I did some digging, and guess what. 75% of the vaccinated Providencetown hospitalized breakthrough cases were people who had the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, and 25% Pfizer according to a document from the CDC. (but the majority who tested positive and didn’t get hospitalized had Pfizer). I hope they continue to keep tabs on these stats.
Israel’s showing that Pfizer is declining in terms of prolonged protection, so I don’t think it’s necessarily about which vaccine you get, although I do believe that mRNA vaccines are a superior technology.
This is a fluid situation, but all the anecdotal data I’m seeing so far is that the breakthrough hot spots have occurred where vaccinated people have had repeated or prolonged contact with an infected person. I could be way wrong on this, but so far I’ve not heard of a case in which a vaccinated person got it while pumping gas or going in and out of the supermarket. It’s almost always instances in which there are large groups of people, perhaps thinking that since they are vaccinated they can let their guard down, so they probably don’t wear masks and don’t social distance, thereby repeatedly exposing themselves to infected people
The possible implications?
If you’re thinking of large gatherings, reconsider it. If you’re thinking of having repeated maskless contact indoors with groups of people, including your friends or family, rethink that. If you have to go to work, urge your employer to establish a mandatory mask policy, and ideally, a vaccinated policy.
If we’re just spitballing, I think there are multiple factors for breakthrough infections, including:
How long since vaccination
How long between shots if 2-shot vaccine
Density of virus in environment exposed to
How long was the exposure
Masked/unmasked
Strength of immune system
Probably more factors
One more big one: Age of the infected person.
I found this in your link:
Vaccine products received by persons experiencing breakthrough infections were Pfizer-BioNTech (159; 46%), Moderna (131; 38%), and Janssen (56; 16%); among fully vaccinated persons in the Massachusetts general population, 56% had received Pfizer-BioNTech, 38% had received Moderna, and 7% had received Janssen vaccine products.
I didn’t see where it said what vaccines the hospitalized patients had, only:
Five were hospitalized; as of July 27, no deaths were reported. One hospitalized patient (age range = 50–59 years) was not vaccinated and had multiple underlying medical conditions.†† Four additional, fully vaccinated patients§§ aged 20–70 years were also hospitalized, two of whom had underlying medical conditions.
I find it a little odd that they compare the vaccination status of those infected to that of the state as a whole. It’s true that Provincetown (the town where this outbreak took place) is a vacation destination, but the report said that
Nearly one half (199; 42%) reported residence in the town in Barnstable County.
And Provincetown has MUCH higher vaccination rates that the state as a whole. How much higher is a little hard to judge, since their official stats show a rate of 115%, apparently due to a mismatch between summer residents and census-bureau residence numbers. Still, it seems likely that the vaccination rate is higher than the 69% for the state overall.
Also, Provincetown has a large gay community (and given that the outbreak was 85% male, and “demographics of cases likely reflect those of attendees at the public gatherings, as events were marketed to adult male participants”, I suspect it mostly hit that community) I bet that community is vaccinated at a higher rate than the 69% of the state overall.
I think the focus of that paper is that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections carried enough virus to be contagious, not anything about the effectiveness of vaccines to prevent infection, and especially not comparing the relative efficacy of the vaccines.
In another COVID thread here, I posted about my future son-in-law’s cousin who was seriously ill this past winter. He was hospitalized for months, many miles from home, his long term girlfriend ghosted him when he was in a coma, multiple surgeries, on ECMO, more than once it was thought he was not going to make it.
He tried to commit suicide this past Friday. Between long COVID problems and mental health issues that came with everything, he was done. Luckily, he was found.
Yet, do you think future son-in-law’s family will get vaccinated? An Auntie and Uncle were recently diagnosed positive. FSIL’s brother and his girlfriend have it. Some are facing job loss at Mayo. But it’s not real.
It’s towards the bottom “One vaccinated, hospitalized COVID-19 patient had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and three had received the Janssen vaccine.” Somewhere else it notes the 5th person wasn’t vaccinated.
I quoted the part that said one of the 5 hospitalized wasn’t vaccinated.
