What Vaccinated People Should Really Know About the Delta Variant?s Threat to Them

“I feel like I had very inaccurate information,” he told me, “and I would have made my decisions in a very different light if I knew what I know now.” He would have worn a mask at the hockey game, for example—even though no one was wearing a mask at the hockey game, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it’s fine for vaccinated people not to wear masks inside.He acknowledged it might be possible that he and his family just got really unlucky—and maybe a year from now, as long as everyone recovers fully, he’ll be able to look back on this and say “OK, well, the vaccines still did their job.” But right now, he feels worried—worried that breakthrough cases are more common than we think, that vaccinated people will get sicker than they think, that fears about the delta variant are not overblown, and that it might still get worse. We do know that vaccinating as many people as possible is our best path toward minimizing the badness of whatever that is, and that in the U.S., we are doing better than many of us seem willing to accept.Still, just because we can hold onto the knowledge that the vaccines are working (they are) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to get a clearer understanding of breakthrough cases. But the most interesting thing I’ve learned is that if you are fully vaccinated, avoiding a “mild” case of COVID, even if it sucks, might not actually be as important as you think. (Frankly, the fact that you can get that sick from mild COVID should be yet another reason to avoid getting what doctors call severe COVID.)My colleague was also frustrated by the fact that everyone in his group got sick—he had believed that because they were all vaccinated, perhaps only one person would get ill if they came into contact with the virus. The answer to those questions is not quite as easy as “yes, if you’re vaccinated.” It depends partly on how many in your group are vaccinated, but the actual answer is basically the same as it’s been all pandemic: It depends on your risk tolerance, it depends on what is happening with case counts locally (though, as more people travel, this might become a less reliable tool), and it depends on any unique risk factors in your group. There are still good reasons to want to avoid COVID, even a milder, vaxxed version—if you are spending time with higher-risk people, like the immunocompromised who can’t get the same efficacy from vaccines; if you have unvaccinated kids you’re worried about (though kids are a slightly different situation). “I think in areas with high case counts (or some combination of cases and low vaccination rates), masking indoors in public makes a great deal of sense,” Faust said. (Obligatory caveat: Get vaccinated if you can.) The reason why everything feels so confusing right now is because we’re getting closer and closer to the point where COVID is something that we just have to live with—just as we live with a million other things that are risky but make us happy, like driving or eating meat from a questionable restaurant.