The number of recorded COVID-19 cases among Americans who have been fully vaccinated against the CCP virus is now over 7,100, according to health officials.
Most of the breakthrough cases, 64 percent, took place among women, while 46 percent were among people 60 years old or above.
Nearly 500 people who contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated required hospital care, though about a third of them were hospitalized for illnesses deemed unrelated to COVID-19. Eighty-eight of the breakthrough patients, or 1 percent, died. Eleven of the deaths were reported as not showing symptoms or being unrelated to the disease.
The state-by-state breakdown of the cases was not made public.
The CDC first reported the breakthrough case numbers on April 15. The new update shows 7,157 such cases. The new figures are through April 20. The CDC expects to update the numbers every Friday, a spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email.
Because the current system relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments, there may be more breakthrough cases than the number the CDC publishes.
As of April 23, more than 91 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against the CCP virus.
Fully vaccinated refers to people who received their second Moderna or Pfizer dose, or their single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, two or more weeks prior.
None of the vaccines were expected to provide full protection, so health officials and experts say the breakthrough cases are not a cause for concern.
“While there are breakthrough cases and they are not surprising, they are exceedingly rare and in no way undermine the value of mass vaccination. Moreover, the breakthrough cases are uniformly less severe, showing the benefits of even imperfect immunity,” S. Mark Tompkins, professor of infectious disease at the University of Georgia, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The CDC expects thousands of breakthrough cases to occur, a spokeswoman said. “Vaccine breakthrough infections make up a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated. CDC recommends that all eligible people get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one is available to them. CDC also continues to recommend people who have been fully vaccinated should keep taking precautions in public places, like wearing a mask, staying at least 6 feet apart from others, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces, and washing their hands often,” she said.
The CDC has said that it’s monitoring reported breakthrough cases for clustering by demographics, geographic location, time since vaccination, vaccine type, and virus lineage. It plans to soon focus on investigating only the breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death.
