“Re-infections are extremely rare within 90 days of the original infection,” said Georgiou. “This suggests that the antibodies that someone’s immune system has made against the infection are effective for at least 90 days.”
According to the CDC, it is not yet clear whether someone with the COVID vaccine can still spread the virus to others.
“Even if people have been vaccinated, they could, if exposed to COVID, pass it on to someone else if they are out of quarantine, so it is a calculated risk on the part of the CDC,” said Dr. Georgiou. “We know that people who are symptomatic with COVID are more likely to transmit than people who are asymptomatic and that is why that criterion is there, that you have to be asymptomatic. It is also part of the criteria that you always wear a mask and social distance, so I think the CDC is balancing the pros and cons of quarantine difficulties and taking these other facts into account. “
The CDC urges those who are vaccinated to still wear a mask and social distance.
On Friday in Oregon, health officials reported that four people contracted COVID at least 14 days after receiving the second dose of the vaccine. The Oregon Health Authority said that each person was asymptomatic or had mild symptoms.
An OHA spokesman told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS: “We are working with our local and federal public health partners to investigate these cases and determine their origin. Genome sequencing is ongoing and we expect results later this week. We can confirm that two of the four cases were associated with a congregated care environment. “
We asked Dr. Georgiou about the cases.
“It tells us that no vaccine is 100 percent effective,” she said. “What we need to know is how many people in total in Oregon have been vaccinated because there are four people, what is the denominator? That’s what we need to know here.”
The Pfizer vaccine is about 95% effective, while the Modern vaccine is about 94% effective.
A spokesman for the CDC told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS: “In trials, the two authorized vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, were 94% + effective, but that means that a small number of cases of COVID-19 advancement occurred between vaccinated trial participants, so we hope that will happen. “
The day before its vaccine was approved in December, Pfizer said data on the vaccine’s effectiveness against asymptomatic spread would be collected in the coming months.
“We don’t know the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing asymptomatic COVID,” she said. “From a practical point of view, it was easier, because of the speed we needed to complete these tests, it was easier to get people to report and take the test when they had symptoms of COVID. It would have been very difficult, very expensive and would take much longer time for them to periodically test all those 40,000 people, whether they are symptomatic or not, and test just randomly. “
She said it is important to be vigilant, even with the declining trend of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Minnesota.
“I hope that we will continue to see the decline and stay as low as possible because what I hope, what the CDC expects to happen in March and April, is that we will see another increase,” she said. “And this is because this variant of the United Kingdom is spreading across the country. It is already in 40 states, with well over 1,000 cases and we know that it doubles every 10 days.”
According to Dr. Georgiou, there is limited data on these variants, but based on studies, current vaccines are believed to be equally effective against the UK variant. It may be less effective, however, against South Africa and Brazil variants because they contain an additional mutation.