Despite the power of Covid-19 vaccines in cutting the risk of hospitalization and death from the disease, fully vaccinated people can get very sick and die from the virus in rare cases.
"Throughout the pandemic, people who died of Covid-19 were most likely to be older, and that continues to be true with breakthrough cases," a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said in an email.
That still represents just a tiny fraction of the more than 160 million fully vaccinated people in the U.S.
As of July 12, the CDC has reported nearly 5,500 cases in which a fully vaccinated person with Covid-19 was hospitalized or died.
In fact, in 1,456, or 28 percent, of the hospitalizations tracked by the CDC, the breakthrough cases were either asymptomatic or didn't play a role in why the patient was hospitalized.
In Delaware, a spokesperson for the state's Division of Public Health said just because residents had died with a diagnosis of Covid-19 "does not mean Covid was the cause of death.".
"Someone may have died or been hospitalized as a result of another cause, but tested positive for Covid-19," the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in an email
Tracking and analyzing breakthrough infections is important so public health officials have a good understanding of how the vaccines are working — or not
"We are not seeing evidence at this point in time that waning immunity is occurring among people who were vaccinated back last December or January and that they are at higher risk of breakthrough infections," Butler, of the CDC, said
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