Every person known to be infected with COVID-19 after attending a 2022 health conference in Germany was vaccinated, according to a new study.
All people who reported testing positive for COVID-19 said they had received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
While about 4,462 people attended the conference in Berlin in the fall of 2022, just 1,355 filled out a survey and only about half of those were tested after the conference, researchers said in the new paper, published on June 13 by JAMA Network Open, a journal from the American Medical Association.
Of the people who filled out the survey and were tested after the conference, 109, or 14 percent, tested positive for COVID-19.
All 109 were vaccinated.
Just 19 had evidence of prior COVID-19 infection.
In comparison, of the people who filled out the survey and tested negative after the conference, 98 percent were vaccinated and 62.5 percent had proven prior COVID-19.
Factors
That means that a person’s vaccination status “was not associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection during the congress,” Dr. Alaa Din Abdin of Saarland University Medical Center UKS and the other authors wrote. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.
On the other hand, prior infection was “significantly associated” with testing negative, and staying in private accommodation versus a hotel was associated with a higher infection rate.
The conference in question was the 122nd Annual Congress of the German Society of Ophthalmology, from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, 2022. People attended the conference in person for the first time in three years.
Researchers found a higher rate of infection, 8 percent among those who went to get tested after the conference, than previous studies. That might stem from the protection from the vaccines declining following the late 2021 emergence of Omicron, they said.
“This higher rate could be because the congress took place during the Omicron surge, which was locally and temporally different compared with the variants in other studies,” they said, adding later that “the Omicron variant had a much higher transmission rate and lower vaccine efficacy due to immune escape of the new subtype.”
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