PITTSBURGH — U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle awoke at 4 a.m. Wednesday at his Washington, D.C., apartment with fever and chills, fearing the worst.
Later, he tested positive for COVID-19 despite having been fully vaccinated against the disease in January. Now he’s quarantined until Sept. 1, thankful he got the two-shot Pfizer vaccine, even though he got sick.
“My lungs are clear, and I’m able to breathe easily, so I feel protected since I’ve been vaccinated,” the 68-year-old lawmaker said Thursday. “The vaccine only protects you so you don’t end up on a ventilator or dead.”
Doctors say no vaccine is 100% effective, but the COVID-19 vaccines can save your life by making the disease less serious than if you hadn’t gotten the shots. As the total number of vaccines administered rises, an increasing number of vaccinated people — like Doyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat — will develop so-called breakthrough COVID-19 infections.
Just how common such infections are isn’t well known. The Pennsylvania Department of Health has made collection of data a priority, but numbers were not available on this particular development, even as the number of new cases overall in Pennsylvania climbs to totals not seen since the spring.
Nationwide breakthrough totals come with caveats.
As of Aug. 23, 11,050 people in 49 U.S. states and territories who had been fully vaccinated were later hospitalized or died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 171 million Americans have been fully vaccinated.
Here’s the hitch: “National surveillance relies on passive and voluntary reporting, and data are not complete or representative,” according to the CDC, which is conducting several studies of COVID-19 breakthrough rates.
Officials believe the total count of breakthrough infections was likely an undercount, especially because some people do not have symptoms of the disease or have only mild infections.
In Allegheny County, based on limited testing data, the Health Department is seeing COVID-19 breakthrough rates of about 30%, department Director Dr. Debra Bogen said recently.
Among people hospitalized for the virus in the Pittsburgh region, the percentage who have been fully vaccinated ranges between 7% and 40%, doctors say, depending on the time period measured. Many breakthroughs occur in people who are older or who are immunocompromised or who have chronic medical conditions such as diabetes or lung problems.
“Older people’s immune response may not be as good,” said Michael Cratty, chief medical officer at Heritage Valley Health System, where about 20% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were fully vaccinated. “But most have done pretty well.”
Seventeen people were hospitalized for COVID-19 overall in Beaver County on Friday, including seven in intensive care units and three on ventilators, according to the state Health Department. About 47% of the county’s eligible population has been fully vaccinated as of Thursday, CDC data indicate.
Vaccinated patients who wind up infected and hospitalized at Excela Health in Greensburg also have generally done better than those who were not inoculated, said chief medical officer Carol Fox. In the month of August, 7% of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were fully vaccinated, but none required mechanical ventilation to aid failing lungs.
“Individuals who don’t require ventilators typically do better than those who do require ventilators,” Dr. Fox said.
On Friday, 32 people were being treated for COVID-19 at Excela hospitals.
At Washington Health System, between 25% and 40% of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were fully vaccinated, said John Six, chief medical officer.
“They tend to be older, with co-morbidities,” Dr. Six said. “They’re relatively less severe cases.”
As of Thursday, Washington County had 26 people hospitalized for COVID-19, including nine in the intensive care unit and two on ventilators, according to the Health Department. The CDC said 59.2% of the county’s eligible population was fully vaccinated.
Fifty-two percent of the eligible U.S. population had been fully vaccinated as of Friday, according to the CDC. That number includes 65.3% of those old enough for the shots in Pennsylvania.
UPMC doctors were unavailable Friday to talk about COVID-19 breakthrough cases, but discovering the infection in many Allegheny Health Network patients often comes through routine screening rather than complaints of feeling sick, said Tariq Cheema, division chair, critical care medicine.
Because these patients often have no symptoms, the diagnosis is often made after routine screening before a medical procedure.
“They’re incidental findings,” Dr. Cheema said. “That’s what drives the numbers. The good news is they’re not super-sick; they don’t end up on ventilators and dying.”
AHN was treating about 100 people for COVID-19 on Friday at its hospitals.
As he recovers in D.C., Doyle said he’s unsure how he became infected with COVID-19, but he’s planning to get his booster shot in September. He said he usually wore a protective face mask when he was in groups of people, which the CDC recommends, except when he was at restaurant meetings. Those meetings could be crowded, he said.
Still, he’s happy with the vaccine.
“I think it’s working the way it’s supposed to work,” he said. “I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to get the shot.”
