Posted on 09/12/2021 2:48:40 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
The test results that hot day in early August shouldn't have surprised me — all the symptoms were there. A few days earlier, fatigue had enveloped me like a weighted blanket. I chalked it up to my weekend of travel. Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. And soon enough, everything tasted like nothing.
As a reporter who's covered the coronavirus since the first confirmed U.S. case landed in Seattle, where I live, I should have known what was coming, but there was some part of me that couldn't quite believe it. I had a breakthrough case of COVID-19 — despite my two shots of the Pfizer vaccine, the second one in April.
I was just one more example of our country's tug-and-pull between fantasies of a post-COVID summer and the realities of our still-raging pandemic, where even the vaccinated can get sick.
Not only was I sick, but I'd brought the virus home and exposed my 67-year-old father and extended family during my very first trip back to the East Coast since the start of the pandemic. It was just the scenario I had tried to avoid for a year and a half. And it definitely was not the summer vacation I had anticipated.
Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing, after getting fully vaccinated. We had flown across the country, seen friends, stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors and, yes, even went to a long delayed wedding with other vaccinated people.
I ended up in quarantine at my father's house. Two rapid antigen tests (taken a day apart) came back negative, but I could tell I was starting to feel sick. After my second negative test, the nurse leveled with me. "Don't hang your hat on this," she said of the results. Sure enough, a few days later the results of a PCR test for the coronavirus (this one sent to a lab) confirmed what had become obvious by then.
It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I'd drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low.
Of course, I am very lucky. I didn't go up against the virus with a naive immune system, like millions of Americans did until vaccines were widely available. And, in much of the world, vaccines are still a distant promise.
"You probably would have gotten much sicker if you had not been vaccinated," Dr. Francesca Torriani, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Diego, explained to me recently.
As I shuffled around my room checking my fever, it was also reassuring to know that my chances of ending up in the hospital were very slim, even with the delta variant. And now, about a month later, I've made a full recovery.
The reality is breakthrough cases are becoming more common. Here's what you should know about getting a breakthrough case — and what I wish I'd known, when those first symptoms laid me low.
Is it time for reality check about what the vaccines can — and can't do? The vaccines aren't a forcefield that ward off all things COVID. They were given the greenlight because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying.
But it was easy for me — and I'm not the only one — to grab onto the idea that, after so many months of trying not to get COVID-19, that the vaccine was, more or less, the finish line. And that made getting sick from the virus unnerving.
After all, there were reassuring findings earlier this year that the vaccine was remarkably good at stopping any infection, even mild ones. This was a kind of bonus, we were told. And then in May the CDC said go ahead and shed your mask, if you're vaccinated.
"There was so much initial euphoria about how well these vaccines work," says Jeff Duchin, an infectious disease physician and the public health officer for Seattle & King County. "I think we — in the public health community, in the medical community — facilitated the impression that these vaccines are bulletproof."
It's hard to keep dialing up and down your risk calculations. So if you'd hoped to avoid getting sick at all, even slightly, it may be time for a "reset," Duchin says. This isn't to be alarmist, but to clear away expectations that COVID is out of your life, and keep up your vigilance about common-sense precautions.
With more people vaccinated, the total number of breakthrough infections will rise, and that's not unexpected," he says. "I don't think our goal should be to achieve zero risk, because that's unrealistic."
How high are my chances of getting a breakthrough case these days? It used to be quite rare, but the rise of delta has changed the odds.
"It's a totally different ballgame with this delta phase," says Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "I think the chance of having a symptomatic infection has gone up substantially."
But, he adds, "quantifying that in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy."
The vaccinated still have a considerably lower chance of getting infected than those who aren't protected that way. Look at data collected from Los Angeles County over the summer as the delta variant started to surge in Southern California: Unvaccinated people were 5 times more likely to test positive than those who were vaccinated.
Recent research has tried to pin down how well the vaccines are working against preventing any breakthrough cases during the delta surge, but much of that comes from other countries and estimates vary significantly.
n the U.S., a study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that vaccine effectiveness "against any symptomatic disease is considerably lower against the delta variant," dropping from over 90% earlier in the year before delta was the predominant strain to only about 65% in July. Research on breakthrough infections over the summer in New York found the vaccines were still overall about 80% effective against any infection. Each study has its limits.
