With more people getting inoculated against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus every day, there is a growing belief that vaccinated people are now free to do what they want without following any safety or hygiene protocols. This is a misconception. Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), admitted in December that getting a coronavirus vaccination is not a guarantee of preventing transmissions.
“I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on… We need to assume that people who have been vaccinated also need to take the same precautions till there’s a certain level of herd immunity. This is a dynamic in an evolving field,” she said in a press conference.
WHO Health Emergencies director Mike Ryan stated there is no guarantee of eliminating the infectious disease even with a high efficacy vaccine. He believes that the likely scenario for COVID-19 would be that by the time it is brought under control, the virus will have turned endemic in nature, becoming a “very low-level threat.’
A blueprint that can help predict the course of the CCP virus would be the spread and eventual influenza containment. The most used flu vaccine is an inactivated virus. Combined with the fact that inoculation rates tend to be around 50 percent among adults and the virus’s ability to move between species, scientists have been unable to eliminate the influenza vaccine. However, annual flu vaccines have cut down hospitalizations among adults by up to 82 percent.
SARS-CoV-2 may end up as another type of ‘flu,’ one we need to be protected against every year
“Measles, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, hepatitis B — these are all epidemic-prone diseases… They show that we don’t need 100 percent effectiveness at reducing transmission, or 100 percent coverage or 100 percent effectiveness against disease to triumph over infectious diseases,” Natasha Crowcroft, senior technical adviser for measles and rubella at the WHO, told Scientific American.
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Tal Zaks, the chief medical officer of Moderna, believes that his company’s vaccine might be able to prevent transmission. However, he admitted that there was not sufficient evidence to support his claim.
To define when the pandemic has been brought under control might depend on the reduction in mortality rates. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said: “Even if we are unable to reduce transmissions, bringing down the fatality rate is a key factor in restoring normalcy back to everyday society.”
This would push the coronavirus pandemic from a lethal public health threat to a moderate threat or even just a nuisance. Once mortality rates are down, systems can be put in place to cut down transmissions as much as possible.
January was the deadliest month in the U.S. ever since the coronavirus began to spread last year. More than 95,000 people died in January, taking the total death toll beyond 440,000.
However, by the start of February, the number of infected people in the hospital fell below 100,000 for the first time in two months. The daily number of new infections is around 148,000, well below 250,000 per day during mid-January. More than 32.2 million Americans have been vaccinated to date according to the CDC, up from 16.5 million when Biden took over office on Jan. 20.
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