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| How many vaccinated people have COVID-19?
Letter from the Editor A new challenge we face in our newsroom is how to figure out whether COVID-19 is running rampant through the vaccinated population without being recorded anywhere.
This is different from the frightening surge we’ve been covering. We reported that the Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth hit their all-time highs of COVID hospitalizations in the past week, which is astounding when one considers the availability of vaccines.
The people who are hospitalized, however, largely declined to be vaccinated. As we’ve learned from the science, the vaccine prevents people from getting so sick they must be hospitalized.
How many people, though, have received the vaccines and the booster but are getting COVID-19 in Northeast Ohio, without going to hospitals or being counted?
The question got personal for our newsroom this week. We took a chance Dec. 9 and had a holiday gathering at a Cleveland brewery. Nearly everyone on our team is vaccinated, and most have had the booster, so people felt the risk of infection was low compared to the joy of seeing colleagues for the first time in ages.
A couple of days later, a staff member who attended experienced cold symptoms. By Tuesday, he felt terrible and was tested. The results were positive for the coronavirus. I wouldn’t call what he has a mild case, like a cold. He says his head feels like it is filled with concrete, he has had a fever, and the fatigue is overwhelming. He is recuperating at home.
He has not been in many places where he might have contracted the virus. He suspects he was exposed while standing at the bar to get a drink on the night of out gathering, surrounded by strangers who were chatting away.
News of his infection hit our team hard. They don’t want a colleague to suffer, but they also are shaken about how close they came to the virus. They are wondering anew about taking such risks.
And we wonder how we can capture how prevalent this might be. If infections of vaccinated people are widespread without being in the official counts, we could do a public service by spreading the word.
I had a long, face-to-face conversation with my ill colleague at the gathering, and when I learned he was sick, I wondered whether I might be an asymptomatic carrier. So, I headed out to a drug store to get an at-home test kit. My pharmacy parking lot was completely filled, with eight cars lined up waiting for a space. I’d never seen that before. I drove to another drug store, which also was crowded, and found a test kit on a mostly empty shelf.
Other colleagues tried to find test kits at libraries and found them wanting. The libraries said they’d had a run on their free test kits in recent days.
Is all of this a sign that we in Northeast Ohio are surrounded by people who are testing positive on home kits and recuperating at home without their cases being reported?
It’s an important question, because next week is Christmas. Plenty of us plan to spend time with family and friends. Knowing whether COVID-19 is pretty much everywhere might change our approach. Maybe we’d ask people to take tests before gathering.
We can’t report what no one seems to know, though.
We talked about this in our daily editors call late in the week, and one suggestion was to ask you, the readers of this column. Tens of thousands of people receive this column each week. If we heard back from a large group that you know vaccinated people who are suffering from breakthrough cases without being counted or heading to hospitals, we could report that. People might take that information to heart.
How about it? If you know someone who is vaccinated but suffering from Covid, could you shoot me a note? No names, of course. We’re just looking for the scope of it. If you have other ideas for answering the question we’re asking, please send me those, too. I am at [email protected].
Thanks for reading,
Chris Quinn Editor and Vice President of Content
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