It's very hard to disentangle what's most responsible for the rise in breakthrough infections this summer — whether it's the delta variant itself, waning immunity in some people, or that much of the U.S. dropped public health precautions like masking.
"We don't have good evidence of what's the cause, but we do know all of these things coming together are associated with more breakthroughs," says Rachel Piltch-Loeb, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
How careful do I need to be if I want to avoid a breakthrough? Looking back, I wish I'd taken some more precautions.
And my advice is different now when friends and family tell me they want to avoid having a breakthrough case like mine: Don't leave it all up to the vaccine. Wear masks, stay away from big gatherings with unvaccinated people, cut down on travel, at least until things calm down.
The U.S. is averaging more than 130,000 coronavirus infections a day (about twice what it was when I fell sick), hospitals are being crushed and the White House has proposed booster shots. Scientists are still making sense of what's happening with breakthrough cases.
What's clear is that in many parts of the U.S., we're all more likely to run into the virus than we were in the spring. "Your risk is going to be different if you are in a place that's very highly vaccinated, with very low level of community spread," says Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan. "The piece that's important is what's happening in your community."
Even with delta, the goal is not to go back to a lockdown mindset, though, says Malani. "My hope is that people who are fully vaccinated should really feel like this risk is manageable."
"Feel good about spending time with your friends, or having a small dinner party, but make sure everyone is vaccinated," she says.
What does a "mild" case of COVID-19 feel like? In my case, it was worse than expected, but, in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen.
This mild category is essentially a catch-all, explains Dr. Robert Wachter who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "Mild" can be "a day of feeling crummy to being completely laid up in bed for a week, all of your bones hurt and your brain isn't working well."
"So even if we call them mild cases, as you've seen, sometimes these are ones you really don't want to have if you can avoid it," he says.
There's not great data on the details of these mild breakthrough infections, but so far it appears that "you do way better than those who are not vaccinated," says Dr. Sarang Yoon an occupational medicine specialist at theUniversity of Utah Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational Environmental Health, who was part of a nationwide CDC study on breakthrough infections."In general, in terms of symptom duration, it's much shorter."
Yoon's study, published in June with data collected before the delta surge, offers some reassurance: the presence of fever was cut in half, and the days spent in bed reduced by 60% among people with breakthrough infections, compared to unvaccinated people who got sick. "These are meaningful decreases," says Matt Thiese, an epidemiologist and colleague of Yoon's who worked on the study. "It can be the difference between having a fever for almost nine days and having a fever for just under three days."
A recent study from the U.K. also shows that if you're sick because of a breakthrough case, it's generally not as bad and people have fewer symptoms.. In fact, the top five symptoms for people with a breakthrough infection were headache, sneezing, runny nose, sore throat and loss of smell. Notably absent: fever and persistent cough, which are in the top five for unvaccinated people, according to the data compiled by the U.K. researchers.
If I get a breakthrough infection, how sick could I get? Even with delta, the chance of getting a case of COVID-19 that's bad enough to send you to the hospital is still very rare.
If you're vaccinated, the risk of being hospitalized is 10 times lower than if you weren't vaccinated, according to the latest data from the CDC. Those who get severely and critically ill with a breakthrough case tend to be older — in one study done before delta, the median age was 80 — with underlying medical conditions, like cardiovascular disease.
When I was sick, one thing was in the back of my mind as I monitored my symptoms: Would I have problems catching my breath?
Thankfully, when you get exposed, the vaccine has already set you up with antibodies, a first line of defense, that will neutralize parts of the virus that attach to the mucosal surfaces of your upper respiratory tract, says Torriani at UCSD.
"That initial moment when our body is attacked by the virus, that can lead to some disease," she says. It's a bit of a race. The virus may cause you to get a cold, but, in most people, your immune system will "get its act together and thwart that infection from going down into your lungs," says Wachter.
That later stage of COVID-19 also seems to trigger the immune system to get "overly exuberant" and attack your own body, causing severe respiratory problems like shortness of breath and destructive inflammation. "So if you can prevent that sort of second stage from happening," Wachter says, "you can prevent a lot of the severe illness from COVID." Other parts of your immune system, like T-cells, are also ready to kick into action if you get sick.
If you're concerned, you can keep an eye on your oxygen levels with a pulse oximeter. That's much more important than your temperature or symptoms, he says.
Can I spread it to others and do I need to quarantine? Unfortunately, you still have COVID and need to act like it.
