare occasions some vaccinated people infected with a delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and transmit the virus to others,” a- she added. “This new science is disturbing and unfortunately deserves an update of our recommendation.”
MORE: CDC calls for a return of masks for vaccinated Americans in some places, schools
When asked to release the new evidence, the CDC said more details would be released on Friday.
But Walensky hinted that the main driver was new unpublished research into a person’s “viral load” – the amount of virus in a person’s nasal passages – being significantly elevated even after being vaccinated with a vaccine. authorized in the United States.
“What we’ve learned… is that when we look at rare or breakthrough infections and look at the amount of virus in those people, it’s pretty similar to the amount of virus in unvaccinated people,” a- she declared.
Without such evidence being released, this week’s announcement of the mask sparked strong reluctance among many conservatives, including GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy, who claimed the CDC’s decision was based solely on Indian research that had not been peer reviewed.
But this claim is misleading. The CDC indeed cites Indian research on viral loads as adding to global concerns about post-vaccination transmission. The agency, however, also clarifies that further research and additional studies were underway. And at no point does the CDC cite research in India as the sole rationale for its new mask guidelines.
“These early data suggest that revolutionary delta infections are transmissible,” the CDC said of the research in India. “The unpublished data is consistent with this, and further data collection and studies are underway to understand the level and duration of transmissibility of breakthrough infections from the delta vaccine in the United States and other settings.” , wrote the CDC in a science note posted online.
McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the misleading allegation, which was echoed by other Republicans on Twitter.
“Remember what I said about public health officials who lost our trust? ” tweeted Texas GOP representative. Dan Crenshaw.
Benjamin Siegel of ABC News and Dr John Brownstein, epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and contributor to ABC News, contributed to this report.
The CDC’s mask decision follows astonishing findings from the Cape Cod beach outbreak, which initially appeared on abcnews.go.com
[ad_2]
Source link