'We are failing one another:' USA Today front page implores people to pay attention to COVID surge.
As coronavirus cases rise rapidly again, the fight against the pandemic is focused on an estimated 93 million people who are unvaccinated. They largely fall into two groups: those who are vehemently opposed to the idea, and a second group that is still deciding, according to surveys. Health officials are making progress in inoculating this second group, but those who are firmly opposed to the vaccines outnumber them by two-to-one. Understanding what might persuade them to change their minds will be crucial to fighting the highly contagious Delta variant which is now responsible for 93.4% of the current COVID-19 cases according to the CDC.
By the Numbers: The U.S. is now averaging 100,000 new COVID-19 infections a day, returning to a milestone last seen during the winter surge. In the U.S., the U.S. has had more than 35.7 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 616,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Studies show that the Delta variant is the fastest, fittest and most formidable version of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19. It is roughly 50 per cent more contagious than the Alpha variant first found in Britain, which in turn was about 50 per cent more contagious than the original strain detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. It has also proven more potent than its predecessors, capable of infecting fully vaccinated people. Still, such individuals - even if infected with Covid-19 - remain far less likely than those who are unvaccinated to fall severely ill, require hospital care, or die from any known variant of the coronavirus.
Unvaccinated People Twice as Likely to be Reinfected: FACTS: 1 in 349 vaccinated people were infected with Covid, compared to 1 in 16 unvaccinated people. Of those infected with Covid, unvaccinated people were 16 times more likely to need hospitalization. 1 in 11,828 vaccinated people required hospitalization, compared to 1 in 708 unvaccinated people. And unvaccinated people who were hospitalized were 35 times more likely to die. 1 in 165,592 vaccinated people died of Covid, compared to 1 in 4,632 unvaccinated people. According to a study published by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday, August 6, those who have recovered from COVID-19 but have not been vaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to get re-infected as compared to those who were fully vaccinated.
Is the Delta Variant Hitting Kids Harder? The number of kids contracting the coronavirus is rising. In the week that ended with July 29, more than 70,000 children got COVID-19, representing nearly a fifth of all cases. A relatively small number of children have died of the COVID—358 since the start of the pandemic. The tracking numbers show that the rate of pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations is about the same as it has been for earlier variants, varying between 0.1% and 1.9% depending on the state.
But the Delta variant is proving just as infectious for children as for everyone else, with pediatric cases surging in some parts of the United States. However, it's not clear yet whether the variant is any harsher on kids compared to earlier COVID-19 strains. Child cases of COVID-19 steadily increased throughout July, as Delta became the dominant strain in the United States, according to tracking data kept by the Children's Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The AAP says that "at this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children."
Kids spend the majority of their time around adults, and existing contact-tracing data suggest that adults are the ones getting kids sick. “There is with Delta, we think, a reasonably high household attack rate, meaning that one person in the household gets sick and other people are at risk of getting sick,” says Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
The infectiousness of the Delta variant has meant that more kids are catching the virus, said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
That's compounded by the fact that kids younger than 12 still don't have a vaccine approved for them, while a majority of older folks now are vaccine-protected against severe COVID, says Dr. Emanuel. Dr. Kristin Oliver, an assistant professor of pediatrics with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City says "If you're looking just at the straight numbers, even if it's not more severe, as you get more infections, you're going to get more kids hospitalized and unfortunately more kids die."
The solution to parents’ worries about their children is universal vaccination, which creates rings of protection around kids.
Vaccines and pregnancy: Pregnant women are having "really good outcomes" after having their COVID-19 vaccinations, so it "makes sense" for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to urge expectant mothers to get their shots, says Dr. Ashish Jha. the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health
"I've been tracking this data pretty closely," said Dr. Jha. "First and foremost, pregnant women if they get COVID, have about six times the risk of having a really bad outcome, so we know COVID is really, really bad ... even though obviously pregnant women tend to be young, healthy people."
The CDC on Wednesday urged all pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine, as hospitals in the nation's hotspots are seeing record numbers of unvaccinated mothers-to-be becoming seriously ill with the virus and in some cases losing their babies.
Vaccinated people with breakthrough Infections: Vaccinated people are less likely to get infected. Breakthrough infections despite the media hype represent less than 1% (0.098%) of the current Delta infections. This equates to 1.6 million people of the 165 million fully vaccinated people (50%) to date. If you don’t get infected, you can’t spread COVID-19 to others. Initially, infected vaccinated and unvaccinated people may be similarly contagious for a short period, vaccinated people clear the virus much more quickly, making them less contagious overall. And among vaccinated people, “we haven’t seen studies that show asymptomatic transmission, even with the Delta variant, to others, although symptomatic transmission is clearly occurring,” says Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco. “Every time somebody gets vaccinated, everybody around them becomes a little more protected,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
In a study published Friday in JAMA researchers reported just one vaccine dose gives the previously infected individuals a dramatic boost in virus-fighting immune cells, more than people who have never been infected get from two shots.