Even though my first two tests were negative, I started wearing a mask at my house and keeping my distance from my vaccinated family members. I'm glad I did: no one else got sick.
The delta variant is more than two times as contagious as the original strain of the virus and can build up very quickly in your upper respiratory tract, as was shown in a cluster of breakthrough infections linked to Provincetown, Mass. over the summer.
"Even in fully vaccinated, asymptomatic individuals, they can have enough virus to transmit it," says Dr. Robert Darnell, a physician scientist at The Rockefeller University. "Delta is very good at replicating, attaching, and inserting itself into cells."
The science isn't settled about just how likely vaccinated people are to actually spread the virus, and it does appear that the amount of virus in the nose decreases faster in people who are vaccinated.
Even so, wearing masks and staying isolated from others if you test positive or have symptoms is absolutely critical, Darnell says. He also advises getting tested if you are exposed to someone who has COVID, even if you've been vaccinated, "because you could very well get infected or ill, and you want to protect those around you, including all the children who aren't vaccinated."
Could I get long COVID after a breakthrough infection? The chance I might go on to develop long COVID was front and center in my mind when I had a breakthrough case.
While there's not a lot of data yet, research does show that breakthrough infections can lead to the kind of persistent symptoms that characterize long COVID, including brain fog, fatigue and headaches. "Hopefully that number is low. Hopefully it doesn't last as long and it's not as severe, but it's just too early to know these things," says Topol.
Recent research from the U.K. suggests that vaccinated people are about 50% less likely to develop long COVID than those who are unvaccinated. The underlying cause of long COVID itself is still not yet known, so this complicates the picture for researchers even more, but this early evidence offers some reassurance.
"There may be some symptoms like fatigue [that linger], but studies appear to show that vaccination might also decrease the chances of getting long COVID symptoms," says Torriani.
This is not true for everyone, and it's a compelling reason to avoid getting infected altogether, says Wachter. "Some of those mild cases will go on to be long COVID, so you have to factor that in," he says.
Duhh... That's what's everyone who masked up and went crazy last year did for the last year, so this kid's advice is "stay scared forever"?!??
When I read one of these high minded articles, first thing I do is Google the author to find out what their background and experience is. Almost always, it's someone no older than 30 who has a bachelor's degree in journalism or literature from a fancy private school, zero life experience outside of editing rooms and freelance assignments. If you were at a party and struck up a conversation with the person, most likely you'd quickly look for a reason to excuse yourself.
This author's other writings are similarly junk. Rehashed press releases, parroted quotes, zero effort to individually verify sources or find enriching information that doesn't involve a Google search or Tweet deck. He probably thinks this overwrought story of getting a viral infection for less than a week was groundbreaking because he wrote it in the first person and because his entire adult life has been experienced after the advent of the flu shot, he thinks five days of fever and chills is pretty close to death's door.
He keeps trying to find a way to believe in the system. It’s cute.
“Still raging pandemic”?
I stopped reading right there.
True. My brother, a doctor, and his family have had covid 3 times since Feb 2020. 60,51,17,12,10, yeah he’s raising his own grandkids. All confirmed with IGM and antibody test.
At this point they treat this like what it is, a cold.
Taking ivermectin this time.
No Vaccines, and don’t plan on it.
And monkeys would probably fly out of my ass if I drank one of those sea monkey kits you could buy in the back of magazines. I have as much proof as the “good” doctor.
Seriously, why are we still listening to the public medical “experts”? They’ve been consistently wrong, some of them were directly responsible for funding the research that created this weapon in the first place, and some of them are profiting off of the “vaccines”.
Exactly.
“We had flown across the country, seen friends, stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors and, yes, even went to a long delayed wedding with other vaccinated people.”
People with prior infection but no shot is much safer to be around than one with the shot but without prior infection.
“I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing, (and washing hands?) after getting fully vaccinated.”
The vaccine does prevent infection.
“despite my two shots of the Pfizer vaccine, the second one in April.”
Pfizer protection rapidly sinks after the first month or two and goes down to 0% after 6 months.
False:
The more common tests you can take at home or at a test center will not distinguish variants, but Covid-19 virus variants ARE identifiable thru genomic analysis in a laboratory.
Here is one example. Penn Medicine Surveillance Sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 Variants
Hang on to your hat for the irony here:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3993991/posts
Irony meter pegged in the red about to break the dial.
