New Cases: 786,166 (⬆︎ .58%)
New Deaths: 13,913 (⬆︎ .46%)
USA
New Cases: 85,368 (⬆︎ .27%)
New Deaths: 929 (⬆︎ .16%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 114.4 million (⬆︎ 2.14%) 2.4 million shots yesterday!
Total Eligible Population: 42.8%
Total Population: 34.5%
Fast approaching some pretty grim milestones
As usual (and as it should be), the medicos are watchful - worried they might have missed something that'll come back and bite us on the ass. So far so good, but...
CDC ramps up scrutiny of rare post-vaccination ‘breakthrough infections’
Experts say the number of people testing positive for the virus after being inoculated is to be expected
As tens of millions of people in the United States reach the coronavirus vaccination finish line, a small fraction have had “breakthrough infections,” testing positive for the virus after being inoculated and in rare cases requiring hospitalization, according to data from state health departments.
The precise number of these breakthrough cases is unknown, but figures released by states suggest it is at least several thousand. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has had a team monitoring breakthrough infections since February, has partial data but has not made it public.
These cases represent a tiny percentage of the 66 million people fully inoculated, and experts say they are neither unexpected nor occurring at an alarming rate. Indeed, the rarity of the breakthrough illnesses in the context of the vast scale of inoculations reinforces the encouraging message from public health experts: These vaccines are highly effective, and their rollout has dramatically driven down the rates of sickness and death among the most vulnerable populations first targeted for inoculations.
“There’s nothing there yet that’s a red flag,” Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, said at a White House news briefing Friday when asked about the breakthrough cases. “We’re obviously going to keep an eye on that very, very carefully.”
The administration, state health officials and front-line health-care workers face challenges in trying to get a clear picture of these outlier cases: The data is incomplete. Some states have not reported their breakthrough infection numbers to the CDC. Some post-vaccination deaths are still under investigation and may not be caused directly by covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Investigators are also hampered by the scattered and often chaotic nature of the pandemic response in the United States. Genomic sequencing is critical to knowing which strain of the virus causes an infection, but positive test samples are often discarded before investigators can retrieve them. Vaccinated people may also be less motivated to get tested if they come down with a case of the sniffles — they might assume it’s just a cold rather than covid-19.
In a Facebook encounter yesterday, I learned (from the horse's mouth, understand) that some anti-vaxxer COVID-denier type folks have come to believe that the vaccines are experimental gene therapy agents that alter your DNA, and that if you die after being vaccinated, your life insurance won't pay out to your survivors.
I'm pretty sure these people were not Poes and that's really what they believe.
There's a boatload of people out there who are just flat-out straight-up fucked in the head.
No comments:
Post a Comment