40% of local Covid-19 cases are in the vaccinated. What does that say about the vaccines?

Nursing home staff Covid-19 vaccination

Christopher Bumpus, director of nursing at Bishop Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Syracuse, gets a Covid-19 vaccination on Dec. 21, 2020. N. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.comN. Scott Trimble | strimble@syra

Syracuse, N.Y. – Since July 1, nearly 40% of all Onondaga County residents who tested positive for the novel coronavirus had been fully vaccinated.

Does that mean the vaccines aren’t working?

No, experts say. Those positive cases represent just two-tenths of 1% of those who have been vaccinated. Experts say the vaccines were never guaranteed to stop all infection, but were designed to keep people from getting severely ill -- and they’re doing that.

“In the United States, 97% of the hospitalizations over the past three months, since delta came on the scene, are in unvaccinated people,” said Dr. Stephen Thomas, an infectious disease expert and director of Upstate Medical University’s Global Health Institute. “Ninety-nine percent of the people who have died of Covid in the last three months were unvaccinated.”

The state health department said that Wednesday’s study found “unvaccinated New Yorkers were 11 times more likely to be hospitalized and eight times more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated.”

Onondaga County officials have repeatedly declined to say how many fully vaccinated people have ended up in hospitals or died. A county health department spokeswoman said Wednesday the data would be released “when numbers are large enough to ensure the privacy of individuals and families.”

At a news conference this week, County Executive Ryan McMahon estimated that one or two fully vaccinated people are admitted to Syracuse hospitals each day. He said he was not aware of any vaccinated patients in the county who had died of Covid-19.

Dr. Philip Falcone, chief medical officer at St. Joseph’s Health, said he wasn’t surprised that 40% of Covid-19 cases were in the fully vaccinated.

“That’s probably about what we’d expect,” Falcone said. “The vaccines aren’t 100% effective, but we are significantly reducing hospitalizations and deaths.”

As of Tuesday, 44 Covid-19 patients were in Syracuse hospitals. While that’s four times as many as a month ago, it’s far below the peak in January of about 300. Doctors say that vaccines, particularly among those over 65, who are at greatest risk of complications from Covid-19, have drastically reduced hospitalizations and deaths.

The study released Wednesday of Covid-19 cases in New York indicates that vaccines remain highly effective at keeping people out of the hospital but are becoming less effective against keeping people from getting infected.

Researchers from the state Department of Health, University at Albany and SUNY Rensselaer said the vaccines’ effectiveness against hospitalization in New York remained between 91% and 95%, when adjusted for age, from early May to late July. Effectiveness against getting infected, however, dropped from about 92% to 80% during that time period, as the delta variant became the dominant form of the virus, the study said.

That waning effectiveness, in part, led the federal government to announce Wednesday that booster shots will be available to Americans eight months after their first vaccination series, starting in September.

McMahon said the vaccine remains “the best tool we have to protect ourselves in this pandemic. Is it a perfect tool? No.”

He said that 40% number is skewed because the county has a relatively high rate of vaccination: The more vaccinated people you have, the more likely some of them will test positive.

It’s important to know what that 40% figure represents and what it doesn’t. It means that of all the county’s confirmed positive cases since July 1, 40% of them were in fully vaccinated people. It does not mean that 40% of fully vaccinated people were infected. That number is impossible to know, for a variety of reasons, but the percentage is certainly much smaller.

How small? In Onondaga County, nearly 281,000 people have been fully vaccinated, and about 702 cases have been confirmed in that group since July 1. That means that 25 of every 10,000 fully vaccinated people have tested positive since then, when the delta variant took off.

Put another way, only about two-tenths of 1% of county residents who fully vaccinated have tested positive since July 1.

By contrast, 51 out of every 10,000 unvaccinated people have tested positive since then, or about half of 1%. That’s double the rate of the vaccinated group.

The picture is muddier than that, though. There are likely far more Covid cases among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated that go undetected. Many people infected with the virus never have symptoms, or have symptoms that resemble allergies or a cold, so they don’t get tested.

In addition, McMahon noted that testing has increased over the last month, so more cases are being caught among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. (The partially vaccinated represent about 2.6% of positive cases, and 4% were unknown vaccination status.)

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