Yes people with coronavirus vaccinations should still distance from each other. Here’s why.

Yes people with coronavirus vaccinations should still distance from each other. Here’s why.

But while the vaccines are a critical step toward slowing the spread of a virus that has now caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide, killing hundreds of thousands in the United States alone, experts have repeatedly emphasized that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean an immediate return to pre-pandemic life.

“There are many people that think it’s kind of an antidote to it all and that once you’re vaccinated, you won’t have to mask or distance or any of those things,” said Namandje Bumpus, director of the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, who has participated in community calls about the vaccines. “Certainly, all of us getting vaccinated moves us toward that more quickly, but it’s not something that we’re going to be able to do as soon as we get vaccinated. We’re going to have to continue to be diligent the way that we have been.”

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Yes people with coronavirus vaccinations should still distance from each other. Here’s why.

So far, more than 2.2 million people in the United States have been fully vaccinated, according to The Washington Post’s tracker. But public health officials say at least 70 percent of the population needs to be inoculated for the country to achieve herd immunity and stop the virus’s spread.

And with the virus continuing to spread rapidly across much of the country, many forms of in-person socializing carry some level of risk, including gatherings among people who are fully vaccinated, said Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“I feel like a gathering of a small number of people where everyone is vaccinated is a much safer situation — much — than it was before we had vaccines,” Sax said. “The only thing that people want to hear, though, is, ‘Is it 100 percent safe?’ And we don’t have proof of that yet.”

Bumpus agrees. “Based on science and how vaccines work, it certainly is likely that that will end up being lower-risk. But right now, we just don’t know.”

Here is why experts say vaccinated people should still follow coronavirus safety measures at least for the time being — even around others who have been vaccinated.