'The sky is not falling': Provincetown outbreak shows vaccines work, even against Delta
WASHINGTON — If you want to cast blame for the return of face masks, you will have to look to the charming fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., at the tip of Cape Cod. An outbreak of several hundred cases there earlier this month alerted public health officials to the fact that the Delta variant of the coronavirus transmits much more easily than people had previously thought.
“The war has changed,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged in an internal presentation that summarized the new findings about Delta, which led the agency to reimpose a mask mandate earlier this week in an urgent bid to keep the pandemic from spiking again across the U.S.
And if you want to find a reason for why no such spike will take place — or how such a spike can be effectively prevented — you would do well to look to the same charming fishing village. A combination of high vaccination rates and renewed masking appears to have significantly slowed growth of the Provincetown cluster just as that cluster was making national news.
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Though effectiveness varies by vaccine brand, most are quite potent against infection and exceptionally so at preventing the kind of infection that causes serious illness. Of the 833 people in the Provincetown cluster as of Wednesday, only seven had been hospitalized. And zero had died.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/eight-hundred-cases-seven-hospitalizations-and-no-deaths-the-provincetown-outbreak-shows-vaccines-work-125324207.html
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