[ad_1]
WASHINGTON – Senior public health officials are warning of an alarming increase in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, numbers that represent a bitter setback in the fight to end the pandemic.
“Overall, we are seeing an increase in cases and hospitalizations across all age groups,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said in a briefing Thursday by the team. response to the White House pandemic. She noted that as of Monday, 83% of all counties in the United States were experiencing “substantial or high” transmission of the coronavirus, a trend driven almost entirely by the Delta variant of the virus.
The disheartening news is a refutation of earlier and more optimistic predictions. “From the start, we have known this virus is unpredictable,” White House pandemic response coordinator Jeff Zients said Thursday, although he argued that the country’s “relentless” vaccination campaign administration was showing further signs of progress.
The coronavirus has shown frustrating resilience. New variants of the pathogen could prolong the pandemic until 2022.
It was supposed to be over now.
“We will have collective immunity by April,” read a Wall Street Journal editorial published on February 18, 2021. Vaccines were just beginning to be widely available and the winter wave seemed to be easing. “There is reason to believe that the country is rushing towards an extremely low level of infection,” predicted the author of the article, Dr. Marty Makary, cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins.
Like most other predictions about the pandemic, this one has proven to be incorrect. It’s August now, and while things aren’t as gloomy as they were for most of 2020, the more transmissible Delta variant has prolonged the pandemic, scuttling visions of a summer reopening to nationwide.
“We are going backwards” says Dr Leana Wen, the former Baltimore health commissioner, “when we could put the pandemic behind us with vaccination.”
There are of course reasons for optimism, especially when it comes to vaccination rates which had stagnated for weeks. On Thursday, Zients revealed that 864,000 people had been vaccinated on Wednesday, the highest number since July 3. He said, among other things, that vaccinations have increased in Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee, where infections have recently skyrocketed.
“Clearly, Americans are seeing the impact of being unvaccinated and unprotected,” Zients said at the press conference. Vaccines continue to be exceptionally effective in protecting against serious illness and death. On the rare occasions when the coronavirus breaks the protections offered by vaccines, the resulting COVID-19 crisis tends to be mild.
Overall, only 49.9% of all Americans are fully immunized, according to the CDC. This figure does not take into account those with natural immunity from fighting COVID-19, developing antibodies in the process. The vaccine is also not yet approved for children under 12, although they tend to get sick much more rarely than adults.
This means that the reprieve that began in the spring is about to end. During Thursday’s briefing, Walensky said the seven-day average of cases rose sharply to 89,463 new cases per day, an increase of 43.3% from the previous reporting period. Just two months ago, the country finally had a day with fewer than 10,000 new cases – and a weekly average of fewer than 15,000 new cases.
There couldn’t be a clearer sign that things were improving. But what should have been a turning point turned out to be a brief period of lull. Shortly after that drop, cases started to rise again, just as some epidemiologists had predicted if more people were not getting vaccinated and communities rejected all restrictions.
Even more worrying is a 41.1% increase in the seven-day average of new hospitalizations last week compared to the week ending June 26 and a 39.3% increase in deaths during the same period. increasing case rates. There are now an average of 381 coronavirus deaths per day. Deaths fell below 300 per day in June, but, like infection rates, have increased since then.
For much of the summer, the nation appeared to be in a post-pandemic state of mind, even as Delta was already spreading. “President Biden absolutely declared a victory too soon,” Wen recently told Yahoo News, referring to his July 4 speech on “our independence from a deadly virus.”
The remarks came after a spring that saw more than 100 million Americans vaccinated. As vaccination rates continued to rise, the public and many elected leaders seemed to expire and relax.
It seems to have been a mistake.
In mid-May, the CDC announced that those vaccinated no longer needed to wear masks. Around this time, the more cautious parts of the United States announced that they would lift the last restrictions on activities like dining and concerts.
The pandemic seemed over. “It’s time to get back to normal life,” wrote social critic Yascha Mounk.
Already, however, a new variant of the coronavirus was on the way. Delta was first identified in India and spent much of the spring proliferating in the UK, where it delayed plans to reopen.
“We cannot let this happen in the United States,” Dr Anthony Fauci, the president’s senior scientific adviser, said on June 8, referring to the rapid spread of Delta in the UK.
Early studies indicated that the Delta variant had characteristics that made it more transmissible than other variants of the coronavirus. Yet the vaccines were very effective – and continue to be so. Public health officials have repeatedly said that vaccinations are the only effective way out against the virus.
Of course, for vaccines to be effective, they must be injected into the arms. Despite a host of incentives from federal, state and local authorities, Americans lost interest in the vaccination campaign with the onset of warmer weather. A flood of vaccine misinformation also appears to have hampered efforts. Even the offers of alcohol and free guns failed to convince the holdouts.
The last time more than a million people were vaccinated in a single day was June 11, according to the CDC. At that time, vaccination rates had been steadily declining since early April, when more than 3 million people were vaccinated daily. The doses were coveted, sending some people looking for shots.
Now that the Delta variant has made landfall, people are eager to get the vaccine again. But it takes up to two weeks for a fully immunized person to develop antibodies to the coronavirus, and people now receiving their first injection of mRNA vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna will have to wait several weeks before receiving a second injection. without which there is little protection against Delta.
Nothing can be done about these waiting periods, which means the coronavirus will continue to spread through much of August, even as governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have resisted the warrants. mask that would provide an additional layer of protection.
Earlier this week – about a month later than expected – the nation reached President Biden’s goal of immunizing 70 percent of American adults. Yet experts now believe that around 80% of the population must be vaccinated (or maintain natural immunity against previous COVID-19 disease) to gain herd immunity.
Today’s picture is significantly darker than it was a month ago, when the end of the pandemic seemed near. “We are closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” Biden said at a White House event on July 4.
Now, all of a sudden, independence seems more distant. There are fears of new closures, schools returning to Zoom, canceled weddings and vacations. There are debates over moratoriums on deportations and travel restrictions. The masks are back. The same is true for the duration of this pandemic. For at least a little longer, it seems.
____
Learn more about Yahoo News:
[ad_2]
Source link