View Van Gucht about vaccinations
“We want to launch a call for caution after your vaccination,” said Van Gucht this afternoon at the Sciensano press conference on the current corona situation. “The campaign is moving forward well, and all the data indicate that the vaccines provide good protection against all known variants. So we can gradually leave the worst of the pandemic behind us. But the question remains whether we will encounter another bulge on the way down. ”
But the vaccination campaign is far from over: according to the current schedule, everyone will not be fully vaccinated until mid-August. And so there is a warning: “Unfortunately, we regularly hear from doctors that people get Covid-19 shortly after their vaccination. This is because the first vaccination dose does not provide protection until two to three weeks after the injection. So if you become infected during the first two weeks, you cannot count on protection from the vaccine. It is as if you have not yet been vaccinated. Your immune system needs two weeks to come into readiness. So stay careful in the first two weeks after the vaccination. ”
variants
In addition, most vaccines only become fully effective after two vaccinations. “That is particularly important in the protection against variants such as the Indies,” says Van Gucht. He cited a UK study showing that both Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines offer protection against all variants, but with large differences between doses.
“One dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca reduces the risk of Covid symptoms by 51 percent in the UK variant and 34 percent in the Indian variant. At two doses, there was a protection of 60 percent with AstraZeneca, and even 93 percent with Pfizer. ”
Van Gucht also pointed out that this involved all possible forms of the disease, including very mild symptoms. “If we look at the worst form, including hospital admissions, then the protection against it is a lot higher anyway, even after a single dose. In that case, both vaccines provide 80 to 90 percent protection. ” For the Indian variant, there are still insufficient data to provide correct figures.
‘Just as many people in their twenties and eighties in the hospital as people in their eighties’
Gudrun Briat, spokeswoman for the Taksforce Vaccination, also showed that the vaccines do help, and certainly against hospital admissions and deaths. The most recent hospital figures show that for the first time since the start of the pandemic, it is now mainly people aged 40 to 59 who are in hospital with Covid-19. Moreover, there are now almost as many people in their twenties and thirties in the hospital as people eighty and older.
Six million vaccines put
The most recent vaccination figures show that more than 6 million vaccines have now been administered in Belgium. This means that 4,379,000 inhabitants already received at least a first injection, and 1,716,000 also a second.
Every day there are now an average of 103,000 vaccinations per day, although that figure is likely to fall again in the course of this week and rise again next week.
Over the whole of last week, this involved almost 720,000 doses administered, about the same as the ‘top week’ at the beginning of May, at 730,000 doses at the time.
All in all, 38 percent of the entire population is now at least partially vaccinated, and 14.9 percent fully. In Flanders this is 38.68 percent, in Wallonia 39.41 percent, in Brussels 28.59 percent and in the East Cantons it is 44.51 percent.
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