Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates
Living in a Post-Vax World
What Happens After Aunt Petunia Gets Her Shots?
Hi, I’m back as Robin-Schoenthaler-the-Boston-cancer-doctor-who-writes-about-Covid.
Every day there’s more science about the likelihood of post-vaccination transmission. And every day the science looks more reassuring.
And that’s so important; that’s the everything, right? Post-vax ransmission is the trump card.
Let’s say Aunt Petunia at last gets both her vaccines; her niece from the bridal shower loves her to pieces and helped her with the techie part.
So now Aunt Petunia knows her chances of getting sick with symptomatic Covid is super low, and her chances of getting a serious or deadly case of Covid is now exceedingly vanishingly low.
As she puts it, “The doctor told me the shots are going to keep me out of the hospital, out of the ICU, and out of the morgue.”
These are all fantastic things — a miracle of science has happened right in front of our eyes.
Because Aunt Petunia can now walk around Marshall’s and legitimately feel safe. She can go back to not feeling like every person with whom she comes in prolonged contact at bridal showers or Total Wine or her sister’s nursing home might be harboring a horrible bullet aimed right at her nose. Aunt Petunia is getting that feeling more and more: people are no longer the threat they once were. It is quite the mind-switch.
But the more she pictures getting together with her friends and family for dinner or bridge or Mah Jong or cribbage, the more she wonders:
Could *she* still be a threat to others? Could she catch an asymptomatic or super mild case of Covid and accidentally give it to someone during a bridge game? Could she get enough virus inside her nose to transmit the disease to somebody else?
Simple answer: we don’t know for sure yet. But it’s looking good, it’s looking lower and lower risk.
It’s a hard question to study. I think we would all agree: you can’t do a study where you ask somebody with Covid to go sneeze on a newly vaccinated person — that would be bad science and bad morals.
