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In reply to the discussion: CDC study shows three-fourths of people infected in Massachusetts covid-19 outbreak were vaccinated [View all]BumRushDaShow
(130,948 posts)they can't just wait until every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed if they are seeing a trend across the reported research that is ongoing, that might present some flags to change course.
In many cases, researchers aren't operating in a vacuum and actually belong to organizations that have regular meetings with their colleagues across institutions where they can share what they might have found so far and get feedback. I gave an example of such a meeting and presentation here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2777973
Keep in mind that CDC said what they published in an "early release" was just one piece of what they used for the decision and the WaPo article has quite a bit of info to describe what was being presented in that release. along with some other pieces of data that they used, including data from a similar Wisconsin incident. I.e., -
At least five events sparked the outbreak, so it is not possible to blame it on one party or one bar. Theres no one person or spot to blame here, said Daniel Park, group leader for viral computational genomics at the Broad Institute. The thing thats catching the attention in national public health is that a decently high vaccination rate isnt quite enough to stop an outbreak with so people in one place and the delta variant spreading. The scientists, along with officials at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, reported that 79 percent of the breakthrough infections were symptomatic. Four of five people who were hospitalized were fully vaccinated.
They are now analyzing the genetic fingerprints of the virus samples taken to trace chains of transmission and determine how commonly fully vaccinated people were infecting one another. The presence of similar amounts of virus in the noses of vaccinated and unvaccinated people raises the possibility they are both contributing to spread, but many scientists think that vaccinated people should be less likely to spread the virus. Similar findings may be emerging from other locations. The internal CDC document showed that national surveillance found that vaccinated people had larger amounts of virus in their nose when infected with the delta variant, compared with other variants.
A report of cases from mid-July in Dane County, Wis., found a similar result, showing that fully vaccinated people had viral loads similar to those of unvaccinated people and may be more capable of spreading COVID than was previously known. The Wisconsin data showed that unvaccinated people were twice as likely to be infected as fully vaccinated people.
Here is the link to the Dane County, WI data that was also evaluated - https://publichealthmdc.com/documents/2021-07-29_data_snapshot.pdf (PDF)
A copy/paste of the observation in that PDF is this -
Our partners at UW-Madisonsequence COVID test specimens and are able to determine levels of virus present in a sample. More virus in the sample can mean a greater likelihood that the person with COVID can transmit the infection to others. The chart to the right shows the level of virus (using cycle threshold data) present from recent test specimens in Dane County of fully vaccinated people (yellow dots on the right) vs. not fully vaccinated people (gray dots on the left). When the dots are below the gray dotted line, that means they had enough virus to be able to be sequenced. We can see that there are far more samples from the unvaccinated groupthis is expected because unvaccinated people are more at risk of getting COVID. We can also see that the gray and yellow dots are distributed similarly. This is evidence that fully vaccinated people have viral loads similar to that of unvaccinated people, and may be more capable of spreading COVID than was previously known. This is a very recent discovery that is also being supported by recent research done by the CDC, but more research is still needed.
In fact, here is a screenshot of the slide that has the above text content that is part of that PDF -
And regarding the PCR tests, there are currently no quantitative type kits approved by the FDA. I expect that hospitalized individuals have routine blood screening and those samples can be pulled to do further serology testing and this is what was done.
The results that they are presenting are "real life" / live examples of people who have become infected and have been tested.
What you propose is that they do a large controlled purposeful infection of a designated group of people, which would also require a similar amount of people kept in a complete bubble without any infection (past or current), plus with and without vaccination, and with or without partial vaccination to use as control groups...and good luck with that.