I was a dunderhead for not understanding why breakthroughs would account for a higher and higher percentage of the total infected. The more fully-vaxed the greater the raw number is going to be even at the extremely low 0.08%.There are a few things still unanswered:
1) This report gives us the exact number of the fully-vaxed who have tested positive and, I assume, a rounded number of the fully-vaxed who died. What percentage does 125,682 represent of the total positive tests "since the start of this year"?
2) Why no stats on hospitalizations of the fully-vaxed here?
3) Is it not shocking that 1,400 total fully vaxed have nonetheless died? I accept that 0.08% are going to test positive. But we have been told repeatedly that even if you are one of those rare 0.08% you are likely to be asymptomatic or at least experience milder symptoms; that is, that the vaccines still offer robust protection against serious illness (hospitalization) and death.
*Update. We have been told that. Full stop. But this is on the CDC website today. For how long, I don’t know.:
- There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe for those who are vaccinated and still get sick.
Using NBC's numbers 1.1% of the fully-vaxed who test positive for reinfection die. 1.1%, the percentage of the fully-vaxed who die, is 13.7 times greater than 0.08%, the percentage of the fully vaxed who test positive. Somebody can re-confirm that I am a dunderhead but I cannot wrap my pea brain around how 13.75x> proves the vaccines prevent death.
4) Given the time parameters of this data, "since the start of the year" and published on August 10, I assume that the data includes the Provincetown (Barnstable County) breakthrough, the San Francisco hospital breakthrough, the Santa Monica breakthrough, and the Mesa County, Colorado breakthrough, to list just the four that have come to my attention. How to explain 74% re-infection of the fully-vaxed in P-town? Were these four breakthrough populations unusually susceptible to reinfection in some way?
5) There is nothing in this cnbc report based on NBC data about the increased transmissibility of the fully-vaxed. But that, I assume, is taken as a given now, based on the CDC data.
I read remotely, a month of two ago, perhaps, that CDC is slow and ponderous. It has seemed to me so. COVID-19 is a fast-mutating virus that seems to me to be running circles around CDC's ability to keep up with it. Quick, agile, flexible, anticipatory response is absolutely key. Time is the ally of the virus, the enemy of the American people. CDC needs a COVID czar over it to streamline and make more efficient the data collection and analysis and the flow of communication, like we had an Ebola czar under Obama when that virus was going off in all directions, someone like Ron Klain.
