Singapore : Vaccinated people make up most of the recent covid19 cases in the country
Vaccinated individuals accounted for three-quarters of Singapore’s COVID-19 infections in the last four weeks, but they were not falling seriously ill, government data showed, as a rapid ramp-up in inoculations leaves fewer people unvaccinated.
While the data shows that vaccines are highly effective in preventing severe cases, it also underscores the risk that even those inoculated could be contagious, so that inoculation alone may not suffice to halt transmission.
Of Singapore’s 1,096 locally transmitted infections in the last 28 days, 484, or about 44%, were in fully vaccinated people, while 30% were partially vaccinated and just over 25% were unvaccinated, Thursday’s data showed.
Singapore has already inoculated nearly 75% of its 5.7 million people, the world’s second highest after the United Arab Emirates, a Reuters tracker shows, and half its population is fully vaccinated.
As countries with advanced vaccination campaigns prepare to live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease, their focus is turning to preventing death and serious diseases through vaccination.
The Singapore data also showed that infections in the last 14 days among vaccinated people older than 61 stood at about 88%, higher than the figure of just over 70% for the younger group.
Singapore uses Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and Moderna for its national vaccination programme. It was not immediately clear whether the data reflects reduced protection offered by vaccines against the more contagious Delta variant, which has been the most common version of the virus in Singapore in recent months. For the Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine, there is insufficient data to show how effective it is against the Delta strain.
While studies have shown that vaccinated individuals are less likely to get infected than those who have not had their shots, it is difficult to put a number on this, experts say. This is because the chance of a person contracting Covid-19 differs across the island, depending on where cases surface, as well as a person’s activities.
