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First, the bad news: Fully vaccinated people can spread the Delta variant just as easily as those who are not, according to an internal presentation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention obtained by The Washington Post.
A graphic in the presentation suggests that each person infected with Delta can transmit the coronavirus to between five and 9.5 others, on average, making it more transmissible than the viruses that cause Ebola, colds and smallpox – and about that too transmissible as chickenpox.
But there is also a lot of positive news in the document, according to Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health.
“I find the slides insightful and largely reassuring,” Jha wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
He pointed to data showing that only 35,000 of the 162 million vaccinated Americans develop symptomatic cases of COVID-19 per week – a rate of just 0.02%.
That number is probably a little too low, Jha said. The CDC stopped tracking asymptomatic, mild, or moderate breakthrough cases nationally in May, which limited its data. Jha therefore estimated that the figure could be closer to 300,000 breakthrough cases per week, or 19%.
Yet, given that half of Americans are fully vaccinated, Jha said, that would mean that the current US injections protect about 88% against COVID-19 and are over 90% effective against severe infection.
This is consistent with data from other countries: Studies in England and Scotland indicate that Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine reduces the risk of symptomatic Delta infection by 88%, compared to 95% for the original strain. The vaccine also reduces the risk of any type of Delta infection by 79% and Delta hospitalization by 96%, according to the studies.
In addition, a pending Canadian peer review study found that after the two doses of Pfizer, the risk of symptomatic Delta infection drops by 87% and the risk of hospitalization or death from Delta drops by 100. %.
Data from the Israeli Ministry of Health, however, suggests somewhat less protection: 64% against Delta infection (asymptomatic or symptomatic) and 93% against severe illness or hospitalization of Delta.
The bottom line, according to Jha, is that Delta is “really bad”, but: “Our vaccines are good. Like really good.”
“Revolutionary infections are occurring,” he said wrote. “Sometimes they can spread to others. But if enough people get vaccinated, the pandemic is over.”
The CDC estimated last week that unvaccinated people account for about 97% of hospitalized COVID-19 cases in the United States. The agency’s leaked presentation also shows that vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization or death by 25 times.
Delta led CDC to recommend masks again amid overdue vaccinations
It’s hard to say how many Americans need to get vaccinated to force the coronavirus to circulate at low levels instead of rising dramatically.
Dr Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California at San Francisco, recently told Insider that trends in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations may no longer be closely linked once 75% of the population is will have received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only 57% of the US population has received at least one dose so far, but the vaccination rate continues to decline nationwide. The number of daily vaccinations in the United States has declined by 25%, on average, over the past month, from 573,000 to 431,000 per day. However, states like Arkansas and Louisiana have recently seen their vaccination rates increase slightly.
Given the transmissibility of the Delta variant, the CDC recommended on Tuesday that fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors “in areas of high and high transmission.” That makes up about 70% of US counties right now.
Yet “the vast majority of transmission, the vast majority of serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said on Tuesday.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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