8 Fully Vaccinated Die of COVID in Maine, as States Continue to Report ‘Breakthrough’ Cases
Maine reports eight deaths in fully vaccinated people with COVID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 3,459 breakthrough cases of COVID resulting in hospitalization or death.
Eight people in Maine
have died with COVID after being fully vaccinated, according to the latest numbers from
Maine’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which confirmed a total of
457 breakthrough cases in the state.
Initial
data suggest breakthrough cases in Maine are more common in older individuals and people with underlying health conditions — the same populations that, among the unvaccinated, are
most at risk of hospitalization or death from the virus.
About half of the vaccinated people in Maine who tested positive for
COVID had not experienced symptoms when contacted by case investigators, according to the Maine CDC.
In Maine and other states, anyone who tests positive for
SARS-Cov-2 two weeks after receiving the single-dose
Johnson & Johnson shot or completing the two-dose
Moderna or
Pfizer vaccination is recorded as a breakthrough case.
The daughter of one Maine woman who died from the virus despite being vaccinated
said she wishes there was more information available about breakthrough cases. If she had known more, she said, she would have taken more precautions despite her mother’s vaccination status and been more insistent that she seek testing and treatment when she first had symptoms.
On June 3, Napa County California announced a fully vaccinated woman, who was more than a month past her second Moderna shot, died after being hospitalized with COVID. The 65-year-old woman had underlying conditions and tested positive for the Alpha variant,
The New York Times reported.
“I’m very sad that she had a sufficiently severe illness that it actually led to her death,”
said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. But “we expected to have the occasional breakthrough infection,”
he said.
As of June 9, there had been more than 5,723
breakthrough COVID cases identified in California, according to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).