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A growing number of people fully vaccinated in Maine with COVID-19 are filling intensive care beds statewide. Yet those numbers are more representative of Maine’s high vaccination rate than the vaccine’s ineffectiveness, according to health officials.
About 30% of people with coronavirus treated in intensive care at 10 Northern Light hospitals were vaccinated on Tuesday morning. Four out of 13 patients on ventilators were also vaccinated, or about 30%.
While declining immunity may play a role, the far more important reason for the number of vaccinated patients appears to be the digital reality of Maine’s high vaccination rate, said Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Disease Control on Wednesday. Prevention. Maine has the third highest rate of fully vaccinated people in the country, a factor that no doubt leads to more vaccinated people being hospitalized.
“It’s a rather insidious and somewhat macabre by-product of the fact that we are really vaccinated,” Shah said.
While the numbers are proof of Maine’s successful vaccination efforts relative to other states, they could provide a boost to state health officials as they encourage those newly eligible to get vaccinated against COVID. -19.
These shots were approved by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for at-risk groups last week. Many groups newly eligible for the recall, including people over 65 and adults with underlying health conditions, are the most likely to be hospitalized due to a breakthrough case of COVID- 19.
From August 27 to September 24, about 30% of new hospitalizations for coronavirus in Maine (48 of 159) were in vaccinated patients, according to data from the Maine CDC. About 0.1 percent of those vaccinated were infected with the virus during this time, compared with 2.3 percent of those who were not fully vaccinated.
About 920,000 Mainers have received at least one dose of the vaccine, far exceeding those eligible who do not have one or those under 12 who are not eligible for the vaccine (425,000). As the number of people vaccinated in Maine has increased, they are more likely to show up in intensive care data, Shah said.
However, Shah said it was possible that “waning immunity” could play a role as well, especially for those who already have pre-existing health issues. He said this could show the potential usefulness of booster shots and additional vaccine doses, of which 16,520 have been administered statewide.
Dr James Jarvis, COVID-19 senior physician at Northern Light Health, noted that the vast majority of hospitalizations in the hospital system were still unvaccinated people.
“The vaccine is still clearly our best way out of this pandemic,” Jarvis said.
Even as he begins to further examine the idea of lowering immunity to vaccines and the use of booster vaccines, Shah said the Maine CDC continues to focus on administering the first. doses to the 265,000 eligible people across the state who had not yet received a single dose as of Wednesday.
“If people don’t go out and get vaccinated, especially in the short term, we’re going to continue to see areas of the state with very high transmission rates,” Shah said.
BDN writer Jessica Piper contributed to this report.
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