By Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
After an outbreak of coronavirus was reported this week among vaccinated persons in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the CDC recommended that vaccinated persons resume wearing facemasks indoors, especially in high-infection 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 vaccinated people, almost all symptoms are mild. That means only one thing, 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 conducted by Ethnic Media Services. First, he said, "it is 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 for preventing hospitalizations and deaths from serious illness.
"That was really the promise of vaccines," the expert stressed. "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 or memory cells, which produce the antibodies so that the infection does not enter through the nose, to act correctly and that is why only mild symptoms are produced.
"And because of that, the CDC recommendation ? Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? in areas of high school children, or where the virus is latent, is to wear masks indoors, even among vaccinated people. It is very reasonable because all this prevents vaccinated people from contracting mild infections," he emphasized.
A third important aspect learned was that it cannot be concluded that vaccinated persons have the same probability of transmission as unvaccinated persons.
The above, he said, since the results of the outbreak were based on what is called Cycle Threshold (CT), which indicates the amount of virus harbored by an infected person, or a PCR test, although culture tests have not yet been done.
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 and because the Delta variant is highly transmissible, it is very prudent for those vaccinated to wear masks indoors," he stressed.
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