Covid death toll in US nears 700,000 despite vaccine availability



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His own exhaustion runs deep. He works seven days a week and has recently been faced with problems previously unimaginable: a shortage of coffins, hospitals with full mortuaries, and the need to schedule burials weeks into the future so that cemeteries have vaults available.

“It certainly took its toll,” he said. “And you just think it doesn’t have to be.”

The Delta surge hit working-age Americans particularly hard. Older Americans are even more susceptible to the virus but have benefited from their willingness to be vaccinated: People 65 and older, who have been among the most vulnerable to serious illnesses from the virus, have the highest vaccination rates. high of all age groups, at 83 percent fully vaccinated, according to CDC

Vaccination warrants began to take effect in some states and within some companies, and on Friday California became the first state to announce plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to other vaccinations needed to attend the school, starting next fall. But only 65 percent of the eligible U.S. population is fully immunized. The country’s immunization campaign has been slowed down by people saying they are hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccine, amid a polarized landscape that has included misinformation from conservative and anti-vaccine commentators highlighting question the safety of vaccines.

Vaccination rates are lower for people in their 30s, and the number of people in that age group who died from the virus in August was almost double the number of people who died in January, the previous record month, according to provisional counts CDC More than 3,800 people in their 40s died from Covid-19 in August, up from 2,800 in January.

Stephen Kimmel, professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, said young people are particularly vulnerable to infection now because they have relatively low vaccination rates and increasingly interact with each other, which which increases the chances of getting infected. The Delta variant is much more contagious than the previous variants.

“If you look back when the virus first started, the mantra was that it seems like a disease that affects older people more severely, and luckily younger ones don’t seem to get so sick,” he said. -he declares. “Younger people now think this is a virus that will not affect them. “

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