WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Hospitals are reporting that the majority of COVID-19 admissions are made up of unvaccinated patients, but breakthrough infections are still happening.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that fully vaccinated people are a lot less likely to be hospitalized for COVID than unvaccinated people with similar risks.
But a South Florida man thinks he was more susceptible because he got vaccinated earlier in the year.
Just a few months ago, in March, Scott Wank got the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. So when he started feeling sick recently, the last thing he expected was being infected with the coronavirus.
"I was kind of shocked honestly that it came back positive," Wank said.
Wank lives in Broward County but works in Martin County. He’s not entirely sure where he got COVID-19
"Honestly in the last few weeks, I went from always wearing my mask regardless to taking it off. You see more and more people without it, walking into a store without it on," Wank said.
But get this, his wife and teenage son, both vaccinated, did not get sick or test positive.
"What the department of health told me is that they are seeing more breakthrough cases in people who are vaccinated earlier on in the year like February, March," Wank said.
The CDC said it is working with local and state health departments, but has not discovered a pattern in the very small number of breakthrough infections. Wank said he felt run down, tired, had no appetite, and started coughing.
"That was kind of an eye opener and I'm literally like, thank, thank goodness, thank God that I'm vaccinated. Because if this is how I feel now, I can only imagine how it would be if I wasn’t," Wank said.
At 55 years old, Wank believes the vaccine did prevent serious symptoms. He said if there’s anything else this experience taught him it's to keep wearing his mask until COVID cases are under control.
"The same reason you stop at a red light so you don’t hit the cars that are crossing in front of you, wear the mask so you don’t hit the people that you’re crisscrossing with," Wank said.
Luckily, wank did not need to go to the hospital…
On Sunday, Florida broke the record for hospitalizations related to the pandemic at 10,593 across the state. That’s 414 more than the previous record from July 2020.