Apparently. The data are not all in. Just wear your mask and follow
precautions. Safe means alive. Eric
________________________________
Subject: Can the Vaccinated Develop Long Covid?
A thoughtful and thought-provoking article from the NY Times. Stay safe, my
friends!
While some breakthrough cases among those who are fully vaccinated against
Covid-19 are inevitable, they are unlikely to result in hospitalization or
death. But one important question about breakthrough infection that remains
unanswered is: Can the vaccinated develop so-called long Covid?
Long Covid refers to a set of symptoms — such as severe fatigue, brain fog,
headache, muscle pain and sleep problems — that can persist for weeks or months
after the active infection has ended. The syndrome is poorly understood, but
studies
suggest<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F15%2Fhealth%2Fcovid-19-patients.html&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133972995907%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=0wvG8KR9CRLnmM%2BtjLUBVG4%2F%2BEaJ4GbhZo%2FDBuMh4cw%3D&reserved=0>
that between 10 and 30 percent of adults who catch the virus may experience
long Covid, including those who experienced only mild illness or no symptoms at
all.
But the vast majority of data collected about long Covid has been in the
unvaccinated population. The risk of developing long Covid for the fully
vaccinated who get infected after vaccination hasn’t been studied.
While preliminary
research<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nejm.org%2Fdoi%2Ffull%2F10.1056%2FNEJMoa2109072&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133972995907%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=sbC5Wrlf8vWO6rbEny5Gxx8lg83TSeqE%2BiNU%2BZQIaA8%3D&reserved=0>
suggests that it is, in fact, possible for a breakthrough case to lead to
symptoms that can persist for weeks to months, there are still more questions
than answers. What percent of breakthrough cases result in lingering symptoms?
How many of those people recover? Are the persistent symptoms after
breakthrough infection as severe as those that occur in the unvaccinated?
“I just don’t think there is enough data,” said Dr. Zijian Chen, medical
director at the Center for Post-Covid
Care<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mountsinai.org%2Fabout%2Fcovid19%2Fcenter-post-covid-care&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133973005902%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=wRjbVENe9OGuoU7eSH7zWSS4KY0uLQ9SMoR64%2BFHHN4%3D&reserved=0>
at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “It’s too early to tell. The
population of people getting sick post vaccination isn’t that high right now,
and there’s no good tracking mechanism for these patients.”
One recent study of Israeli health care workers published in the New England
Journal of
Medicine<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nejm.org%2Fdoi%2Ffull%2F10.1056%2FNEJMoa2109072&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133973005902%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=KCXnXxFNLTzEbKFJuOWIaEo6YXyGmHsdRtPBgyt%2FmuY%3D&reserved=0>
offers a glimpse of the risk of long Covid after a breakthrough infection.
Among 1,497 fully vaccinated health care workers, 39 of them — about 2.6
percent — developed breakthrough infections. (All of the workers were believed
to be infected after contact with an unvaccinated person, and the study was
conducted before the Delta variant became dominant.)
While most of the breakthrough cases were mild or asymptomatic, seven out of 36
workers tracked at six weeks (19 percent) still had persistent symptoms. These
long Covid symptoms included a mix of prolonged loss of smell, persistent
cough, fatigue, weakness, labored breathing or muscle pain.
But the study’s authors caution against drawing too many conclusions from the
research. The sample size — just seven patients — is small. And the research
was designed to study antibody levels in the infected, said Dr. Gili
Regev-Yochay, director of the infectious disease epidemiology unit at Sheba
Medical
Center<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shebaonline.org%2F&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133973015897%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=GgyUZBIMnYCR4w2eNIQTaFfxo%2FYttGtsjQdQK8mNE%2Fc%3D&reserved=0>.
It was not designed to study the risk of long Covid after a breakthrough
infection.
“It was not the scope of this paper,” Dr. Regev-Yochay said. “I don’t think we
have an answer to that.”
Even so, the fact that one in five of the health care workers who had
breakthrough infections still had lingering symptoms after six weeks appears to
be the first indication from a peer-reviewed study that long Covid is possible
after a breakthrough infection.
“People have said to me, ‘You’re fully vaccinated. Why are you being so
careful?’” said Dr. Robert M. Wachter, professor and chair of the department of
medicine at the University California San Francisco. “I’m still in the camp of
I don’t want to get Covid. I don’t want to get a breakthrough infection.”
Dr. Wachter said that despite the many limitations of the Israeli study, the
data offer more evidence that the vaccinated should keep taking reasonable
precautions to avoid the virus.
“I’m going to take it at face value that one in five people, six weeks after a
breakthrough case, continued to feel crummy,” Dr. Wachter said. “That’s enough
to make me want to wear two masks when I go into the grocery store, which is
not that burdensome anyway.”
Complicating the study of breakthrough infections is the fact that the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only tracks post-vaccination
infections that result in hospitalization or death. While the C.D.C. does
continue to study breakthrough infections in several large cohorts, the lack of
data on all breakthrough cases remains a source of frustration among scientists
and patient advocacy groups.
“It’s very frustrating not to have data at this point in the pandemic to know
what happens to breakthrough cases,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at
Yale School of Medicine who is conducting studies of long Covid. “If mild
breakthrough infection is turning into long Covid, we don’t have a grasp of
that number.”
Diana Berrent, founder of Survivor Corps, a Facebook
group<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fgroups%2FCOVID19survivorcorps&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133973015897%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=D6V6H25VGMX6IT%2BMRqOPJL7ZkYXW%2F1%2F0%2BC01DrOGTXw%3D&reserved=0>
for people affected by Covid-19 that has about 171,000 members, took an
informal poll and found 24 people who said they had lingering symptoms after a
breakthrough infection. It’s not a scientific sample, and the cases haven’t
been validated, but the poll shows the need for more data on breakthrough
cases, Ms. Berrent said.
“You can’t extrapolate it to the general population, but it’s a very strong
signal that the C.D.C. needs to be mandating reporting of every breakthrough
case,” Ms. Berrent said. “We can’t know what we’re not counting.”
But some experts predict the surge of new cases caused by the spread of the
Delta variant will, unfortunately, lead to more breakthrough cases in the
coming months. Dr. Chen of Mount Sinai said it will take several months before
patients with long Covid from a breakthrough infection are enrolled in studies.
“We’re waiting for these patients to show up at our doors,” Dr. Chen said.
Despite the lack of data, one thing is clear: Getting vaccinated will reduce
the risk of getting infected and getting long Covid, said Athena Akrami, a
neuroscientist at University College London who collected and published data
from nearly 4,000 long Covid
patients<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.medrxiv.org%2Fcontent%2F10.1101%2F2020.12.24.20248802v1&data=04%7C01%7C%7C08f9f3b63a334592345f08d960b09f87%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637647133973025888%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=WODp4SJs5XLw0VbOJh5Vquh5or18yL%2BVr2BN%2FWaVCbk%3D&reserved=0>
after developing long Covid herself after a March 2020 bout with Covid-19
“It’s simple math,” said Dr. Akrami. “If you reduce infections, then the
likelihood of long Covid will drop automatically.”
