California nurse tests positive for coronavirus after getting vaccine
A California nurse has tested positive for the new coronavirus a week after she received Pfizer Inc’s vaccine.
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Matthew W., 45, who works at two different local hospitals, said in a Facebook post on December 18 that he had received the vaccine.
He told the ABC News affiliate that except for his arm that was sore for a day he had suffered no other side-effects.
However, six days later on Christmas Eve, he got sick after working a shift in the COVID-19 unit. He got the chills and later came down with muscle aches and fatigue.
He then went for a test to find that he was infected with the COVID-19 virus the day after Christmas.
Speaking to the ABC News affiliate, Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist with Family Health Centers of San Diego, described the scenario as unsurprising.
“We know from the vaccine clinical trials that it’s going to take about 10 to 14 days for you to start to develop protection from the vaccine,” Ramers said.
“That first dose we think gives you somewhere around 50%, and you need that second dose to get up to 95%,” Ramers added.
A case of a highly infectious coronavirus variant, which was originally discovered in Britain, has been detected in the United States for the first time.
The case was detected in Colorado on Tuesday as President-elect Joe Biden warned it could take years for most Americans to be vaccinated against the disease given current distribution rates.
“The effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. At the current rate, “it’s going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”
Shortly after Biden’s remarks, Colorado Governor Jared Polis said the nation’s first known case of the highly infectious coronavirus variant B.1.1.7 had been discovered in his state.
According to Polis, the infected patient was a man in his 20s with no recent travel history.
“Public health officials are doing a thorough investigation” and the individual has “no close contacts identified so far,” Polis said.
Health experts believe that the variant is more contagious than other previously identified strains of the SAR-CoV-2 variant, yet they say it is not more severe in the symptoms it causes.
The new variant has also been detected in several other countries including some in Europe as well as Canada, Australia, India, South Korea and Japan.
