Forbes - Covid in the Ukraine conflict

Plus: CDC loosens mask guidelines

In July 2021, 75 people attended a wedding without social distancing or masking in Minnesota. One of those attendees was a child who wasn’t yet eligible for a Covid-19 vaccination, who turned out to be infected with the disease. After finding out about the infection, 62 of the attendees were tested for Covid - and 29 tested positive. But the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated attendees was stark. 92% of the 12 unvaccinated attendees tested positive for Covid, one of who ended up being hospitalized with Covid. 2 of the 4 partially vaccinated attendees were infected. And only 35% of the 46 fully vaccinated attendees tested positive. 

The results of this case study, which were published in JAMA Network Open today, help illustrate that although vaccines are primarily geared towards preventing severe Covid cases, they do also reduce the risk of infection even as variants continue to develop (this wedding took place in the middle of the delta wave). “Fully vaccinated attendees had a lower risk of developing symptoms or testing positive, and the only hospitalization was among an unvaccinated adult,” the authors of the paper write.

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What Else We Are Reading

• AstraZeneca's Evusheld and GSK's sotrovimab lose efficacy against Omicron's subvariants (Endpoints)

• These Vaccines May Be Ready to Take On New COVID Variants (Scientific American)

• Pregnancy-related deaths shot up during pandemic’s first year (Washington Post)