The tracing team is set up the same as last year, says Health Director Jean-Claude Schmit. An increase of infections following reopening of schools should be expected, but on the other hand, vaccinated people are reducing the workload.
Those who are fully vaccinated no longer need to quarantine after they’ve been in contact with a positive person. The risk of infection in those cases is very small, says Jean-Claude Schmit. They are still contacted, however.
“We ask them if they are vaccinated, in which case they don’t have to quarantine. But they are still informed that they’ve been in contact and may choose to do a test after a few days to be certain, and of course if they develop symptoms they should contact their GP and get tested.”
It is also still possible to get a prescription for a PCR test without symptoms. The Delta variant may drive up the number of hospitalisations, says Schmit.
But even with a slight increase, the numbers are far from those from last December, says virologist Claude Müller from the research institute LIH. He is expecting a fourth wave of infections, but not hospitalisations.
“In my opinion it is important to always stress how many of those in intensive care have had the vaccine or not. Because we know they’re all not vaccinated, and this should constantly be communicated for everyone who is in hospital.”
The number of vaccinated vs non-vaccinated people in hospital must be put in relation to the total vaccinated vs non-vaccinated population.
“If you do that, you get to an 85% protection level with the Luxembourgish numbers. That’s different from saying 30% are vaccinated.”
But capturing this information about hospitalised patients is not that easy, says Jean-Claude Schmit.
“The number of patients in hospital varies every day, with new people coming in and others leaving. This is additional work for us. We’ve done this research a few times to get a general idea, but if this data were collected routinely, it would be quite a lot of work.”
In his view, it is not that important to communicate these numbers every day, as the ratio of vaccinated people is always more or less the same. But giving occasional snapshots makes sense, he says.
