Three senators announced within hours of each other on Thursday that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, despite each being fully vaccinated.<\/p>\n
Sens.\u00a0Roger Wicker\u00a0(R-Miss.),\u00a0Angus King\u00a0(I-Maine) and\u00a0John Hickenlooper\u00a0(D-Colo.) said they had tested positive in what is known as a breakthrough case, when fully vaccinated individuals test positive for COVID-19. It marks three known breakthrough cases among senators within 24 hours.<\/p>\n
The positive tests come as senators have been back in their home states for roughly a week and aren’t expected to return to Washington, D.C., until mid-September.<\/p>\n
Senators spent hours on the Senate floor together last week, on Aug. 11, before leaving town.<\/p>\n
The Senate was in session for roughly 20 hours starting Tuesday morning through early Wednesday to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill and approve Democrats’ budget, with senators together for much of that time.<\/p>\n
Their announcements Thursday bring the total number of known COVID-19 breakthrough cases among senators to four. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) became the first earlier this month when he announced that he had tested positive despite being fully vaccinated.<\/p>\n
Significance:\u00a0<\/strong>The vaccines work as intended. They’re not meant to prevent you from getting sick entirely, though many people do not experience noticeable symptoms if they have a breakthrough infection.\u00a0 None of the senators needed to be hospitalized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three senators announced within hours of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38912,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38911\/revisions\/38912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}