According to experts speaking in the very latest edition of the 'New Scientist':"Am I safe once I have had one dose of a coronavirus vaccine?The short answer is no. “Don’t for a moment imagine you are safe. That would be a horrific thing to do,” says Danny Altmann at Imperial College London. “You absolutely can’t remotely modify your behaviour until well after your second dose.”The first thing you need to know is that it takes at least two to three weeks for any protection to kick in after the first dose, so during this time you are just as vulnerable.The second is that it isn’t clear how much protection a single dose of any vaccine provides (more on this later), because the trials weren’t designed to tell us this. What is certain is that no vaccine provides complete protection even after two doses. With the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, about 1 in 20 people may still get symptomatic infections. With the vaccine made by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, as many as 1 in 3 people might still be vulnerable.Third, your risk of catching the virus depends on how likely you are to be exposed to it. In countries such as the UK, Ireland and the US, levels of infection are currently very high.“Individuals, even though they have been vaccinated, will be at more of a risk now than they were in the summer,” says Matt Keeling at the University of Warwick, UK.By contrast, countries such as Australia and New Zealand aren’t rushing to vaccinate people. With the virus almost entirely eliminated there, people have near zero risk of infection.If you get covid-19 despite being vaccinated, you can still become seriously ill and die. Some 10 to 20 per cent of infected people also get long covid – lasting symptoms such as fatigue and headaches. We don’t yet know if these symptoms will last months, years or even a lifetime, says Altmann. “This is really scary stuff.”And remember, it isn’t just about you."
David Noades ● 2098d