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When Christie Griffith started feeling sick a few weeks ago, she assumed it couldn’t be the coronavirus. As a nurse at Sandy’s Alta View Hospital, she had been vaccinated in January.
But then her husband, who had only received his first injection and was also feeling sick, noticed that he couldn’t smell a stick of gum. She couldn’t feel it either.
Sure enough, the next morning she tested positive for COVID-19.
Griffith is one of 96 Utahns who contracted the virus after being fully vaccinated – defined as more than two weeks after their last doses.
“We call these ‘revolutionary cases’,” said Tom Hudachko, spokesman for the Utah Department of Health. “… With 521,686 people fully vaccinated as of Thursday, only 96 cases of rupture indicate that the COVID-19 vaccine is extremely effective.”
The Pfizer vaccine, which Griffith received, is 95% effective in preventing COVID-19, while Moderna was 94.1% effective in trials, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Federal researchers confirmed the effectiveness of the vaccines this week, with follow-up studies showing the vaccines to be around 90% effective.
“The Pfizer vaccine is very effective, but it is not 100% effective; everyone knows that, ”Griffith’s husband Bryan said. “So someone has to get sick after getting a vaccine. Someone has to be the remaining 5%. I don’t know if we had a supervariant or just bad luck or whatever.
Cases of rupture remain rare. Out of 1 million fully vaccinated people in Washington state, for example, epidemiologists have found evidence of 102 breakthrough cases since Feb.1, the state’s health department said on March 30. A week earlier, researchers reported two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine which showed that a handful of health workers were infected after vaccination, out of thousands followed and tested.
The question of variants
Griffith’s sample undergoes genomic sequencing to find out if she has contracted a variant of the virus. Any patient whose “breakthrough” case has been identified with a PCR test – as opposed to a rapid antigen test – has a sample taken for genomic sequencing, said Ilene Risk, an epidemiologist with the Salt County Department of Health. Lake.
So far, only two of Utah’s groundbreaking 96 cases have been confirmed to be a variant strain of the virus, Hudachko said. But these are the only two for which genomic sequencing has been completed; 39 samples were still pending at the lab Thursday, and the remaining 55 were antigen tests that cannot be sequenced.
Risk noted that lab work is still pending for Salt Lake County’s 11 known breakthrough cases.
“It takes a little while at the state lab,” Risk said, “because they also sequence random samples, hospitalized cases, the ones we suspect are variants, as well as other groundbreaking cases.”
In total, about 3% of Utah’s positive cases are in the process of being sequenced. Over the past four weeks, the so-called UK variant – B.1.1.7 – has accounted for around 2.6% of all samples sequenced, Hudachko said. However, this is due to a relatively small number of samples.
“The only thing we know is that the number of variants we detect is increasing,” said Hudachko. “This means that the variants are spreading throughout Utah, particularly B.1.1.7.”
But it is not known whether any of the variants are more likely to escape the protections of the vaccine. Instead, vaccines may simply activate a less potent immune response in some people than in others.
“There is a lot of heterogeneity with the antibody response with this vaccine,” Risk said.
‘Like … a cool head’
Although she was baffled that she tested positive after being vaccinated, Griffith said it was impossible to say how much sicker she could have been without the vaccine.
“I’m sure it probably made my symptoms less severe,” she says. “I just felt like I had a cool head.”
The majority of Washington state residents who had confirmed cases of the pierced coronavirus had only mild symptoms, if any, state health officials said.
While officials in Utah don’t consider an infection to be a “breakthrough” case if the patient has only received one of two doses of the vaccine, partially vaccinated people enjoy some protection – and the county of Salt Lake is monitoring the immunization history of hospitalized patients. , noting where they got at least one shot.
As of Monday, 43 Salt Lake County patients had been hospitalized with symptoms possibly due to COVID-19, even though they had received a dose of the vaccine, Risk said.
However, while these patients had tested positive for COVID, health officials had not ruled out other possible reasons for hospitalization in these 43 cases. And none of them were fully vaccinated.
For Griffith, protection from serious illness for those who are fully vaccinated means she can envision a time when COVID-19 is not considered more threatening than the symptoms of the head cold she has had for about. a week in March – although some people still suffer from this.
“I have to believe that the scientists who worked so hard to let us know know what they are doing,” Griffith said. “I would always encourage people to get it.”
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