The COVID Digest, 02Sep2022

New COVID boosters are here

You may have heard that new COVID-19 vaccine boosters were approved and will begin being available next week. A question I’ve already been fielding and thinking about for myself is not so much whether to get the booster. I absolutely will be. The question I’ve had to think about more deeply is when to get the booster. The reason why I plan to get the booster has to do with graphs like the one below from the Georgia Department of Public Health. You can see that those who were fully vaccinated but not boosted saw a much higher rate of hospitalization with a breakthrough COVID-19 infection than those who had received the booster.

I work in a high exposure setting. I work with college students who recently came together from all over the country and live together in dormitories. There are no pandemic precautions in place other than the KN-95 mask that I put on my own face and the Corsi-Rosenthal box that I use to filter the air in my classrooms. People are coughing and sneezing. Is it allergies? Ragweed is high right now. Is it COVID-19? I don’t know. So I am going to get the updated booster as soon as I can schedule an appointment because of my risk of exposure. In addition, my last booster was given last November, so I expect that my immunity has waned. I have dodged COVID-19 through the omicron wave and BA.2. I think this is a combination of luck and using a “vaccine and” strategy of disease prevention. The third reason I’m planning to get the new booster soon is because of something a colleague said to me…we don’t know what the future variants will look like. But we do know that the booster works well against what is circulating now.

You’re eligible to receive the updated booster if it has been more than 2 months since your last dose. The Pfizer-BioNTech booster is available to anyone aged 12 and older. You can find a dose near you using vaccines.gov. You can also contact your local health department.