Because older people, who are at higher risk for severe disease and death, are now highly vaccinated, “100,000 cases today is less dire than 100,000 in December of 2020,” he said.
That means cases are more concentrated in younger people, who are less likely to be vaccinated. Younger people are less likely to become severely ill “but this isn’t a nothing burger,” Noymer said. Hospitalizations are still high.
He looked up the numbers in his county a year ago and there were 722 people hospitalized for COVID-19. This week there are 497 hospitalizations in Orange County.
“We have a vaccine that works wonderfully now,” he said, “so our peak shouldn’t be five-sevenths as big as the previous summer.”
The U.S. numbers parallel what was seen in the United Kingdom and in Israel when the extremely transmissible delta variant hit those nations, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
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