Before we look at the chances of covid reinfection after vaccine, let’s first understand that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
From 12 years of age and older are now eligible to get a free COVID-19 vaccination. However, taking the vaccine does not mean the elimination of reinfection.
According to Dr Katherine O’Brien’s explanation of the breakthrough infections, “people can still get COVID-19 even when they’re fully vaccinated”.
The vaccines that we have against COVID are incredibly effective vaccines. And people have seen the results from the clinical trials of, you know, anywhere in the 80 percent range, 90 percent range of efficacy. But that doesn’t mean that 100 percent of people, 100 percent of the time are going to be protected against disease. There is no vaccine that provides that level of protection for any disease. So we do expect in any vaccine program that there will be rare, but there will be cases of disease among people who were fully vaccinated and certainly among some people who were partially vaccinated. This doesn’t mean that the vaccines aren’t working. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with the vaccines. What it does mean is that not everybody who receives vaccines has 100 percent protection. What we do want to really emphasize for people is that it’s so important to get vaccinated because these vaccines are really effective and it gives you a really good chance of not developing the disease.
Still on reinfection after vaccine Dr. Katherine provide answers to frequently asked questions
How frequent are breakthrough infections?
The degree of severity of disease among people who have a breakthrough infection is less severe than the severity of disease among people who aren’t vaccinated. So vaccines are operating in a couple of different ways. First, of course, they’re preventing people from getting the disease at all. And even when disease does occur among a person, people who are fully vaccinated, the severity of that disease is less.
About how often we’re actually seeing breakthrough infections. We’re monitoring this really carefully. And there’s a couple of things I want to say about breakthrough infections. The first is that they are uncommon. And so this is not something that’s happening in an unexpected way, but they don’t happen equally among all different kinds of people.
People who are at increased risk of disease, so people with frail immune systems, people who are in older age groups, they have a greater risk of having breakthrough disease than other people. So it’s not an equal risk of breakthrough disease.
The second point here is that we’re seeing more cases of breakthrough disease, in part because people are stopping the other interventions that reduce the transmission of this virus. So when the virus starts to transmit at a greater and greater pace and with greater frequency, there’s a lot more exposure that everybody has, including people who are vaccinated.
Now that you know what your chances of covid reinfection after vaccine are, let’s look at the risk of unvaccinated people.
Are unvaccinated people less likely to contract COVID-19 infections?
Yes, only if members of their family have some sort of immunity against the virus, study suggests.
Researchers from Umeå University, in northeast Sweden, found Covid vaccines not only protect people who have received the shot, but others around them as well.
If an unvaccinated person within a five-person family unit – with the other four members either having received the jab or acquired natural immunity via infection – their risk of contracting the virus was reduced by 97 percent.
There was also a direct correlation between the share of family members vaccinated and a lowered risk of infection.
Living in a family with multiple people having immunity to the virus reduced the risk of catching the virus for non-immune people. Researchers found that four immune people within a five person family reduces risk for the other person by over 97% (bottom right). The risk of infection increases as less people in the family get jabbed
Experts believe the target for herd immunity is 80% of a population having immunity to the virus, though emerging strains of the virus could set that number higher. Pictured: A man in Stockholm, Swede, receives a shot of a COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021
‘The results strongly suggest that vaccination is important not only for individual protection, but also for reducing transmission, especially within families, which is a high-risk environment for transmission,’ said Peter Nordström, a professor of geriatric medicine at Umeå University, in a statement.
Researchers, who published their findings in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday, gathered data from 1.7 million people spread across 814,806 family units in Sweden.
Each family was made up of between two and five people.
The team used infection and inoculation data to determine how many people within each household had some sort of immunity from the virus – whether through natural antibodies from infection or from having received the vaccine.
All of the households included in the study had at least one family member that did not have immunity, and researchers calculated their likelihood of catching Covid.
Researchers found that people in five-member families with four members immune were most safe – with the unvaccinated person being 97 percent less likely to contract the virus when compared to the average unvaccinated person.
Having three members of a four- or five-member household with immunity reduced the risk of infection by more than 90 percent for the unvaccinated person as well.
Two members of a household having immunity reduced the overall risk of infection by at least 75 percent, and one immune person in the family cut the risk by nearly 50 percent.
Herd immunity is a well-known concept, and the researchers say the findings prove that the combination of protection from the Covid vaccine and natural antibodies can prevent infection in even non-immune people.
‘It seems as if vaccination helps not only to reduce the individual’s risk of becoming infected, but also to reduce transmission, which in turn minimizes not only the risk that more people become critically ill, but also that new problematic variants emerge and start to take over,’ said Marcel Ballin, co-author of the study and doctoral student at Umeå University.
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