GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – While the 65-and-older crowd is now eligible to receive vaccines in Wisconsin, it remains unclear exactly how long it’ll take for widespread immunity or even how long that immunity might last.
General guidelines from the CDC show that people who have had COVID-19 don’t need to quarantine get re-tested for 90 days. But what is that number for those who have been vaccinated?
“We really won’t have a good idea until this summer and we start to look at the people who were enrolled in the trials and their level of immunity,” Prevea Health CEO Dr. Ashok Rai told the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl. “This summer will be a year, and we’ll have to see if [immunity] continues or if this is a year-to-year vaccine process. We obviously hope it’s much longer than that, but only time will tell.”
The potential of transmitting the virus also remains a major question mark. For those that were infected, studies couldn’t find replicating virus in that 90-day period – but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t still transmit the virus. Transmission also wasn’t studied as scientists developed the vaccines, as they focused on making immunity their number one endpoint.
“That’s why we still really want people to wear a mask and remain physically distanced until a large population has immunity,” Rai explained. “Hopefully by sometime this summer or early fall, we can lay back worries about transmission because most of the people would have immunity by then.”
But Rai’s optimism comes with a bit of an asterisk at the moment. He still argues that the state isn’t getting nearly enough doses of the vaccines to actually get the job done.
“The number needles in arms is is much more efficient today, as you would expect it to be four and half, five weeks since receiving the first one. We learned a lot, we scaled up,” Rai said. “The big issue is we’re just not getting enough from the federal government into Wisconsin. 70,000 a week isn’t going to cut it. We need to triple that number. We have the capacity to put that number in arms if we get that vaccine.”
The state is currently receiving more Pfizer than Moderna vaccines, as more Pfizer vaccine has been made at this point. Larger hub areas like northeast Wisconsin are seeing a more significant amount of Pfizer, while Moderna is being targeted more towards nursing homes, long term care, and assisted living facilities – as well as areas with more rural populations. That, Rai says, is largely due to the fact that the Moderna vaccine doesn’t have to be kept at quite as cold temperatures as the Pfizer version.
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