I hope this is mostly a function of incomplete data.
Millions of Americans — including tens of thousands of Houstonians — either have delayed or are forgoing their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccination.
As of late last month, roughly 51,000 people who received their first inoculation through the Houston Health Department were “overdue” for their second dose. The department’s number is preliminary but includes any person who has gone at least 42 days since their first round without returning for a second shot.
Statewide, more than 630,000 of the roughly 11 million people who’ve received one dose are more than six weeks overdue, the Texas Department of State Health Services told the Houston Chronicle.
“We need a lot of those folks from February to come back in and get their second dose now,” Dr. David Lakey, a DSHS commissioner who sits on Texas’ COVID-19 Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel, said last week.
Part of the gap, however, is likely due to people who opted to receive their second dose through other health care providers as vaccine availability expanded.
It’s not cause for alarm just yet, said Rice University health economist Vivian Ho, though she said the trend does not bode well for the overall goal of herd immunity.
[…]
Ho said people shouldn’t be dissuaded from rescheduling appointments that they missed, as they’ve been shown to give additional antibodies even if they come late.
“The first dose really does boost your antibodies, but it’s the second that really gives you the second umph,” she said.
Houston Methodist radiologist Dirk Stotsman worried that some people are forgoing their second round of inoculations because the first doses of Moderna and Pfizer have been proven highly efficacious against the virus.
While the first dose offers a good level of protection, he said, the extra antibodies provided by the second dose will be integral to prevent the spread of more infectious and dangerous strains of the virus.
Getting just the one Pfizer or Moderna shot is better than nothing, but it’s not as good as it should be. If you’ve gotten one shot and for whatever the reason not gotten the second one, it’s not too late. Go ahead and make an appointment or do a walk-in where available.
With the rescission of the mask mandate and full reopening of businesses, medical experts worried spring would bring a debilitating fourth wave of COVID-19 infections to Texas.
But as vaccination rates slowly leveled off in recent weeks, the rate of infections and hospitalizations did as well. More than a year after businesses closed, offices sent workers home and traffic vanished from Houston’s concrete jungle of freeways, public health officials are cautiously optimistic efforts to quell the spread of the virus and vaccinate as many people as possible are working.
Yet despite claims from officials like Gov. Greg Abbott that this downturn is linked to “herd immunity” — the mysterious target ranging between 60 and 80 percent fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — experts say Texas cannot rely on vaccinations alone to achieve what some think may mean the end of the pandemic.
“Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen,” said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist with UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston. “But my educated guess would be as more of the population becomes either vaccinated or immune through natural infection, we won’t see as many cases.”
Fewer than 3,000 patients have been hospitalized across the state for the past five weeks, according to a Chronicle data analysis. It’s the longest streak with that few patients since June 2020.
Dr. Carl Vartian, chief medical officer at HCA Houston Healthcare’s Clear Lake and Mainland hospitals, worries the public conflates “herd immunity” with “ending COVID-19.” But COVID-19 may not truly end. Rather, experts suspect it will become “endemic,” never fully leaving the population — like influenza, which still infects hundreds of thousands of people a year in the U.S.
Again, what we have now is better than what we had before, but not as good as it could be. Even at “herd immunity levels”, there’s still a lot of unvaxxed people. The difference is that it becomes harder for the virus to really take off as it has done before. But people can and will still get sick and die if they’re not vaccinated. It’s up to us what the level of those illnesses and deaths are.
It turns out that completion rates over 80% for two-shot vaccination regimens is pretty darned good. Usually they hover around 60% or so.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504385/
The COVID-19 completion rate is breaking ground in that respect, particularly when you allow for the people who got one dose and then found they could get the second dose somewhere more convenient.
I received dose 1 at a mass vaccination site and they were not very clear when or where I was supposed to come back for dose #2 just that it was due April 22nd. Naturally I called to find out but I do think with the mass sites a lot can easily get lost in translation.