Vaccines Still Your Best Bet Even As CT Breakthrough Cases Rise

CONNECTICUT — At this point, everyone seems to know someone who has completed their coronavirus vaccine series and still managed to contract the virus.

In fact, just over 30 percent of patients suffering from COVID-19 in Connecticut hospitals as of Friday have been fully vaccinated. The percentage of these breakthrough cases has been growing steadily, even as the number of residents getting vaccinated has leveled off.

The rise in breakthrough cases might seem like an indictment of the vaccines' effectiveness, but all the science indicates otherwise.

A vaccinated person is far, far less likely to retransmit the virus than an unvaccinated person, according to multiple studies. Even those infected with the highly-transmissible delta variant are 63 percent less likely to pass the infection along than the unvaccinated, according to research from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands. Those infected with the alpha, the so-called "U.K. variant," were 73 per cent less likely to infect unvaccinated people.

The numbers get even better when you take into consideration the fact that most vaccinated people don’t become infected in the first place, according to the results.

The Dutch scientists used data from their home country's contact tracing system to deduce the proportion of contacts infected by positive cases. They then calculated what percentage of those results were reduced by vaccination, adjusting for age and other factors. Their conclusion was that vaccines reduce transmission by more than 80 per cent overall. The Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports funded the research, which has not yet been peer reviewed.

The Dutch numbers were backed up and reinforced by another study closer to home, out of Yale University. A team of researchers there took a (pre-delta variant) data set from vaccination results in Israel and concluded the effectiveness of the vaccine against transmission was 89 per cent. A third study, using vaccination data from the U.K., yielded a comparable conclusion.

Of the 2,404,652 persons who have completed their vaccine series, 0.81 percent of
Connecticut’s fully vaccinated persons have contracted the virus. There has been no change there from last week's report from the Department of Public Health.

One hundred seventy fifty COVID-19 related deaths have occurred among the 19,383 fully vaccinated persons confirmed with COVID-19. These deaths represent 20.3 percent of all COVID-19 deaths since Feb. 9, 2021, up 2.6 percent from last week's data drop from DPH.

Thirty-three residents have died from COVID-19 over the past seven days, up from last week's report of 25 deaths from DPH. The coronavirus death toll in the state is currently 8,809.

Nationwide, coronavirus-related deaths have trended downward by 3 percent over the past seven days. Likewise, the number of cases also ticked downward slightly, by 1 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

The charts above and below show the "relative risk," or the difference in risk when comparing rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated persons.

The latest data show unvaccinated residents have a nine times higher risk of dying from the coronavirus, compared to the vaccinated. Their risk of hospitalization is seven times greater.

Although coronavirus deaths in Connecticut have declined markedly since February, it is important to note that death — and hospitalization — rates have consistently been higher among unvaccinated persons compared to fully vaccinated persons.

According to the vaccine tracker maintained by the Mayor Clinic, about 71 percent of Connecticut's total population has received all their COVID-19 vaccine shots as of Thursday afternoon. Connecticut's vaccination rate is tied with Maine's, and second behind only that of Vermont.

About 58.5 percent of Americans have completed their vaccine series, according to the CDC. That's up 0.2 percent from last week.

Predictably, residents in the eastern area of the state, with the highest coronavirus infection rates, are also least likely to be fully-vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the data released by DPH.

Mansfield remains the outlier, still with less than 39 percent of its population fully vaccinated. Of all Connecticut municipalities, only Canaan has fully vaccinated all its residents.

As of Thursday, those residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19 include more than 95 percent of those over the age of 65, 92 percent of those between 55-64, 84 percent of those between 45-54 (up 1 percent from last week), 84 percent of those between 35-44, 77 percent of those between 25-34, 71 percent of those between 18-24, 80 percent of those between 16-17, and 71 percent of those between 12-15. Except where noted, there has been no percentage increase in the number vaccinated in each age tier since last week.

Initial data on the 5 to 11 age group, which was just approved last week to be vaccinated, are still being collected, according to DPH.

The progress toward compete vaccination proceeds slowly, as illustrated in the graph above.

The state's daily coronavirus positivity rate reported on Friday afternoon was 2.61 percent, about 0.35 percent higher than it was seven days earlier.

Hospitalizations dropped by 13 beds overnight. Currently, there are 225 patients hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Connecticut.

Most of those hospitalized (69) are in New Haven County.