Nothing gets fixed until the scientist’s that unleashed this gain of function monster are removed from positions of power. They are desperate for new science to save the day, simple effective therapeutics must be diminished. They want all the unethical research to continue. God complex.
"Is it time for reality check about what the vaccines can — and can't do? The vaccines aren't a forcefield that ward off all things COVID. They were given the greenlight because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying."That's not how they were sold, dirtbag. Oh wait, here's the sockpuppet to put you right:
"I think we — in the public health community, in the medical community — facilitated the impression that these vaccines are bulletproof."
"Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "I think the chance of having a symptomatic infection has gone up substantially." But, he adds, "quantifying that in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy."
Which is why your article leans all over the 'data', what a pure autoflame but you can't spell stupid without s-t-o-n-e-d. Maybe write an article explaining why Fauxi, the CDC and uninquiring journolists intentionally disregard the necessary tracking of acquired immunity? You can't spell Topol with t-o-o-l.
"In the U.S., a study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that vaccine effectiveness "against any symptomatic disease is considerably lower against the delta variant," dropping from over 90% earlier in the year before delta was the predominant strain to only about 65% in July."
Yeah bless those CDC chuckleheads, they unintentionally revealed the "Put-your-mask-back-on" study earlier this summer of a COVID breakout of 469 COVID P-town 'bears', sent exactly 5 Yogis to the hospital: 5 fully vaccinated, 1 unvaccinated.
"A recent study from the U.K. also shows that if you're sick because of a breakthrough case, it's generally not as bad and people have fewer symptoms.. In fact, the top five symptoms for people with a breakthrough infection were headache, sneezing, runny nose, sore throat and loss of smell. Notably absent: fever and persistent cough, which are in the top five for unvaccinated people, according to the data compiled by the U.K. researchers. "
Says the vaxhole who had 103F! Hey genius, I never broke 101F and I haven't had delta. Stick that acquired immunity in your soy pipe and smoke it!
Nowhere in this piece does it mention anything about treatment with a monoclonal antibody infusion. If I turn out to have symptoms and test positive, this will be one of the first things I look into doing.
It’s NPR! How can it be anything but absolute bullcr@p?
The writer never specified if he was taking the likes of Vitamin D3, etc. Or is there an assumption that once the injections were given, a person just doesn’t bother with it?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Per Dr. Zelenko (full disclosure: I have high regard/respect for him), he says that once you take the shots, you have put yourself back in a high risk category. The one thing you do NOT want to do is get COVID. He says you should be on a prophylactic protocol and at the first sniffle, you should be treating for COVID.
2nd point - no real relation to your comment, but I’m using this as an excuse to vent ...
To the author ....Ok, so you had COVID and that is an “experience”; however, I find it irksome when people like you use that to more or less ‘lecture’ on getting the shots, it would have been worse if you hadn’t had them, etc.. You got the shots, you got COVID, you don’t know where you got it - could have been from all those “vaxed” guests at the wedding for all you know .... you had a miserable week. ‘Nuff said from you.
BTW, everyone I know who has had COVID, with the exception of one person, was FULLY vaxed. The one unvaxed person was an obese diabetic in her 80’s (bad enough to be losing eyesight & having kidney problems) .... her fully vaxed skinny, fit hubby had a terrible time with COVID & developed heart issues that were unknown before the shots/COVID ... his wife thought he would die. She did fine, other than miserable flu systems for a week. Go figure.
www.npr.org
Stopped reading after that
I’m still waiting for data for unvaxxed people who have gotten and recovered from covid. Studies say that you are 5 to 20 times better immunized than those who get the vaccine. But what does that mean?
> The vaccines aren’t a forcefield that ward off all things COVID.
Isn’t it anti-science to say that? Only a conspiracy theorist would say the vaccines don’t prevent Covid. Does he want to be kicked off social media?
Genesis until now of the vaccine has been a complete cluster bleep. And I for one am disappointed and frankly pissed off that Trump (still no comment on Biden’s mandate) still not come out and owned some of it and become a better man for it and a better future candidate for it so we know he won’t make the same mistakes in the future of trusting people that he shouldn’t trust.
NO it isn't.
Where’s the science behind this statement.
When ICU wards across the country are full of Covid-19 patients and 90% of them are unvaccinated, its safe to conclude that vaccination protects people from serious Covid-19 illness.
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