Even so,the fact that 1 in 5 of the health care workers who had breakthrough infections still had lingering symptoms after six weeks appears to be the first indication from a peer-reviewed study that long COVID is possible after a breakthrough infection.
“People have said to me,‘You’re fully vaccinated. Why are you being so careful?’” said Dr Robert M. Wachter,professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University California,San Francisco. “I’m still in the camp of I don’t want to get COVID. I don’t want to get a breakthrough infection.”
Wachter said that despite the many limitations of the Israeli study,the data offer more evidence that the vaccinated should keep taking reasonable precautions to avoid the virus.
“I’m going to take it at face value that 1 in 5 people,six weeks after a breakthrough case,continued to feel crummy,” Wachter said. “That’s enough to make me want to wear two masks when I go into the grocery store,which is not that burdensome anyway.”
Complicating the study of breakthrough infections is the fact that the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention only tracks post-vaccination infections that result in hospitalisation or death. While the CDC does continue to study breakthrough infections in several large cohorts,the lack of data on all breakthrough cases remains a source of frustration among scientists and patient advocacy groups.
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“It’s very frustrating not to have data at this point in the pandemic to know what happens to breakthrough cases,” said Akiko Iwasaki,an immunologist at Yale School of Medicine who is conducting studies of long COVID. “If mild breakthrough infection is turning into long COVID,we don’t have a grasp of that number.”
Diana Berrent,founder of Survivor Corps,a Facebook group for people affected by COVID-19 that has about 171,000 members,took an informal poll and found 24 people who said they had lingering symptoms after a breakthrough infection. It is not a scientific sample,and the cases have not been validated,but the poll shows the need for more data on breakthrough cases,Berrent said.
“You can’t extrapolate it to the general population,but it’s a very strong signal that the CDC needs to be mandating reporting of every breakthrough case,” Berrent said. “We can’t know what we’re not counting.”
But some experts predict the surge of new cases caused by the spread of the delta variant will,unfortunately,lead to more breakthrough cases in the coming months. Chen said it will take several months before patients with long COVID from a breakthrough infection are enrolled in studies.
“We’re waiting for these patients to show up at our doors,” Chen said.
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Despite the lack of data,one thing is clear:Getting vaccinated will reduce the risk of getting infected and getting long COVID,said Athena Akrami,a neuroscientist at University College London who collected and published data from nearly 4000 long COVID patients after developing long COVID herself after a March 2020 bout with COVID-19.
“It’s simple math,” Akrami said. “If you reduce infections,then the likelihood of long COVID will drop automatically.”
The New York Times