Skift Take
The reality harms sometimes: Vaccine passports would be a reasonably practical way to improve worldwide travel, however Israeli data suggest that needing PCR screening, too, would be prudent.
Dennis Schaal
“Vaccine passports” that exempt immunized people from routine COVID-19 testing would allow lots of infections to be missed, Israeli information recommend.
Researchers examined infection rates in people going back to Israel through Ben-Gurion airport, for whom PCR tests upon arrival are needed regardless of vaccination status.
“Remarkably,” in August 2021, the rate of favorable tests among immunized tourists was more than double the rate amongst the unvaccinated, said Retsef Levi of the MIT Sloan School of Management, coauthor of a report posted on an SSRN server ahead of peer review.
Travelers who had actually received the 2nd dosage of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine within the previous six months or who had actually gotten a booster dose were thought about vaccinated. The group considered to be unvaccinated included the never-vaccinated and those whose most recent shot was more than six months prior, given proof of subsiding vaccine efficacy by then.
In September, when the Israeli government was recommending booster shots for all adults, the positive-test rate dropped among immunized travelers and was about 3.5 times lower with vaccination than without. However by October, the positive-test rate in the vaccinated group, while still lower, had actually begun to climb up once again, Levi said.
The data suggest that restricting frequent COVID-19 screening to unvaccinated individuals would “posture potential dangers by strengthening the misstatement that immunized individuals are safeguarded from infections,” he stated.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/3HE39zC SSRN, online November 7, 2021.
This post was written by Reuters Staff from Reuters and was legally licensed through the Market Dive publisher network. Please direct all licensing concerns to [email secured]
< img alt ="" width="1" height="1" data-src="https://pixel.welcomesoftware.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT03Mjg1M2QzMDQ5ZjkxMWVjODU3MmZlYmQ1ZjExYmRiOQ==" src="image/gif; base64, R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw = ="/ > < img src="https://pixel.welcomesoftware.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT03Mjg1M2QzMDQ5ZjkxMWVjODU3MmZlYmQ1ZjExYmRiOQ==" alt ="" width="1" height="1"/ >