By Marcy Axness, TME

The spike in covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths over the past month being driven by the delta variant of the coronavirus has school districts scrambling to update guidance as classes are about to begin. State agencies and businesses are adopting vaccination mandates and families are rethinking late summer travel plans.

Alarming CDC Leak

On July 29, The Washington Post reported a leaked set of slides from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). They contained alarming data not meant for the public.

It was a wake-up call for many, to hear that delta is “as contagious as chicken pox,” that fully-vaccinated people can get infected and are as likely to shed and spread the virus as unvaccinated people. The report’s authors urged officials to acknowledge that “the war has changed.”

The report says unvaccinated people are more vulnerable to delta infection than vaccinated people, and far more likely to be hospitalized or to die (see report graphic below).

New Reason to Get Vaccine

The CDC now wrestles with the challenge of how to phrase vaccine promotion in light of these “breakthrough cases” in vaccinated people.
Jeffrey Shaman, Columbia University epidemiologist, was quoted by The Washington Post on the delta-driven shift in vaccine benefit. It isn’t now to protect family and community (via herd immunity, which has been the nationwide vaccination goal) as much as it is to simply protect oneself.

“…[V]accination is now about personal protection—protecting oneself against severe disease,” Shaman said.

Dust Off Those Masks

Mask guidance from the CDC was updated two days before the leaked report went public, and did not go as far as the report authors had recommended. On July 27, CDC director Rochelle Walensky reversed the May guidance that vaccinated people could go mask-free indoors and anywhere. She now urges all citizens in high-transmission communities, vaccinated and unvaccinated, to wear masks in public indoor spaces.

Readers may not realize that Kern County is a “high-transmission” area. In the week leading up to Walensky’s July 27 mask guidance revision announcement, covid case numbers in Kern County rose steadily, and in the following six days (see graph below) new cases nearly tripled.

On the closing frame of the leaked slide deck report, the authors strongly recommended “universal masking” as a prevention strategy.

Walensky pulled that punch, tempering the bitter pill with the “in high-transmission” qualifier. It may be too easy to dismiss that guidance if you reside in a county—like Kern County—in which there has been no talk of covid, or masks, or anything other than the simple joys of returning to sweet normality. But the facts show we are at risk.

Kathleen Neuzil (a vaccine expert from the University of Maryland), cited by the Washington Post, suggested the public will need to establish a more pragmatic relationship with a virus that is likely “not going away” in the foreseeable future. That means focusing on preventing serious consequences of covid-19, which, according to the data, vaccines do to a significant extent. The move by government agencies and private companies to mandatory employee vaccinations suggests that the message is being received.

Photo captions:

Greater risk of disease, hospitalization and death among unvaccinated vs. vaccinated people: National estimates

Graph of Kern County covid case incidence data from federal, state and county agencies, updated as of August 3, 2021.

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This is part of the August 6, 2021 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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