By Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
After an outbreak of coronavirus was reported this week among vaccinated people in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the CDC recommended that vaccinated people resume wearing facemasks indoors, especially in high-contagion settings, because, it said, new evidence shows that new COVID-19 infections are also transmissible among the unvaccinated, albeit with mild symptoms.
The big difference among all the vaccinated people, almost all of the symptoms are mild. That means only one thing -- the COVID-19 vaccines work!" said Monica Gandhi, M.D., professor of medicine and associate chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
"There are three lessons we can learn from this," Dr. Gandhi said during a briefing held by Ethnic Media Services. First, he said, "it's important to say that the COVID-19 vaccines work. Of the more than 800 people vaccinated who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 - in Provincetown - there were only three hospitalizations and no deaths. This is an amazingly effective vaccine in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from severe disease.
"That was really the promise of vaccines," she said. "It was always the reason we designed vaccines. Otherwise, you wouldn't have designed a vaccine against something that didn't cause death."
He also explained that the second point learned from the outbreak is that the Delta variant is highly transmissible and has high viral loads, which is why a person already vaccinated can become infected because there is no time for the B cells or memory cells, which produce antibodies to prevent the infection from entering through the nose, to act properly and therefore only produce mild symptoms.
"And because of that, the recommendation from the CDC - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - in areas of high school children, or where the virus is latent, is to wear facemasks indoors, even among vaccinated people. It's very reasonable because all this prevents vaccinated people from getting mild infections," he said.
A third important aspect that was learned was that it cannot be concluded that vaccinated people have the same probability of transmission as unvaccinated people.
This, he said, since the results of the outbreak were based on what is called Cycle Threshold (CT), which indicates the amount of virus an infected person harbors, or a PCR test, although no culture tests have been done yet.
And "presumably, what's going to happen is that a vaccinated person is going to fight off the virus and therefore is not as contagious."
"These vaccines still work. They work. But for now, because the Delta variant is highly transmissible, it is very prudent for those vaccinated to wear masks indoors," he said.
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