The facility had planned to offer all residents and staff boosters, but it hadn’t happened yet when this outbreak started. »īetsy: Yesterday, I was reading about a nursing home outbreak that happened in Connecticut over the past month and a half - almost all of the residents and staff were vaccinated, but they had a big outbreak of breakthrough cases and eight residents died.
The Science You Need To Make Your COVID-19 Decisions Read more. The agency has also approved vaccination - they made a distinction earlier this month between who SHOULD get it and who CAN - for 18- to 49-year-olds with underlying conditions and any adult who works in or lives in a high-risk setting, like a nursing home. Anyone who got the J&J shot should get a booster after two months. Currently, the CDC recommends a six-month booster for people who are 65 and older, people who are between 50 and 65 and also have underlying medical conditions and people 18 and over who live in long-term care. Not breakthroughs.īut, like Betsy says, people over the age of 65 and the immune compromised are a different story. Maggie: I was just looking at some charts today from the CDC that show that the surge in cases and hospitalizations - which is serious stuff - is being driven by unvaccinated people. Especially for those seniors who got vaccinated very early on (like in January 2021), their immune systems may have less capacity now to respond to a COVID infection than they did closer to their vaccinations. This is really middle-of-the-pack.īetsy: Seniors and people with certain health conditions may be exceptions to this, though. Some studies found higher rates of effectiveness against any infection, some lower. But that includes asymptomatic infections. In a recently published study of frontline workers in the U.S., effectiveness is still holding around 66 percent for the mRNA vaccines post-delta variant. There’s been a reduction in effectiveness of whether you get an infection at all … but even that is still reasonably high. Maggie: As far as anyone can tell, there’s been very little change in vaccine effectiveness for hospitalization and death. Breakthrough cases, when they happen, tend to be milder and shorter because vaccinated peoples’ immune systems are primed to respond to the virus. I feel like, anecdotally, a lot of people have the impression that the original vaccinations are failing at a high rate, and that’s just not true.īetsy: Right, the vaccines are still doing a very good job of protecting people against severe disease and death, which was the original goal.
Maggie: Well, I think an important place to start is by clarifying what your original vaccination does and doesn’t do. What’s the latest on the science of what boosters do and don’t do? But I am not sure if getting boosted would really help cut the severity of COVID-19 down if I got it.
But since NYC changed the rules for who’s eligible (which we’ll get into in a minute), I made an appointment and went to get my booster shot today … only to realize I scheduled it for next Wednesday.īut as I was waiting in line, I wondered, Why am I getting this thing again? Yes, I have a 2-year-old whom I should try and protect, and a (boosted) wife who is a teacher interacting with lots of kids. I’m technically eligible because I have depression, and mood disorders are included in the “ complicating medical conditions” criteria, but I’m also not sure if it’s for me.Ĭwick: I also live in NYC and had been waiting for it to become approved for me. Maggie ( Maggie Koerth, senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight): I haven’t, either. I became eligible in NYC (where I live) earlier this week, and I’m kinda going back and forth on whether it’s worthwhile for me. Betsy ( Betsy Ladyzhets, FiveThirtyEight contributor and author of COVID-19 Data Dispatch): I have not.