Other recent studies published in Science and Nature show the combination of a prior infection and vaccination also broadens the strength of people's immunity against a changing virus. It's what virologist Shane Crotty of California's La Jolla Institute for Immunology calls “hybrid immunity.”
Are The Vaccines Are Still Working: It’s worth remembering that this time last year, experts weren’t certain any of the vaccine candidates would pan out. And for any that did, they didn’t expect an efficacy of more than 70 percent. Moderna reported Thursday that its vaccine was 93 percent effective six months after its second dose, while Pfizer’s vaccine was 84 percent effective after six months, both far higher than the 45 percent effectiveness of last season’s slate of flu vaccines
Yet the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) that most Americans have received showed stunning efficacy of more than 90 percent in clinical trials. Still, none were 100 percent effective, even if many people who got their shots started treating them as impenetrable armor.
Recipients of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine are less likely to be hospitalized or have severe reactions after coming into contact with the Delta variant of the virus, according to a new study.
Based on a trial involving about 480,000 health workers in South Africa, the study provides the first large-scale evidence that Johnson & Johnson's one-dose vaccine is effective against the Delta variant strain of the virus, Time reported. Glenda Gray, a co-lead researcher of the study, said at a presentation Friday the J&J shot was 71% effective against hospitalization and up to 96% effective in preventing death from the virus. Numbers are not as readily available for the J&J vaccine because only 4.5% of the U.S. population has received this vaccine.
Pfizer and Moderna protection against the Delta variant, now dominant across the US, barely waned, the National Institutes of Health-led team found. The team will continue to look for evidence of protection beyond six months. The effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines at preventing hospitalizations was 85% and 91%, respectively said a recent Mayo Clinic study.
"High levels of binding antibodies recognizing all tested variants, including B.1.351 (Beta) and B.1.617.2 (Delta), were maintained in all subjects over this time period," immunologist Nicole Doria-Rose and colleagues at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
Booster shots: Moderna says a third booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine will likely be necessary this fall because of the rapid spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. “We believe a booster (dose 3) is likely to be necessary this fall, particularly in the face of Delta.” the company said in its’ presentation.
The booster test doses are 50-micrograms, which is half of Moderna’s 100-microgram standard shot. Moderna is also working on a vaccine that would combine a “COVID-19 variant booster + seasonal flu booster + RSV booster,” all in a single dose.
Lambda Variant: Genomic sequencing has identified 1,060 cases of Covid-19 caused by the Lambda variant in the United States. Infectious disease experts have said that Lambda is a variant they are watching closely. "I think any time a variant is identified and demonstrates the capacity to rapidly spread in a population, you have to be concerned," Dr. Gregory Poland, a professor of medicine and director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "There are variants arising every day -- if a variant can be defined as new mutations, the question is, do those mutations give the virus some sort of advantage, which of course is to human disadvantage? The answer in Lambda is yes." "Thankfully studies suggest that the currently available vaccines remain protective. We have learned during the pandemic that things can change quickly, so controlling spread of COVID-19 in general will help manage Lambda," says Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The variants Beta, Delta, Delta plus and Lambda showed only "modest" resistance against antibodies elicited by the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, suggesting the vaccines still work.
Point of View (JAV): What we need to battle this COVID pandemic and the new variants its’ producing is patience and flexibility. For the past 18 months on a weekly basis, I have tried to provide the most accurate, most reliable and most repeatable science-based facts about this current pandemic.
With this latest newsletter the point is: If you are unvaccinated and you want to protect your children you need to get vaccinated. Those that interact with your children need to be vaccinated. We need to not make vaccination or mask wearing political especially if it is being shown that it is working not only herein the U.S. but throughout the world.
The facts support that the people who are now filling up the hospitals and dying are the unvaccinated. The vaccinated are not. The vaccines work. Vaccinations and masking when appropriate are the right things to do as responsible human beings to take care of ourselves and each other based on the science not the news media or social media.
If you want to avoid mask mandates and yes, a potential lockdown due to hospitals reaching capacity as many are right now do the responsible thing and get vaccinated. The vaccines work to protect all of us.
Until next time, Stay Safe, Stay Well, Get Vaccinated and Wear your Mask when appropriate.
James A. Vito, D.M.D.