The new delta variant of the coronavirus, which has been completely dominant in Sweden for a few weeks now, is both more contagious and easier to get past vaccine protection even in fully vaccinated people.
It has been shown in some new studies, but in practice became apparent after a super-spreader event at the July 4 celebrations in the American city of Provincetown, after which nearly 900 people fell ill despite three-quarters of the population already fully vaccinated. According to US media reports, a majority of those infected were also fully vaccinated.
The incident resulted in the American Infection Control Agency, CDC, going out on Tuesday and also recommending fully vaccinated people to wear mouth guards in areas with a spread of infection, but without really explaining the data. An internal document from the authority has now been leaked stating that the authority is concerned about how this information will be received by the American population where they do not want to damage the credibility of the vaccines by being too clear that even vaccinated people can be infected and carry the infection further. .
At Tuesday’s announcement of the new oral protection recommendation, the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, said that new information about the delta variant shows that in unusual cases it may be the case that vaccinated people can be infected and infect others.
It’s a bad communication strategy, says Joakim Dillner, professor of infection epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet.
– We now have robust data that the vaccines provide good protection against the delta variant, but it is not one hundred percent. When it comes to infection, the protection is about 80 percent after full vaccination of the mRNA vaccine. To then say “in unusual cases” is stupid, I think, it is quite accurate in 20 percent of cases that fully vaccinated are at risk of infection, two out of ten, he says.
The vaccine protection against infection by the alpha variant is 92 percent, but since that variant has almost completely disappeared, the new protection level of 80 percent applies.
It will also mean that more and more vaccinated people will be infected, but it is not something strange or dramatic, says Joakim Dillner.
– It’s not really that strange. As more and more people are vaccinated, more and more people who get the infection will be vaccinated. If you now have an 80% protection of the vaccine against infection and there are five times as many who are vaccinated as unvaccinated, there will be about as many cases among the vaccinated as among the unvaccinated, he says.
Of course, that still means It will be important to keep your distance and to pay extra attention to people with weakened immune systems or those who for various reasons cannot or do not want to be vaccinated.
But for the general population, the most important thing is that the vaccines still provide significantly better protection against disease and hospitalization even in the case of infection with the delta variant. Data from the United Kingdom show that the protection against illness is 88 percent and the protection against hospitalization is 96 percent. This is also confirmed in the American outbreak in Provincetown where only seven people out of the nearly 900 infected have had to be hospitalized.
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The spread of infection is increasing in large parts of Sweden – but still low levels
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