Covid Q&A: Is it safe to return to normal life after a vaccine? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Covid Q&A: Is it safe to return to normal life after a vaccine? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Q&A: Will vaccines bring life back to normal?

In this week's edition of the Covid Q&A, we look at how the vaccines might help life get back to the way it was before the pandemic. In hopes of making this very confusing time just a little less so, each week Bloomberg Prognosis is picking one question sent in by readers and putting it to an expert in the field. This week's question comes to us from William and Sheryl in Las Vegas. The pair wonders how much a vaccine might protect them from contracting Covid-19, and how that might affect their daily lives. They ask: Can we safely resume going out to dinner and shopping? As vaccines roll out across the world, we have heard from many readers with similar questions. Michal Caspi Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University, explained that it's a little more complicated than just getting vaccinated and going back to life as it was before the coronavirus. “The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are most likely to prevent any disease symptoms of Covid-19 but may not prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from getting into the body,”  she said. In other words, we don't know yet whether the vaccine just prevents symptoms from occurring, or whether it actually prevents infection. So once vaccinated, you could still contract an infection and potentially pass it along to others. “The way I like to think about the vaccination efficacy of 95% is that if you are exposed to infection, your chance of actually getting sick now goes down to 1 out of 20,”  she said. “The vaccine rollout for SARS-CoV-2 will take a while, and during that time while some people are vaccinated and not others, the vaccine will be most helpful to those individuals who are themselves fully vaccinated.”