“If you think about what it means to have a virus takeover that rapidly, it means that it is the most fit virus that it is spreading more efficiently, that it is spreading in pockets that are unvaccinated and it’s causing a lot of disease, and a lot of stress in it,” he added.
Mississippi has administered at least one shot to just 37% of its population, ranking last in the country. Officials there asked people over 65 and immunocompromised residents to avoid any indoor mass gatherings for the next two weeks amid “significant transmission” of the delta variant over the coming weeks.
“We don’t want anybody to die needlessly,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said during a news briefing Friday.
The Covid vaccines currently being used are proving to be successful in preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death from the delta variant, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Breakthrough infections are rare, and about 75% of the people who die or are hospitalized with Covid after vaccination are over the age of 65, according to the CDC.
“Preliminary data over the last six months suggest 99.5% of deaths from Covid-19 in the states have occurred in unvaccinated people … the suffering and loss we are now seeing is nearly entirely avoidable,” Walensky said earlier this month.
In addition to the risk of illness for Americans who have yet to get a shot, having unvaccinated pockets of the population could threaten the country’s ability to control the pandemic. Continued transmission of the virus means additional opportunities for new variants to emerge, with the possibility that one will be able to evade the protection offered by vaccines.
While 48% of all Americans are fully vaccinated, the pace of daily shots has slowed significantly in recent months. About 515,000 vaccinations have been administered each day on average over the past week, CDC data shows, following a steady decline from peak levels of more than 3 million shots per day in April.
Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/covid-cases-rise-in-us-counties-with-low-vaccination-rates-as-delta-variant-spreads.html
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