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and somewhere along the line it’s lost. one day you wake up and everyone’s forgotten. those friends you had don’t even remember talking to you. 

but once upon a time that was your everyday. for years.

July 30th 2021

Highlight 1

The document, obtained Friday by NBC News and first published by The Washington Post, explains the scientific background behind the agency’s change in mask guidance earlier this week.

It concludes that the delta variant is “highly contagious, likely to be more severe” and that “breakthrough infections may be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases.”

Researchers have been focusing on viral load — a term for just how much of the virus is present in infected peoples’ bodies — which can affect transmissibility and severity. Infections with the delta variant lead to higher levels of virus in the body, even in breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated individuals, the document said. Virus levels can be as high in breakthrough cases as in unvaccinated people, even if vaccinated people don’t get nearly as sick.

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The document notes that the risk of infection is threefold lower in vaccinated people, and the risk of severe disease or death is at least tenfold lower in vaccinated people.

One piece of evidence cited in the document came from an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where 74 percent of cases were in fully vaccinated individuals. In a report on the outbreak published Friday by the CDC, researchers said that the delta variant was implicated in 89 percent of cases, and in the breakthrough cases, 79 percent of people developed symptoms.

Of note, PCR tests, which are used to determine if someone is infected, showed similar levels of the virus in vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people. PCR results, the CDC wrote, “might reflect the level of infectious virus.” In other words, it could suggest that vaccinated people are as contagious as unvaccinated people.

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The internal CDC document also provided more concrete numbers on breakthrough infections, estimating that at current levels, there are 35,000 symptomatic breakthrough infections per week among the 162 million fully vaccinated adults in the U.S. The agency stopped providing public information on most breakthrough infections in April, when the tally hit 10,000. From that point on, the CDC website only posted data on breakthrough infections that led to hospitalization or death.