Staci Martin is doing her grocery shopping online again.
She’s particularly alarmed by studies that suggest vaccinated people can have lingering health problems if they …
Staci Martin is doing her grocery shopping online again. She’s particularly alarmed by studies that suggest vaccinated people can have lingering health problems if they get sick, so she closely watches her state’s COVID-19 data dashboard. It shows “breakthrough” cases have been ticking up. “I’m worried more now,” said Martin,50. “We’re not going out much.” She’s not wrong to worry. From the earliest days of the pandemic, public health officials told Americans vaccination was the way back to normal life, but the path forward has become less clear. While COVID-19 vaccines were delivered in record time, the promise of vaccine salvation was upended by entrenched hesitancy, waning immunity and a wildly contagious mutation of the enigmatic virus that causes the disease. Three studies released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscore the new reality: Breakthrough infections are occurring more frequently than previously reported. “Recent data makes clear that protection against mild and moderate disease has decreased over time,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said during a Wednesday briefing. “This is likely due to both waning immunity and the strength of the widespread delta variant.” There’s no way to know exactly how common breakthrough infections are across the country, for several reasons. Many cases are asymptomatic or mild enough for people to forgo testing, and the United States doesn’t track post-vaccination infections in any organized way. Americans are flying blind. “The variability in tracking is all over the place,” said Dr. Eric Topol, vice president for research at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and an outspoken writer on COVID-19. “It’s totally chaotic.” Topol said breakthrough infections are a critical statistic for several reasons.
