Unvaccinated areas of the country are the source of the pandemic now

WASHINGTON – Virtually all deaths from COVID-19 in the United States now involve people who have not received their coronavirus vaccine. And those deaths are heavily concentrated in counties – many in the Midwest and Southeast – where vaccination rates are precarious.

On the other hand, transmission has effectively stopped in the northeastern and western states where governors have made vaccination a top priority and resistance has been low among residents from the start.

“We are seeing that communities and counties that have high vaccine coverage and low case rates are returning to normal,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a briefing Thursday on the response to the White House pandemic. team.

Walensky described a national scenario that has become very fractured due to marked differences in vaccination rates. These differences are linked to cultural, social, economic and political factors.

At the same time, the vaccines remain highly effective against all variants of the coronavirus, including the more transmissible Delta variant which Walensky says accounts for eight out of 10 new cases in parts of the western mountain. Delta is now the dominant strain of the coronavirus in the United States.

Walensky said that in the past few months, 99.5% of all deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were among unvaccinated people. “These deaths were preventable with simple and safe shooting,” the CDC director said. President Biden has made much the same point, and he and his senior public health officials are looking for ways to galvanize a stalled vaccination effort.

Although some vaccinated people contract the coronavirus, it tends to cause only mild illness.

For weeks, the trajectory of the pandemic has been steadily shifting, with parts of the country returning to normal and others appearing to fall back into an increase in case rates. Overall, case rates and hospitalizations are increasing slightly, while deaths continue to decline. But these national trends are not indicative of more nuanced realities on the ground.

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In particular, Walensky singled out 173 counties with the highest incidence of new infections – 100 or more cases per 100,000 people over the past week. Of those 173 counties, 93 percent have vaccinated less than 40 percent of their respective populations, according to Walensky.

In recent days, parts of Missouri and Arkansas have seen a sharp increase in cases. The same is true for parts of Colorado and Utah.

Meanwhile, the highly vaccinated state of Maryland is recording about one new coronavirus death per day.

“Low vaccination rates in these counties, coupled with high case rates and lax mitigation policies that do not protect those who are not vaccinated against the disease will certainly and unfortunately lead to more unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations. and, potentially, death, ”the CDC director said.

Unvaccinated people are expected to continue to wear masks, according to the most recent CDC guidelines. Walensky and other senior public health officials have said that instead of resuming wearing masks, people should get vaccinated.

“Widespread vaccination is what is really going to turn the tide of this pandemic,” Walensky said Thursday. According to the CDC, 47.6% of the US population is fully vaccinated. It’s one of the highest rates in the world, but not enough, according to most epidemiologists, to declare the last corner has passed.

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