Fully vaccinated people in the US have been told to wear masks again. This advice includes those who haven’t taken the vaccine as well. But does that imply the vaccine doesn’t work? Especially, against the new delta-variant.
President Joe Biden said the announcement showed that America needs to “do better” on vaccinations, adding that a vaccine mandate for the country’s more than two million federal workers was now “under consideration.”
People vaccinated against Covid-19 in high-risk parts of the United States should resume wearing masks indoors, the top health authority said Tuesday, a major reversal in guidance that underscored the country’s struggle to suppress the Delta variant.
So should fully vaccinated people be concerned?
As recently as last week, the CDC had defended its surprise decision in May that vaccinated people did not have to wear masks indoors in most circumstances.
According to the latest CDC data, 63 percent of the country’s more than 3,200 counties are experiencing substantial or high transmission.
Substantial is defined as being between 50 to 100 daily cases per 100,000 people over seven days, while high is defined as more than 100 daily cases per 100,000 over seven days.
It has been reported the reason the vaccinated people need to be masked again is to stop the spread of the disease. So vaccinated people are having to do this to prevent the spread in unvaccinated people.
However, fully vaccinated people can still develop symptoms & transmit covid-19 and are at a risk to the delta variant, but less in both cases.
The delta variant
Eric Cioe-Pena, director of global health at Northwell Health in New York, said that “this is a solution to a problem that exists because we have high levels of people that are not vaccinated.”
“The main predictor of how much Covid is going to surge in an area is the vaccination rate,” he added, so areas that are highly vaccinated will not fall under the new mask guidance.
According to a recent paper in the journal Virological, the amount of virus found in the first tests of patients with the Delta variant was 1,000 times higher than patients in the first wave of the virus in 2020, greatly increasing its contagiousness.
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