"While the virus hasn't been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives," President Joe Biden said on Sunday, as hospitalizations, cases, and deaths trended down. "America is coming back together," he added.
But a quiet new wave of severe COVID-19 infections is brewing, fueled by the more transmissible Delta coronavirus variant.
"We actually have states where hospitalizations are going up more than cases," Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told Insider, stressing that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may mask the virus' true spread.
"We have 14 states where transmission has started to go back up," said Murray, who's also the lead modeler at the IHME, which the White House has leaned on for disease projections throughout the pandemic.
That's "due to the Delta variant and the fact that everybody's stopped wearing a mask and just basically stopped most precautions," he added.
Disease modelers at Scripps have estimated that Delta could be responsible for about 60% of COVID-19 cases across the US.
Vaccines prevent serious illness
COVID-19 vaccines don't prevent every infection - they are designed to better defend your body against the virus. The vaccines authorized in the US do that very well, even against Delta.
Some vaccinated people get a mild, cold-like illness , with a headache and a runny nose. Others could get infected but never know it, becoming silent spreaders.
Delta has wreaked far greater havoc among the unvaccinated. Hospitalizations are trending up in several states, including Missouri, Arkansas, Utah, and Mississippi, according to IHME data . Those are some of the same places where vaccination rates are lagging .
How Delta can move through a semivaccinated population
Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King's College London, previously told Insider that while there's no evidence that Delta is deadlier, it is more infectious, and "because of that extra stickiness, it's going to still keep breaking through the vaccine group."
More than half of Scotland is fully vaccinated, and 71% of Scots have received at least one dose of a vaccine. But the country is suffering its worst wave of infections.
"You cannot explain the explosive epidemic in Scotland, in a pretty highly vaccinated population, if they're not playing a role in transmission," Murray said of vaccinated people.
Lee pointed to studies indicating that Delta cases are milder in vaccinated people and, therefore, people are not infectious for as long. It stands to reason, he said, that vaccinated people would not transmit as much.
"That window of transmission probably goes down," he said.
Delta versus our vaccines
A recent real-world study from the UK suggested that Pfizer's vaccine was about 88% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 with Delta, markedly lower than the 95% efficacy against earlier-detected strains.
Vaccines from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson , too, may be less effective at preventing symptomatic infections with Delta, early lab studies by those companies have suggested.
What's clear is that all three US-authorized vaccines maintain strong protection against severe disease and death, even with the Delta variant.
there are people who took the vaccine and there are people who didn't and that was their choice, what folks need to do is stop criticizing one another for the choice they made, the government and these big corporations aren't going to tell us the truth about this vaccine that they threw together in such a short time, come on think people folks have been dying from aids and other illnesses for years and they still talking about finding a cure for these illnesses, every drug has a side effect it may not effect some people the same way or same time but eventually it will, this vaccine was put together fast and thats questionable to me, covid 19 came upon us out of nowhere and it killed millions of people around the world, Someone knew about this virus beforehand and then boom here we are today with a pandemic and a vaccine that some are taking and some aren't, I'm not going to question anyone's choice thats not my business God help us all
Tom Cat
2021-07-10
So is it a conviction to be vaccinated? Geeeee, the way they state it in this article makes like we are doing something wrong. We were told to get vaccinated, now they are blaming those who are vaccinated? Stop pointing get on those who have not been vaccinated. Plus, and find solutions for those who can’t get vaccinated because of certain illness they have, duh…
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