Unboosted People Minimally Protected As Omicron Spreads In The Mission

San Francisco CA

21 December, 2021

4:28 PM

Description

By Eleni Balakrishnan, Mission Local December 20, 2021 Since San Francisco's first case of the highly contagious omicron Covid-19 variant was detected on Dec. 1, covid has been making a comeback: Positive cases have more than tripled at the Mission's Unidos En Salud test site this month. Early research, meanwhile, shows that vaccines are shockingly less effective at protecting against symptoms from omicron compared to the delta variant, although vaccination is still critical in reducing the chances of growing seriously ill and landing in a hospital. Current data shows that people who received their second vaccine dose in the summer are now only five percent protected against symptomatic disease if infected with the omicron variant — "practically nothing," said Dr. Diane Havlir during a presentation today of early research on the variant from UC Santa Cruz. Someone infected with the delta variant could still have about 43 percent protection from their waning vaccine doses four to six months ago. To read the full article, click here. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.