To date, more than 45 million Americans have been fully vaccinated.
An individual is considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the second dose of a two-dose vaccine or two weeks after receiving a single dose vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As more Americans seek to return to some form of normalcy, what activities can the fully vaccinated people return to and what safety guidelines does the CDC recommend that they still follow? Yahoo News Medical Contributor, Dr. Kavita Patel, explains.
Video transcription
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KAVITA PATEL: Fully vaccinated individuals – and again, as a reminder, this is two weeks after your second dose if you are getting a two-dose vaccine or two weeks after your single dose if it is a one-dose vaccine – it means you can safely Gather – without masks in closed environments, touching people as close as possible, with other people who are fully vaccinated or even with people who are not vaccinated if they are at low risk of contracting severe COVID or of being hospitalized by COVID.
This means that grandparents can get – if they are vaccinated – they can reunite with children, grandchildren or their own children, if those children or grandchildren do not have other comorbidities or immunological problems or other conditions that would put them at risk for serious COVID. This is amazing. This is indoors, eating, hugging, kissing, whatever you need to do.
If people, especially adults, are fully vaccinated, it is an incredibly low risk situation. It is not a risk, because children, as we know, who have not been vaccinated have less chance of getting diseases or even getting sick in some way, even if they get the coronavirus, but it is always possible.
So basically, children under 15 cannot get a vaccine today. The current three authorized manufacturers are all in testing or have completed testing enrollment for children under the age of 16. We hope to see some vaccine opportunity, possibly in late summer, early fall, for the 12 to 16 age group. This will be useful. But now, people will have to make decisions about how to get together.
If you are in a home with mixed vaccine status, three things are worth doing. First, understand who in your unvaccinated population or who you want to find in the unvaccinated population may be at risk. And again, they are people with chronic diseases, obesity, smokers. Number two, have a very honest conversation with anyone you are meeting with who is vaccinated and who is not, so that everyone understands.
And then, number three, keep the meeting small. So the key is – and what does small mean? Small means no more than two or three families. When you start to gather more than 15 people, it gets a little bit bigger.
There has been a lot of concern about people trying to have a medium-sized meeting. There is no direct guidance on what that number is. But generally, anything with 25 or more people is still discouraged at this point. And it is because of what I mentioned around, one, not knowing the vaccination status of each person, but two, also observing the patterns of the disease moving from high-risk areas to low-risk areas in these travel patterns.
If you’re thinking that – and you really need to do something, absolutely consider having it outdoors and, again, giving people who may be traveling to any event, a warning about the test before and the test after, and even potentially quarantined before and after.
ROCHELLE WALENSKY: Every time there is an increase in the number of trips, there is an increase in the number of cases in this country. We know that many of our variants have come from international places and we know that the travel corridor is a place where people mix a lot.
KAVITA PATEL: Here is why you should consider it, although it is safe for a fully vaccinated person to get on a plane and travel somewhere to meet another fully vaccinated person, two things to consider.
We are seeing increases in cases in some parts of the country, which is very worrying, as the whole country is opening and loosening restrictions. Therefore, you may be, even if you are fully vaccinated, potentially part of an unfortunate pattern in which you are bringing, transmitting or carrying viruses to and from high and low risk areas. We know that this risk is low if you are vaccinated. But we are still – and the CDC is still encouraging it to minimize travel.
But we are still seeing recommendations that, when you are in public, no matter what your vaccination status is, continue to wear a mask, continue to distance yourself, until we vaccinate enough people in the country to get rid of these things.
According to current estimates, about 15% of the country is fully vaccinated. And so we still have room to make everyone eligible and vaccinated. So until that happens and the majority of Americans who are eligible are vaccinated, we still need to practice public health measures, because unfortunately we don’t carry our vaccination status, you know, on our shirts.