<ThelmaLou shakes head in disbelief>
And yet, I do believe it.
Abbott needs to go!
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Judge [Nelson] Wolff expressed frustration over Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order which prevents mask mandates in Texas and can potentially remove anyone serving in public office while also fining them.“The only person who needs to be removed from office is the governor,” Wolff said.
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The ‘You can get COVID from gas pumps’ thing is going around again. It’s the ‘Delta variant’ of the original one that came out… What? A year ago? One of my coworkers sent a text this morning, saying her daughter who is a nurse who works in a hospital warned her to use gloves or a towel when pumping gas, and to wash her hands.
Here’s an article rebutting the message:
Is Delta Variant Spreading Through Gas / Petrol Pumps? | Tech ARP
(No, I’m not going to tell her. I think people should sanitise their hands after touching high-use things even if there isn’t much of a chance to get the virus. And I’ve always been a big fan of hand-washing.)
Infection control by following arbitrary rules is the role of nurses. It’s what they are trained and paid for. It’s not only what I’d expect a nurse to say: it’s what nurses are supposed to say. When the (doctor) says “that’s not important”, the nurse says “that’s hospital protocol, and if you don’t follow it, I’ll be reporting to my supervisor, who will be complaining to your department head”.
I believe it was Michigan’s governor who, in one her earlier press conferences, mentioned someone who had come down with COVID said that the only thing they had touched was the handle of a gas pump.
Someone should send this to her:
As I said, it was in an press conference during the early months of the pandemic. (Rats: I can’t find a cite. My apologies if I was confusing something the governor said with some other early news report.)
From the Daily Kos, granted, not the most scientific of sources (waaaay too leftie, amirite?), but this chart is an eye-opener.
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Epidemiologists have now determined that COVID delta is more contagious than were childhood viruses like chickenpox in the 1950s. I was a young child in the days before chickenpox vaccines, and when the virus arrived locally it tore through communities like wildfire. If you didn’t get it in kindergarten you got it in grade 1 or maybe grade 2.Nobody made it to grade five without getting chickenpox and its three sisters: mumps, measles and German measles. It was a rite of passage and the four of them were known, with good reason, as universal childhood diseases. (Adults were immune as a result of their own childhood encounters with these self-immunizing diseases.)
Epidemiologists are now starting to point out that delta COVID has the “transmission power” to spread like the universal childhood diseases in the 1950’s – the bug is aggressive enough that it will spread to every niche of the community, finding and infecting virtually everyone who is not vaccinated (and some that are). If that sounds far-fetched – just look at the numbers in the table above.
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This brings something I’ve been wondering about for a few weeks to mind again. When it comes to spawning new variants, is it better or worse for all the unvaccinated people to catch covid rapidly? I mean, if 4 billion people are going to catch it eventually, will there be more new variants if it happens quickly, or fewer than if that level of infection takes a long time?
My gut says that we’re better off in the long run if they all get it within the next several weeks than it continue to drag out for a year or more because needlessly protracted time is an important factor to variant creation, but I have an English degree so what does my gut know.
My gut says that the metric that matters is “how often does the virus reproduce itself”, with maybe a second order effect “in how many different people”. And that calendar time doesn’t matter one way or the other.
My degree is in math, but I read a lot of science and medical stuff.
“We” might be, but the hospitals and staff won’t be. More and more of them are starting to quit because they literally cannot anymore, especially when most of their patients could have avoided the infection by being vaccinated and a significant percentage are still claiming it’s a hoax, demanding miracle cures, accusing staff of misdiagnosis and incorrect treatments and, in some cases, spitting on the people trying to help them.
Medical resources were stretched thin before the pandemic. I shudder to think what it will be like when, or maybe if, we ever get out of it.
The virus mutates with each new infection. If it mutates faster than vaccines can effectively immunize the entire population, it’s very possible that we’ll end up with worse variants. It’s also possible we end up with a variant that is highly transmissible but either because we’ve already got some immunity or because the virus just becomes less lethal, it could in fact be a relatively benign variant. Some have hypothesized that this is what happened with the 1918 flu.