A coronavirus outbreak in an old-age home in Be'er Sheva, Israel: 12 out of the 30 vaccinated residents tested positive... but NONE had any symptoms at all.
The residents were tested after a staff member tested positive. They were all about a month from their second Pfizer dose.
Israel's Health Ministry is doing genetic sequencing on the virus to see what variant it is (most of Israel's cases now are B.1.1.7 lineage).
Obviously, this is good news. The vaccine is preventing disease in elderly people, which means it's working as intended.
But... 12 vaccinated people testing positive, all asymptomatic? I wonder if they were all actually *infected* at all. In a closed environment like a care home, could people test positive due to airborne virus lingering up their nose?
I'd also be interested to know viral load. Israel sometimes reports Covid tests as 'marginal' positives, where people test for the virus right at the edge of the PCR copy range. Was that the case here?
Active monitoring studies of working-age people from England and Israel show that the Pfizer vaccine is 85% effective against testing positive for the virus. Maybe older people are more likely to test positive asymptomatically?
https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1363961910312513542
I seem to have confused some people. The residents were a month PAST their second dose.
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