Photo: Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images The term itself, perhaps, is a problem. “Breakthrough” sounds bad — implying an immune-escape mutation, likely rare, and therefore alarming.
“The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told me in the long interview that follows below. “If this was still Alpha, sure. But with Delta, plenty of people are getting sick. Plenty of transmission is going on.
Unfortunately, more accurate month-to-month data is hard to assemble — because the CDC stopped tracking most breakthrough cases in early May, before the Delta wave had begun, and the states maintaining their own databases often update them irregularly and, in some cases, according to idiosyncratic logic — but over the last week, I’ve tried. And while several states show prevalence rates roughly in line with Kaiser’s ballpark one percent estimate , in others the patterns were divergent.
The vaccine effect is considerably more encouraging when it comes to the risk of severe disease and hospitalization on those 50 percent of the country — and 61 percent of adults — who have gotten the shots. According to Kaiser, the hospitalization rate for vaccinated people is, for most states, at or just below 0.01 percent — meaning one out of every 10,000 vaccinated people has been hospitalized. Over the past year, the hospitalization rate for the country as a whole is about 0.7 percent.
Yes. And that’s exactly right. Breakthrough cases are real. It’s no longer what we were talking about when we talked about the Yankees outbreak. And I think what we’re seeing is that viral loads can get very high with Delta. They could actually get high with some of the other variants too, actually. It’s worth mentioning, We are seeing some new data that shows that clearance of the virus from the body is faster, too —Well, that’s how it’s being interpreted. But at the end of the day, I’d be willing to bet that almost all transmission happens when people are at their peak viral load.
dwallacewells michaelmina_lab really undermines the case for limiting civil rights if you can't even communicate effectively even with mass censorship