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UPticks in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in south-central states such as West Virginia and Kentucky are seen as signs that the pandemic is on the verge of subsiding and heading towards endemicity.
As more people gain immunity to the coronavirus, whether through vaccination or infection, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread and mutate into variants that infect people better. Downgrading the pandemic to the endemic level at which the virus is circulating around the world at manageable levels is likely around the corner, infectious disease experts say, but the delta variant is still tearing up states such as West Virginia and the United States. Kentucky, where immunogenicity is low.
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“Delta is accelerating this approach to endemicity,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco. She cited California as an example of the recent drop in case rates due to a steady rise in vaccinations over the summer as well as the natural exposure of unvaccinated people to the virus.
The delta variant “leaves immunity in its wake,” Gandhi said. “So you get all that immunity, and then you lower it to a low level of circulation, and then that’s a way of life.”
In contrast, the new daily COVID-19 reported cases in West Virginia and Kentucky are up 20% and 36% in the past two weeks, respectively. They have the second and third cases per capita in the United States, second only to Alaska. They also lead hospitalizations in the United States for the disease, indicating that too few people in those states have received the vaccines that have been shown to be very effective in protecting against serious infections.
Still, epidemiologists warn against viewing these recent increases as a sign that a new surge is brewing. On the contrary, they are an integral part of the same delta wave recorded earlier this summer.
“What we are seeing in Kentucky and West Virginia is an evolution of what we have already seen in the South,” said Dr. David Dowdy, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We haven’t seen the same spread in the most vaccinated areas, but it’s still the evolution of this same epidemic… like what Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana were at the start of this wave. ”
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice warned folks last week that “we’re going to pile up the body bags until we get to a point where we have enough people who have natural immunities and enough people who are vaccinated.”
Daily vaccinations in the state capped despite the inducements to get shot, like a $ 100 savings bond and a gun gift. To date, only about 40% of West Virginia have been fully immunized, the lowest total in the country. In Kentucky, a little more than half of the population has been fully vaccinated. Vaccinations continue to rise, albeit slowly, and new infections are outstripping efforts by state officials to get everyone vaccinated.
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Reaching this level means that many more people will be exposed to the virus as long as those resistant to the vaccine remain firmly opposed to the vaccines.
“The current push has probably peaked in the United States, but it could be a very slow exit ramp,” Dowdy said. “If the criterion is that we want to be back where we were in June, it could still be far, far away, I mean it could take months. … We are going to have to learn to adapt and accept a certain level of disease that is going on.
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