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A few months ago, life seemed to be inching back to normal for the fully vaccinated. Grandparents were reuniting with grandkids, travelers were booking vacations and more people were leaving their masks at home. But the rise of a new coronavirus variant, known as delta, has crushed the optimism many felt in the early days of summer and replaced it with an air of uncertainty.
Cases of COVID-19, fueled by delta, are higher this summer than they were last summer, and hospitalizations and deaths caused by the highly contagious variant are also on the rise. Unvaccinated individuals are bearing the brunt of delta's wrath, but worries still abound for the vaccinated: Will the variant lead to more restrictions and upend another year of plans? How can we keep young kids who aren't eligible for vaccination safe and shield people with suppressed immune systems? And what about breakthrough infections?
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Delta isn't the first concerning coronavirus variant to pop up — and it won't be the last, experts say. Here's what that means for vaccinated people:
Vaccines work better when more people get them
If you've had your shots, rest assured you have a high degree of protection from getting severely ill or dying from COVID-19. In fact, less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated Americans have been hospitalized with the disease or have succumbed to it, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show. And while reports of asymptomatic and mild breakthrough infections are making headlines, research shows even those are pretty rare.
The vaccines even mount a strong defense against delta, which is more contagious than the other coronavirus strains and perhaps more lethal. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a full dose regimen of the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) is 88 percent effective against a symptomatic illness caused by a delta infection. And if a vaccinated person is hospitalized with a delta infection, they're less likely to need supplemental oxygen, a preprint study out of Singapore shows.
But vaccines don't just work on an individual level; they “work on a population level,” says James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Global Center for Health Security. “One of the important things about vaccination is it provides this dampening effect across a community that's more than just its effect on one person. It can be synergistic when you have a large portion of the population vaccinated,” he says, explaining that as vaccination rates go up, virus transmission goes down and hospitalizations and deaths will follow.
Increasing population-wide immunity also reduces the risk that a variant even more dangerous than delta will pop up. That's because the more chances a virus has to replicate, or spread from person to person, the more likely it is to mutate.
"That's just essentially spinning the roulette wheel for the virus again, until it potentially has the opportunity to come up with a lucky number,” Lawler says.