- The U.S. is experiencing another spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations driven by the emergence of the Delta variant.
- A large majority of new hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 are occurring among unvaccinated people.
- A new
CDC report shows that since July 26, there have been only 6,587 reports of breakthrough infections that resulted in hospitalization or death among 163 million fully vaccinated people — a percentage of 0.01 percent or less.
The pandemic remains a race between an increasingly infectious and changing virus and administering the vaccines, which offer high levels of protection.
At this point, 70 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, while many other countries struggle to get enough vaccine supply to come anywhere near that.
While vaccine access is widespread in the United States, so is the Delta variant of the coronavirus — the one first detected in India in December. Now, a variant of that variant dubbed “Delta Plus,” an even more contagious strain, has been detected in various countries, including India, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and South Korea.
Infectious disease experts say large-scale outbreaks among unvaccinated people are being fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant.
“What makes the variant worrisome is the fact that it is a more contagious version of COVID-19 and will find unvaccinated individuals and infect them at a high rate,” Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Healthline. “If those unvaccinated are high risk for hospitalization, and there are many of them in a geographic area, it could be problematic for hospitals.”
That’s what’s occurring in places such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, where local leaders have resisted basic precautions like mask mandates and vaccination rates among young adults remain low.
Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, which has some of the highest vaccine rates in the country, local authorities have reverted to mandating that people wear masks indoors in public, regardless of their vaccination status. That’s due to a spike in infections attributed to the Delta virus.
Arnab Mukherjea, chair of the Department of Public Health at California State University, East Bay, said that up to 99 percent of people experiencing severe illness from COVID-19 are unvaccinated, but no vaccine is 100 percent effective.
“There is always going to be a case where something bad happens to someone who did everything right,” Mukherjea told Healthline. “Pretty much everything we’re seeing is because of the Delta variant.”
Source: healthline