More women than men have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in the US.
If you have not received the COVID-19 vaccine yet, get it soon. If you're fully vaccinated, you're less likely to get the coronavirus infection. Breakthrough infections are exceedingly rare in fully vaccinated people, says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a report issued on Tuesday. According to the new CDC report, breakthrough infections may occur in just 0.01% of all fully vaccinated people. Moreover, majority of the people who tested positive after being fully vaccinated are asymptomatic, it said.
The CDC defines breakthrough infection as testing COVID positive 14 days or more after full vaccination with any FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine, including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson.
By the end of April, over 101 million Americans had been fully vaccinated. Of those just 10,262 breakthrough infections were reported, majority of them had mild symptoms or were entirely asymptomatic. The median age of all cases was 58, and nearly two-thirds of these breakthrough infections happened in women. Only 10% of breakthrough cases required hospitalization and 2% of people died. Those who died were mostly elderly in their 80's. Around one in five died from a cause other than COVID-19 as stated by the new CDC report.
This report indicates that vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection. But health officials noted that no vaccine is 100% protective and infections are expected in some vaccinated people. Even when these rare breakthroughs happen, the vaccines are still overwhelmingly effective at protecting people from being hospitalized or dying. "As more people are vaccinated, there is a decline in cases of hospitalizations and deaths across the country," Dr. Michelle Medina, the associate chief of clinical operations for Cleveland Clinic Community Care told ABC News.
"This report helps confirm, in a real-world setting, that breakthrough infections are rare and when they do happen, they mostly have no clinical significance," the American news channel quoted Dr. John Brownstein, a chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, as saying.
However, the CDC report noted that the number of breakthrough infections may be more as many asymptomatic cases may never have been tested. Specialists are also not sure why breakthrough infections were reported more in women. But the report noted that more women than men have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in the US.
Through genomic sequencing, several variants of concern were found to play a role in most of the breakthrough cases. More than 57 percent of cases were linked to the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the U.K. and a quarter to the B.1.429, first found in California. The P.1 from Brazil and the B.1.315 first identified in South Africa was found in a small percentage of sequenced cases.
