Florida governor signs executive order to ensure there will be no mask mandate in schools
New evidence about the contagiousness of the Delta variant shows it’s more important than ever to get vaccinated, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study earlier Friday showing that three-quarters of people infected during an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, were vaccinated. Most cases involved the Delta variant. And infected people who were vaccinated had just as much virus in their bodies as unvaccinated patients did.
“What we did know was how transmissible the virus was among unvaccinated people,” Fauci told NPR. “So it was very clear that when you compare the Delta variant with, for example, the Alpha variant, it was clearly, considerably more transmissible. The new data show that it is so transmissible that even a vaccinated person who has a breakthrough infection can now transmit it. That is the new data.”
The Provincetown study prompted the CDC to change its guidance on mask use and advise vaccinated people to resume mask use indoors in areas of sustained or high transmission of the virus.
“There’s a difference between knowing that is transmissible in general versus it’s also transmissible when you have a breakthrough infection of a vaccinated person,” Fauci said.
“I think the simplest way to get people to understand is that we are dealing with a different virus,” he added. “The Delta virus has characteristics that’s different than the Alpha variant and other variants we’ve dealt with. So when someone says the war is changed, what it really means [is that] the virus has changed. And we have got to keep up in our understanding, and what our policies are related to the fact that we’re dealing now with a more formidable virus.”
Some background: The Alpha, or B.1.1.7 variant, dominated the US until early summer. Now Delta, also known as B.1.617.2, accounts for more than 80% of cases, according to the CDC. It’s driven a fresh surge of infections.
“The solution to all of this is to get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can,” Fauci said. “There’s a really, really good reason to get vaccinated, and that is to save yourself from getting a severe infection that would lead to hospitalization and deaths.”
“There’s one striking number that people who choose to remain unvaccinated should remember: in the United States… look at all of the Covid deaths, 99.5% of them occur among unvaccinated people, and 0.5% occur among vaccinated people. So if ever there was a statistic that’s striking, to tell you the difference between a vaccinated and unvaccinated person, that’s it,” Fauci added.
