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Q&A Of The Day – Is It Time To Worry About Breakthrough Cases? Part 1
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Parler & Twitter: @brianmuddradio
Today’s entry: You’ve been levelheaded with your reporting on Covid and I appreciate the time and research you dedicate to the topics you discuss. What’s your thought about the rise in cases with people who’ve been vaccinated? Should we be concerned?
Bottom Line: I’ll start with saying anecdotally, yeah maybe. In the last week there have now been six people I know who’ve been fully vaccinated who’ve contracted COVID-19. Then there are the high-profile breakthroughs like the Yankees who just had five fully vaccinated players test positive for the ‘vid. Then there’s what’s happening in states like Florida. On July 1st we were pacing around 1,200 cases per day. Last week that jumped to 6,100 per day. This includes the semi-ominous fact that Saturday, the last day we have reporting for in Florida, we had the highest number of new cases, over 8,000, that we’ve had since April and the second highest total since mid-January – when almost no one was fully vaccinated. If 54% of Florida’s population is vaccinated today and we’re pacing the same number of cases as when it was 1%...yeah, it’s something to think about. When it comes to so-called COVID-19 “breakthrough cases”, the problems are two-fold. First, the data gathering stinks.
The CDC’s keeping tabs on breakthrough cases, but only to a point, and the data is already old by the time we get it. And what we don’t get isn’t all that helpful. Here’s the deal. The CDC’s receiving breakthrough data from 48 states, which is obviously incomplete and only making available breakthrough cases which have resulted in hospitalizations or deaths. And the most recent data is from June 12th. All of this is to say what we’re being provided is an incomplete and narrow view of what’s happening. What is happening, according to the most recent reporting, is that the CDC through two-weeks ago had documented 5,492 breakthrough cases which resulted in hospitalizations or death. FIU’s Dr. Aileen Marty had this to say: It isn’t easy to obtain those data because (1), we are not necessarily testing all breakthrough cases, and (2), they are not published on a per-state basis in a timely fashion. To know if someone has Delta Variant, you need to perform special Nucleic Acid tests. This detailed testing is NOT widely available. We need to request that CDC release official primers for Delta Variant to labs that are currently doing PCR tests or allow for sequencing to be done as a CLIA test and not as a research procedure. That’s a scientific way of saying, to address your question, we don’t really know what’s real with breakthrough cases.
That’s not the end of this story, however. In the second part of today’s Q&A, I’ll address why the CDC might want to suppress or minimize breakthrough information and what history might be telling us about vaccine efficacy in real-time.