![]() The immune system is not really designed to put high levels of antibodies at those sites,” Gupta says.Ĭt values correlate with the viral load, which is the number of viral particles present in the body. ![]() It is very difficult to get a very high level of antibodies for long periods of time in that area. “SARS-CoV-2 virus infects nose and upper airway. To test for SARS-CoV-2, the scientists employed a measurement called threshold cycle (Ct) that uses glowing dyes to reveal the quantity of viral RNA in the nose. How do we know the virus in the sample is infectious? This sort of insight, especially as it’s tested and refined, is incredibly helpful as organizations develop policies around testing, social distancing, and vaccinations,” Berke says. ![]() “Even though the study was based on one region, it offers important insight into how people can spread the virus to others whether they’re fully vaccinated or not. Berke was not involved in the Wisconsin study. Berke’s research has shown that frequent testing with rapid results, even if preliminary, can be very effective in curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies like these highlight that transmission of the Delta variant can be much higher that currently estimated, according to Ethan Berke, chief public health officer of the UnitedHealth Group. “Which is why masks and mitigation measures are important, even for people vaccinated,” he says. What concerns Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, is that fully vaccinated individuals who are infected with the Delta variant can transmit the virus and this can happen at a higher rate than previous strains in the days before symptoms, or in the absence of symptoms. “It an alarming finding,” explains Katarina Grande, a public health supervisor and the COVID-19 Data Team Lead of Madison & Dane County, who led the study. ![]() If the Wisconsin study finding holds up, then people with breakthrough infections-many of whom do not develop COVID symptoms-can unknowingly spread the virus. Gupta’s lab was one of the first to document that fully vaccinated healthcare workers could get infected with Delta and had high levels of virus in their noses. “Delta is breaking through more preferentially after vaccines as compared to the non-Delta variants” because it’s extremely infectious and evades the immune response, says Ravindra Gupta, a microbiologist at University of Cambridge. “We're the first to demonstrate, as far as I'm aware, that infectious virus can be cultured from the fully vaccinated infections,” says Kasen Riemersma, a virologist at University of Wisconsin who is one of the authors of the study. Many experts suspected they did, but until this study it hadn’t been proven in the lab. The next logical step was to determine whether vaccinated people could shed infectious virus. Previous studies in hospitals in India Provincetown, Massachusetts and Finland have also shown that after vaccine breakthrough infections with Delta, there can be high levels of virus in people’s nose whether they are vaccinated or not. ![]() The virus that grows is just as infectious as that in unvaccinated people, meaning vaccinated people can transmit the virus and infect others. A preliminary study has shown that in the case of a breakthrough infection, the Delta variant is able to grow in the noses of vaccinated people to the same degree as if they were not vaccinated at all. ![]()
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