Getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19 after being vaccinated is possible, but very rare (and much more so than from other everyday causes)
Different vaccines against COVID-19 have different degrees of effectiveness, but none reaches 100%. That means it is possible to contract the disease even after receiving the full course of the vaccine, although it is an extremely rare possibility. In the United States, where more than 76 million people have already been vaccinated with the full cycle, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported 5,800 cases of infections after being vaccinated when the total number of vaccinated was 66 million. That is, an incidence of 0.0088%.
Of those 5,800 cases, 29% contracted the disease asymptomatically, and only 7% required hospitalization. The death toll is 74, only 1.3% of those infected. In other words: of the 66 million vaccinated, only 0.0001% died of COVID-19, and the vast majority of those who still got it did so without serious symptoms. Exactly as the forecasts marked at the beginning of the vaccination campaign. “The vaccination is working exactly as we hoped,” Jinlene Chan, acting assistant secretary for public health services for Maryland, told Wall Street Journal.
Dying or getting seriously ill from COVID-19 after getting vaccinated: much less likely than in our daily lives
The causes of mortality in Spain and their incidence in relation to the population leave circulatory system diseases (hypertension, myocardial infarction, arrhythmias …) as the main cause of death in our country, with an incidence of 0.261% over our population. The rest of the causes that continue to be much more frequent than the possibility of dying from COVID-19 after having received the complete vaccine with the data published from the United States CDC.
Hospitalizations for COVID-19 after being vaccinated are also much less frequent than for a multitude of other diagnoses if we look at the incidence of hospital discharges in Spain also broken down by type of disease. Hospital discharges for circulatory, digestive, respiratory diseases or even congenital anomalies and tumors are much more frequent in Spain than those seen by COVID-19 in vaccinated Americans.
Even the risks of ailments such as blood clots, which have paralyzed the administration of the Janssen vaccine and led to a rethink of the AstraZeneca administration strategy, are still much lower after receiving individual vaccines than for other daily activities, such as smoking, taking the contraceptive pill or travel by plane.
In fact, the risks of thrombi after receiving these vaccines are more than 165,000 times lower than if we contract COVID-19 seriously without being vaccinated, where one in six patients suffer from thrombosis. The risk with the AstraZeneca vaccine is close to one in a million.
David Hirschwerk, an infectious disease physician at Northwell Health System (New York), told Wall Street Journal that “the experience so far is that the vaccine continues to be highly effective, and those who suffered infections [pese a estar vacunados] they have had very mild and treatable illnesses. This is really what we see every year with the flu vaccine. “
The United States has seen these data with 20% of its population fully vaccinated (already close to 24%). Spain is at 7%, and although the suspension of Janssen complicates the plans, it is still feasible to reach the target of 70% of the vaccinated population by the last week of August. During the time until then we will have the opportunity to see if the US figures are replicated in our country. What happened in the residences after the first months of vaccination, where deaths have been neutralized and contagions minimized, give rise to thinking that it is.