Journey to the Indie Radar!

Michael Barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

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Today: The United States takes a step backward in the pandemic, warning that even vaccinated Americans may spread the virus and asking millions of them to resume wearing masks. I spoke with my colleague Apoorva Mandavilli about this new chapter of the virus. It’s Monday, August 2.

Hey, Apoorva.

Apoorva Mandavilli
Hi.

Michael Barbaro
My sense is that you do not come bearing good news.

Apoorva Mandavilli
I do not.

Michael Barbaro
Well, I have only come to expect that from you.

Apoorva Mandavilli
Could be worse, though. Could be worse.

Michael Barbaro
Could it? So as I think we’re hinting at, a lot has changed since we spoke to you exactly one week ago, and that conversation was about breakthrough infections of Covid-19, vaccinated people getting the virus because of the Delta variant. And right after we spoke, we got a bunch of new information about those kind of infections that really began to change how the government and a lot of other people are approaching the entire pandemic. So talk us through all of that.

Apoorva Mandavilli
Last time when we talked, we were talking mainly about anecdotal cases of vaccinated people getting infected, these breakthrough infections. I was describing these incidents of breakthrough infections in weddings and family gatherings, and there was this one outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

What changed this week is that the C.D.C. looked into that Provincetown outbreak more closely. That outbreak has spread to now 900 people across the country. About 450 of them are in Massachusetts.

And what the C.D.C. and the Massachusetts Department of Health found is that not only can vaccinated people get infected, but they have about the same amount of virus in their nose and throat as unvaccinated people do. And that’s completely unexpected.

Michael Barbaro
And why is that so important to our understanding of the virus?

Apoorva Mandavilli
If you have virus in your nose and throat, you can spread it. And we did not expect that once somebody was vaccinated, that they would be very likely to get infected or to spread the virus to anybody else. What we learned this week is that if somebody who was vaccinated does get a breakthrough infection, they end up having a lot of virus in their nose and throat, and now they can spread that virus to people around them.

Michael Barbaro
So this new understanding is that a vaccinated person could potentially spread the virus just as much as an unvaccinated person who becomes infected.

Apoorva Mandavilli
Right. We don’t know how often a vaccinated person is likely to get infected. It’s looking like it’s actually very rare. But when that happens, when a vaccinated person does get infected, they end up with just as much virus in their nose and throat as an unvaccinated person, and they may be just as likely to spread it to other people as an unvaccinated person.

Michael Barbaro
So just to be super clear, in order to have a breakthrough infection that could then lead to transmission in a vaccinated person, that person has to be infected by Covid. They can’t just breathe it in the air from somebody and pass it on to somebody else without being infected.

Apoorva Mandavilli
That’s right. And you not only do you have to be infected, but you have to be infected and have enough virus in your nose — have had enough opportunity for the virus to grow into these large amounts, that you can then infect somebody else. That’s why it’s as rare as it is.