More and more, I find myself confused about COIVID-19. It feels as though the pandemic is finally over. Everywhere I go, people look to be back to normal. Very few people wear masks. Nobody seems to be keeping a distance between themselves and other people. Movie theatres are open. Restaurants are fully open without pandemic restrictions.
Here in Maryland, the number of new infections is ridiculously low. For example, Maryland reported 64 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday. The positivity rate is now at .57%.
What about herd immunity?
It would be easy to explain these low numbers to Marylanders being fully vaccinated. As of today, there are 3,302,453 people in Maryland fully vaccinated. As of 2019, the population in Maryland was 6.046 million people. So the percentage of fully vaccinated people roughly works out to be around 54%. We should not have achieved herd immunity at 54%, but it seems that we have unless a person doesn’t need to be fully vaccinated to gain immunity from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Not that being fully vaccinated will stop you from contracting COVID-19. You can still acquire COVID-19 if you are fully vaccinated. However, you won’t get severely ill. Most importantly, you won’t die.
At least that’s what we’ve been told.
Can vaccinated people contract COVID-19 and pass it on to others?
Since you can still get COVID-19 even if you are fully vaccinated, wouldn’t that mean you can pass it on to others? From looking at the numbers, it would appear you can’t. If vaccinated people can get COVID-19 and pass the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others, the new cases of COVID-19 would be much higher. Since people who are fully vaccinated do not get seriously ill from COVID-19, it would suggest they would be more likely to go out and live their normal lives and infect others, including people who are not vaccinated.
I just don’t know what to believe anymore. Things just don’t add up. I wish I hadn’t dropped Biology 101 while attending community college. I feel like if I hadn’t dropped it, I’d possibly be in a better place to understand our current situation. In my defence, it was an 8 AM class, and the teacher was extremely boring. Every morning, he would walk into class, take off his sports coat, and fold it into a neat square.
What kind of freak does that?