Covid: why wearing a mask and complying with health guidelines even once vaccinated?

Published by · Published on April 1st, 2021 at 05:14 p.m.
The vaccination campaign continues in France, and a question is often raised: why wearing a mask and complying with health guidelines even once vaccinated? Variants, contagiousness, immunity lifespan, some of you might be disappointed, and skeptics might be bothered.

You may have forgotten it, but vaccine test phases are not over yet. Even though some covid vaccines have been given marketing authorization, vaccines are still subject to controls and studies. It explains the grey areas about post-vaccination acquired immunity lifespan, the time period between vaccination and protection and the possibility to be a healthy carrier after vaccine.

All these data that we still do not know about put worldwide governments in a difficult situation as they have to temporize vaccinated people’s enthusiast in their speeches. In the United States, the CDC has presented guidelines for fully vaccinated people and only three situations change. Wearing a mask indoors is no longer necessary when fully vaccinated Americans meet with vaccinated relatives, they can remove their mask indoors when they go to non-vaccinated people in the same household, excluding one of them is at high-risk. Last change, people vaccinated in the United States no longer need to get teste if they are contact cases, except if they have symptoms.

HAS vaccination functional commission president Elisabeth Bouvet rightfully reminded to our peers from Le Parisien there “are variants likely to be less sensitive to the vaccine. And then, even though vaccines are very effective to prevent one from being sick, they do not prevent virus asymptomatic carrying at 100%”.

Theoretically you can remove your mask and not comply with barrier gesture with your relatives who are vaccinated as well, but as it is not the case in the public place, it is inopportune to encourage a two-tiered system. The government insists on the importance of complying with health guidelines, and will reinforce police controls.

The health authorities are also expected to soon address the necessary conditions to remove one’s mask with one major issue: herd immunity. Institut Pasteur bets on a herd immunity of 70% Covid-19 vaccinated people including an R0 reproduction rate of 3.3 Since variants broke out, the herd immunity has been set at 80%. In the United States, about 30% of the population has been vaccinated, and President Joe Biden assured each adult would be able to get vaccinated by late May.

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