As the United States witnesses an alarming surge of COVID-19 cases driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the coronavirus vaccine appears to be working to keep people out of the hospital and out of the morgue.
A new CDC data suggests that 99.999% of people who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 did not have a severe breakthrough case that led to hospitalization or death, CNN reported.
So far, over 166 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against the deadly virus, the data states. It further says that 1,507 people (about 0.001%) of those fully vaccinated people died from COVID-19.
On the other hand, 0.005% or 7,101 of those who had been fully vaccinated were hospitalized after getting infected with the virus.
According to the CDC, most of the severe breakthrough cases — around 74% — had been among seniors who were 65 years or older. About 20% of the people who died from the virus after a breakthrough case lost their lives due to something other than COVID-19, though they had a breakthrough case when they died, it said.
COVID-19 breakthrough cases are defined as those cases of infections or the detection of antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person after 14 days of them being fully vaccinated.
The CDC data also showed that about 26% or 1,816 among those who had to be hospitalized among the breakthrough infections were asymptomatic or had to be hospitalized for something not related to COVID-19. Further, 21% or 316 of the 1,507 fatal cases were reported to be asymptomatic or were not related to COVID-19.
Reports also suggested that the latest numbers were as recent as of August 2 – aligning with the time when the Delta variant of the coronavirus started to spread in the United States.
The CDC reiterated that vaccine breakthrough cases were detected in only a small percentage of fully vaccinated people and no unexpected patterns have been identified so far in the case demographics or vaccine characteristics among people with reported vaccine breakthrough infections.
