"Wrong to stop testing vaccinated people"
Testing, genetic surveillance and tracing of all cases of covid-19 are crucial tools to keep society open in the coming winter.
We want to argue for continued broad testing to monitor the infection, deploy and evaluate targeted measures, and conduct effective tracing to keep communities open. [...]
Testing of people with symptoms of covid-19 is crucial for two main reasons: 1) at the population level, broad testing is a cornerstone of informative surveillance that can guide targeted interventions and identify new virus variants; 2) at the individual level, broad testing is a prerequisite for effective infection detection. In addition to these, there are other reasons for continued testing even of vaccinated persons, such as having test results in case of prolonged symptoms, and to have a good basis for research, but we do not go into these aspects further in this article.
Good surveillance is central to infection control as it can identify new outbreaks early, help to understand the effects of different community interventions and other external factors that influence the spread of infection, and detect abnormal patterns that may indicate new characteristics of the infectious agent. [...]
It is also of high importance to rapidly identify new virus variants with undesirable characteristics such as increased infectivity, more severe disease or where immunity from vaccines or pass-through infection no longer protects. Finding these requires three things. The first is broad testing, the second is mapping the virus' genome in patient samples and the third is good infection detection that identifies abnormal patterns such as an unusually rapid spread, a different symptom pattern or an increase in infections in vaccinated people. When this happens, it is necessary to analyse whether it is a new virus variant. Not testing vaccinees will therefore make it more difficult to detect variants where the vaccine no longer provides sufficient protection. [...]
Without testing of vaccinated people, these cases will not be detected, which increases the risk of transmission to people at risk and to health care workers who may in turn infect susceptible individuals. In order to protect the most vulnerable, it is essential to stop as many chains of infection as possible, including those that start with a vaccinated individual. [...]
This is not only a Swedish interest, but we also have a global responsibility to monitor such variants and inform the outside world of any findings.
