- Experts are hoping the sight of vaccinated people enjoying life again in a relatively carefree manner will encourage unvaccinated people to get inoculated against COVID-19.
- They say there is a danger that people will assume anyone not wearing a mask is vaccinated, spreading the coronavirus among crowds and gatherings.
- Experts say it’s important to encourage unvaccinated people to get vaccinated, but not in a heavy-handed way.
It’s becoming a more common sight.
People attending weddings and parties. Crowds gathering at sporting events. Restaurants with almost all their tables full.
Many times, the people there aren’t wearing masks. Most of them are assumed to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The big question now is whether seeing fully vaccinated people enjoying themselves with new social freedoms will prompt those who are unvaccinated to get their shots and join the club.
“From what we’ve seen so far, this seems to vary from community to community,” Kris Sims, the managing partner of Veritas Testing and Vaccines, a mobile COVID-19 clinic in Los Angeles, told Healthline.
“In areas with a high vaccination rate, where the majority of the local population has been vaccinated, there tends to be an assumption that your neighbor is also vaccinated,” Sims said. “On the other hand, when we encounter vaccine skepticism in an area, those pockets of population typically had a low adoption rate for masks early on, as well.
“That said, I think it would be safe to say that an unvaccinated person may very well be thinking that if someone is no longer wearing a mask, then they must be vaccinated,” Sims added.
And that could be problematic, Dr. Javeed Siddiqui, the chief medical officer and co-founder of Sacramento-based telemedicine provider TeleMed2U, told Healthline.
“This is the main concern,” Siddiqui said. “How do we know who is vaccinated and who is not? We have to ask. Our primary and best tool to combat SARS-CoV-2 is vaccination. As we see vaccination rates decrease across the United States, we have to be concerned.”
“What we are seeing is the significant majority of patients with COVID-19 in hospitals now are unvaccinated individuals,” he added. “We cannot assume people are vaccinated. We have to ask one another. This is why masking is still essential.”
Source: healthline