Public health officials have released a new report documenting hundreds of Alaskans who got sick with COVID-19 in spite of being vaccinated against it.
But the report comes with a counterintuitive conclusion, according to officials who worked on it: They say it reinforces the urgency of upping Alaska’s stalling vaccination rates.
That’s because the number of so-called “breakthrough” cases of COVID-19 in vaccinated people were a small fraction — about 4% — of the number of cases among unvaccinated people, even though those groups are similarly sized.
“Vaccine breakthrough doesn’t make me nervous,” said Louisa Castrodale, a state epidemiologist who worked on the report.