So far 168 Oregonians have tested positive for the coronavirus despite being fully vaccinated against COVID-19, leaving 19 hospitalized and three dead -- figures so small that officials said they were “good news.”
The case count means that of the 700,000 people who reached full immunity, just 0.024% got infected anyway.
“This shows the vaccines are working really well,” said Dr. Melissa Sutton, the Oregon Health Authority’s medical director for respiratory viral diseases. “All of those numbers are good news.”
While coronavirus vaccines are proven to be effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths among those who do get infected, no vaccine is foolproof. Sutton was not surprised by the death and hospitalization counts, either.
“They are, of course, unfortunate,” Sutton said. But the numbers were “not more than we would have expected.”
State officials calculated the number of so-called “breakthrough” cases among Oregonians who had reached full immunity, which comes two weeks after a final vaccine dose. Officials track the cases because they could point to dangerous mutations of the virus.
It’s unclear how many, if any, of the breakthrough cases Oregon announced were caused by virus variants, Sutton said, though none of them are known to be.
State officials said many of the people with identified breakthrough cases reported no symptoms and were tested for other reasons, such as care-facility workers who must be screened at least once a month.
None of the three deaths was tied to a variant, the state said. The state’s information is current through April 2.
Oregon has now identified 294 cases driven by variants the federal government is concerned about. But the health authority has detailed case data for only 23.
That’s because the state identified the other 271 variant cases before federal health officials said those specific versions of the virus had to be monitored closely. As a result, at the time Oregon discovered those variants it didn’t check whether the people infected with them had been vaccinated.
Oregon’s disclosure Thursday makes it at least the seventh state publishing breakthrough case numbers. Officials initially denied a records request from The Oregonian/OregonLive for the data.
Lawmakers said the state should reveal how many such cases health investigators identified. They also criticized the state for hiding behind a law allowing officials to conceal any health investigation information they want, with a bill pending in the legislature to improve transparency.
Sutton said the agency will continue to update numbers about breakthrough cases once a month.
-- Fedor Zarkhin
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