Yes, keep distancing even if you get a shot
As the coronavirus vaccines have rolled out, so too have promising messages about what the shots mean for the countless lives upended by the pandemic.
“The weapon that will end the war.”
“A veil of protection over the country.”
“Our light at the end of the tunnel.”
But while the vaccines are a critical step toward slowing the spread of a virus that has caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide, killing hundreds of thousands in the United States alone, experts repeatedly have emphasized that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean an immediate return to pre-pandemic life.
“There are many people that think it’s kind of an antidote to it all and that once you’re vaccinated, you won’t have to mask or distance or any of those things,” said Namandje Bumpus, a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “Certainly, all of us getting vaccinated moves us toward that more quickly, but it’s not something that we’re going to be able to do as soon as we get vaccinated. We’re going to have to continue to be diligent the way that we have been.”
Public health officials say at least 70 percent of the population needs to be inoculated for the country to achieve herd immunity and stop the virus’ spread.
Clinical trials have shown that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna two-dose vaccine regimens are both highly effective at preventing illness from the virus, but they don’t provide instant and complete protection, said Onyema Ogbuagu, the principal investigator for Yale University’s Pfizer vaccine trial.
It typically takes a week after the second dose for the PfizerBioNTech vaccine to reach 95 percent efficacy. Moderna’s vaccine efficacy increases to 94 percent two weeks after the second shot. This means that even if you get your two shots as scheduled and wait the appropriate amount of time, there is still a small chance you could be infected and develop symptoms, Ogbuagu said.
“On a population level, 95 percent efficacy still translates to 5/ 100, or 50/1,000, or 500/10,000 vaccinated persons still being vulnerable to symptomatic disease and maybe even more having asymptomatic carriage,” he wrote in an email.
There are still unanswered questions about whether vaccinated people can transmit the virus.
Scientists are still trying to gather more data on how the vaccines affect transmission. It’s possible that people who are vaccinated can be exposed to the coronavirus and become unknowing carriers, said Joshua Barocas, an infectious-disease physician at Boston Medical Center.
People with no symptoms transmit more than half of all cases of the coronavirus, according to findings from a CDC model published this month.
The virus also can just hang around in a person’s nostrils after they’re exposed, Barocas said. Then, all it takes is an ill-timed sneeze to potentially transmit it.
Still, experts are encouraging people to remain hopeful and prioritize getting vaccinated, emphasizing that the recommendations to keep following public health measures are temporary.
“We all are tired and are at risk of burnout from all of this,” Barocas said. “The goal is not to say, ‘You absolutely cannot meet with people.’ It’s to say, ‘Let’s continue to do the things that we know lower your risk as best as you possibly can.’ ”