As of April 30 there were 10,262 cases of fully vaccinated people being infected with Covid-19, said the CDC this week, quoting statistics from 46 American states and territories. While 1.6% (160) actually died, less than 7% of the patients were hospitalized with Covid-19 symptoms. 63% of those infected were female and the median age for all cases was 58.
“The number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths that will be prevented among vaccinated persons will far exceed the number of vaccine breakthrough cases,” the CDC claimed. They suggest the number of these rare “breakthrough infections was only around 1 in every 10,000 fully vaccinated people, even though the total was substantially undercounted. Try telling that to someone who lost a loved one that was fully vaccinated.
The CDC added that reporting of such cases is voluntary and does not include vaccinated people who had no Covid-19 symptoms and weren’t tested. They noted that 101 million Americans were fully vaccinated as of April 30, and the vast majority of those inoculated were being protected from the virus.
Sequencing data on breakthrough infections suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines being used in the US are about equally effective against various variants of the virus. Around 64% of the cases involved “variants of concern,” such as the UK Covid-19 variant, the CDC said. As of late March and early April, those same variants accounted for approximately 70% of the overall Covid-19 cases in the US, the agency said.