1. Why is this important?While getting vaccinated gives people considerable insurance against falling ill with Covid, which is sometimes fatal, if they can still get silently infected with SARS-CoV-2, they might pass it on, potentially sickening people who aren’t immune.
Those who are infected but never develop symptoms are responsible for 24% of transmission, one study estimated. The more SARS-CoV-2 circulates, the more opportunity the virus has to mutate in ways that enhance its ability to spread, sicken and kill people, and evade the immunity provided by existing vaccines or a past infection.
Already, variants of the virus have emerged that appear to be more dangerous. Also, using vaccination to achieve so-called herd immunity, when an.