The state health department is now releasing numbers on fully vaccinated people who got COVID-19.
According to an epidemiology report released yesterday, 69 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized and 11 have died in Oklahoma between December 2020 and June 28, 2021. There have been 737 known breakthrough cases total.
Breakthrough infections are to be expected, but some public health officials don’t think it’s time to discard mask mandates. Dr. Dale Bratzler is University of Oklahoma's chief COVID officer. He pointed to the situation in Israel. About 62% of Israel’s population has received at least one dose of vaccine, but cases are rising.
“It’s a small country of about 9 million people, a little over twice the population of Oklahoma. Their case count hit 200 a day, which we’ve now been at for several days. They’ve now implemented a nationwide mask mandate. I know no one wants to do that. But masks are effective against all variants.”
Aside from reimplementing the mask mandate, the country is not imposing many other restrictions because public health officials there are trusting the vaccine. When a vaccinated person contracts COVID, the disease is much less severe than if they were unvaccinated.
There are 329 new cases of COVID-19 in Oklahoma.