More and more people are receiving their COVID-19 vaccines each day in New Hampshire, and NHPR has been getting a lot of questions from listeners about what life looks like after they are fully vaccinated.
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Dr. Michael Calderwood is an epidemiologist and the Chief Quality Officer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Calderwood joined Morning Edition host Rick Ganley on NHPR to answer those listener questions and talk more about what precautions people should still take after getting their COVID vaccines.
Rick Ganley: After receiving both doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, how quickly does protection actually start?
Michael Calderwood: So we are looking at protection at 14 days beyond the second dose of the two mRNA vaccines. That's the Moderna and the Pfizer. And we suspect that we will be using a similar metric, so a two week, beyond the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, although we're still waiting for guidance from the CDC. That is where you see those protection levels of 90, 95 percent for those two vaccines at that 14 day mark.
Rick Ganley: So between your first and second dose, if we're talking about the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, you need to obviously continue with the precautions we've done for the past year, I'd assume.
Michael Calderwood: Well, and even after.
Rick Ganley: For two weeks after that last dose?
Michael Calderwood: So once you reach that point of full vaccination, when you're 14 days beyond either the Moderna or the Pfizer, and eventually once folks start getting the Johnson & Johnson, when you're fully vaccinated with that, you no longer need to quarantine if you're exposed to someone who has COVID-19 or if you've traveled. But at the same time, we need to emphasize that no vaccine is 100 percent protective. And we also know that there are increasingly variants that are in circulation that will lower the efficacy of some of these vaccines.
And so even after vaccination, everyone needs to continue to cover their nose and mouth with a mask, to stay six feet away from others, avoid crowds and poorly ventilated spaces, and do many of the things that we have been doing up to this point. And that really is about protecting others. The reason I want to emphasize that once you get your vaccine, you are much less likely to be severely ill, be hospitalized or die. And that is a very good thing. But if you get infected, you're more likely to have milder symptoms or even no symptoms, and you can still spread to others who are not vaccinated. And so it's critical that really nothing is going to change until we get a much larger percentage of our population vaccinated.
Rick Ganley: So even if you are fully vaccinated, you could still pass on the virus?
Michael Calderwood: Yes, you could.
Rick Ganley: You know, I'm wondering if you're worried that this messaging that getting a vaccine doesn't mean that you can start spending time socializing, stop wearing a mask, that kind of thing, are you worried that that'll lead to some people saying, hey, really, why am I getting the vaccine? What's the point?
Michael Calderwood: Well, so I want to kind of emphasize what it's going to take to get out of this pandemic. And, you know, we've been in this for a long time and we're all very tired. Right now, it is assumed that around 40 percent of the U.S. population has some level of immunity from natural infection. That means 4 out of 10 people probably have been exposed to this virus at some point in the last year.
And if we think about our current pace prior to kind of the approval of the latest vaccine, we were thinking we would reach herd immunity somewhere between July and November, but that there would still be another 100,000 deaths. That's the best case scenario. If we double our vaccine supply, and I think we will be able to do that, the time horizon for getting to herd immunity is somewhere between May and July, but that's only if all of the same measures remain in place.
If we end the precautions, all the things that we've been doing right now, we will see a death toll that is three times higher, meaning that we will have 800,000 who are dead in the United States by the summer. And in addition, and this is the really concerning thing, because of the spread of the variants, it is possible we would never reach herd immunity if people back away from what they're doing too soon.
Rick Ganley: Many people are feeling anxious about seeing loved ones who have they have been isolated from for a year in many cases? Is it safe to visit family, like a grandparent, if they've already received the vaccine, but you haven't?
Michael Calderwood: So these are all going to be personal decisions. And so we can think about how we could do those visits. The individual who has received the vaccine is much less likely to become significantly ill from COVID, even if you, yourself, were infected. And so that's a good thing. We've actually seen, in nursing home populations, those where we saw the highest rates of death in the past year, that in kind of the month following vaccination, there were significant declines in deaths in that population. So the vaccine is working as it was prioritized for these high risk populations. So that's very good.
What I would say when you're visiting is it's possible that you may still want to wear a mask. And again, we know, as I said before, that no vaccine is 100 percent effective. And in general, in individuals who are older, we tend to see vaccines because of the degree of immunity, be even slightly less effective than maybe that 95 percent that people talk about. And so it is time to begin to think about how we can gather with others. We want to think about what that duration is, how you think about the number of people that are visiting at one given time, and continue to think about the role of masks. Does that mean that you can't hug the loved ones that you haven't seen in a long time? No, I think we can begin to do things like that. But we might want to think about not having large gatherings with people in the same room for hours and hours.
Rick Ganley: Because you could still, obviously, potentially have some people who are vaccinated and some who aren't.
Michael Calderwood: That is correct.
Rick Ganley: Would it be okay to socialize indoors with a group where everyone has been fully vaccinated?
Michael Calderwood: And I think that really is where we are getting some clear messaging. And so, I mean, that is what we're really aiming to get to. We want to get to a point where a high enough percentage of the population is vaccinated, where we can back away from a lot of these mitigation measures. So, yes, if you knew everyone was vaccinated, that is a much safer situation for individuals together.
