HealthDay News – Infection incidence is significantly reduced once healthcare workers receive the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccination schedule. This is evident from two research letters published online March 23 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
William Daniel, MD, of Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas at Dallas, and colleagues will report on December 15, 2020, on their institution-initiated efforts to provide vaccination to frontline staff. Between December 15, 2020 and January 28, 2021, 1.5 percent of employees who were eligible for vaccination were newly infected with the severe coronavirus 2 with acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2; 350 of the 23,234 employees) identified. The infection rates differed depending on the vaccination status: 2.61 percent for unvaccinated employees, 1.82 percent for partially vaccinated employees and 0.05 percent for fully vaccinated employees.
Jocelyn Keehner, MD of the University of California at San Diego Health and colleagues evaluated pooled, unidentified data from an electronic health record system at the University of California at San Diego and the University of California at Los Angeles. Among the vaccinated health care workers (36,659 received the first dose, 28,184 of whom received the second dose), 379 people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at least one day after vaccination, with the majority (71 percent) positive within the study was first two weeks after the first dose. After receiving both doses of the vaccine, 37 healthcare workers tested positive. Twenty-two of these healthcare workers had positive test results one to seven days after the second dose. Eight health care workers tested positive eight to 14 days after the second vaccination and seven tested positive 15 days or more after the second vaccination. Seven new SARS-CoV-2 infections were identified among 14,990 health care workers who received the second dose of the vaccine two or more weeks earlier, representing a positivity rate of 0.05 percent.
“We were able to describe the infection rates in a real-life scenario in which the introduction of the vaccine coincided with an increase in infections,” Keehner said in a statement. “We observed a low overall positivity rate among fully immunized health care workers, which supports the high protection rates of these vaccines.”
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