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MIAMI VALLEY – As Ohio accounts for 2% of its COVID-19 hospitalizations involving fully vaccinated people in 2021, new data from a local health care provider may provide insight into why the federal government is pushing for booster shots for most Americans.
Data from Reid Health showed the healthcare provider had 38 people active in their hospitals on Sunday with COVID-19 and eight of those patients were vaccinated. Data shows 21% of their COVID-19 breakthrough rate for cases. In the past two months, Reid Health has reported that about 10 percent of its cases are considered breakthrough cases.
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A breakthrough case is defined as a patient who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and who tests positive for the virus.
“Vaccinated cases are generally less sick. The sickest patients are almost all middle aged, overweight, diabetic and unvaccinated. So vaccination confers protection, ”said Dr. Thomas Huth, vice president of medical affairs at Reid Health. “It’s just that lower antibody levels combined with a highly contagious Delta variant means more breakthrough cases. Booster shots for those most at risk will be helpful as studies show they cause a greater increase in antibodies than the original vaccinations. “
News Center 7 asked Premier Health, Kettering Health, Mercy Health and Dayton Children’s Hospital for the same data, but the four hospital systems were unable to provide specific numbers and were referred to the coronavirus dashboard of the Ohio Department of Health.
The state dashboard does not provide a daily breakdown of breakthrough cases by hospital system, but provides breakthrough cases since the start of the year.
In Ohio, 20,156 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2021 and of those 407 were fully vaccinated, according to the Ohio Department of Health. This represents about two percent of the state’s hospitalizations this year being considered a breakthrough case.
One percent of COVID-19 deaths reported in Ohio in 2021 were in fully vaccinated people, according to data from the Ohio Department of Health.
Ohio Director of Health Dr Bruce Vanderhoff said the initial job of vaccines was to prevent severe and fatal cases of COVID-19.
“The protection against serious illness and death, which vaccines continue to offer in a very robust way, was actually the original goal of these vaccines,” Vanderhoff said last week.
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“Respiratory virus vaccines rarely protect against mild to moderate infections as well as against serious illnesses, as they are much better at inducing immunity in the lungs than in the nose, where respiratory viruses infect first. our body, ”Vanderhoff said. “While immunity to more moderate infection may begin to wane, our protection against serious illness and death is much more likely to last.”
President Joe Biden has said coronavirus booster shots will be available from the week of September 20, pending FDA approval.
The injections will be free and will be provided to people eight months after receiving their second vaccine injection, the president said.
Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they had submitted initial data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that a booster dose of the vaccine developed by the companies “could help maintain a high level of protection against COVID-19.”
In a press release, company officials recommended that a booster dose be given to people vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine six to 12 months after receiving their second dose. As evidence, they pointed to preliminary data released last month which showed that when tested against the delta variant, a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine produced neutralizing antibody titers that were up to 11 times stronger in humans than after a second dose of vaccine.
The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention has previously recommended that people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised receive an additional dose of the vaccine if they have received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.
Officials said recommendations for those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine were not immediately available due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
© 2021 Cox Media Group
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