- Covid-19 vaccines are protecting more than half the US population from current strains, experts say.
- But if too few people get vaccinated, the virus will be allowed to continue to spread — and the result could be an even more dangerous variant, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
The dreaded deja vu of overloaded hospitals and students needing to stay at home was almost entirely avoidable, doctors say.
But as millions of Americans remain unvaccinated and unmasked — and the Delta variant runs amok — the country is paying the price, reports CNN.
Vaccination and Delta variant surge
More than 95% of the US population lives in a county where people should now be wearing a mask in indoor public places, according to guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those in counties with “high” or “substantial” coronavirus transmission should mask up indoors, the CDC said.
The US is now averaging more than 108,000 Covid-19 cases per day over the past week — the highest in about six months, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Hospitalizations and deaths have almost doubled in the past two weeks. About 67,000 people are now hospitalized with Covid-19, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
And every day, about 514 Americans are dying from Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins. “We’re seeing severely increasing rates” of new infections, said Michael Sweat, team leader of Medical University of South Carolina’s Covid-19 Epidemiology Intelligence project.
“In early July, we were down to the lowest we’ve been since the beginning (of the pandemic),” he said. “Now, just within a couple of weeks, we are getting close to the maximum number of cases we’ve had from the beginning.”
Of those getting hospitalized, more than 90% are not vaccinated — mirroring national statistics from the CDC. “But we’re also seeing younger patients than we have seen in the past,” Sweat said.
“I believe this is largely because vaccination rates were quite high among people 60 and over. But we are seeing many teens. We’re seeing some pediatric cases. So it is shifting from what we’ve seen before.”
Get vaccinated before another variant arises
The longer a virus spreads and replicates among unvaccinated people, the more chances it has to mutate. And when mutations give the virus an advantage, more aggressive variants can emerge — such as ones that could evade vaccines.
“Then all of us who are protected against Delta may not be protected against” some other variant, Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a Q&A with USA Today published Sunday.
If an overwhelming majority of the population is vaccinated, the virus will disappear in the country, said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But having only a partially vaccinated population means smoldering levels of infection will carry into the fall, Fauci told USA Today. Then Covid-19 infections could be confused with the flu this winter and pick back up in the spring.
And if the rest of the world isn’t vaccinated over the next couple of years, more circulation could mean more variants, Fauci warned.
In many parts of the country, particularly the South, hospitalizations are surging. Louisiana set a new record for Covid-19 hospitalizations last week. Florida’s hospitalizations recently jumped 13% over the previous peak in 2020. And a hospital in Houston said Sunday morning there are no more beds left in the facility.
“Over the last 12 hours, we have lost more patients than … in the last five to six weeks,” Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center Chief of Staff Dr. Joseph Varon said.
Experts not worried about vaccine protection yet
The good news, experts say, is that data shows that vaccines do protect against the most troubling coronavirus strains in the US. Some have questioned the risk of the emerging Lambda (C.37) variant, first identified in Peru.
But researchers aren’t yet seriously concerned about current vaccines not working against Delta or Lambda, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told ABC on Sunday.
“We all worry about the day when a variant arrives that the vaccines stop working as well,” Collins said. “The best way to reduce that from happening is to reduce the number of infections. That’s how variants happen.”
“All the more reason why we should be doing everything possible to cut back the wild spread of Delta so we don’t get something even more dangerous.”
But public health officials are watching vaccine efficacy closely, including how protection might wane over time, Fauci told CNN.
When data shows protection goes below a certain threshold, health officials will recommend boosters for the general population, Fauci said Sunday.
- Pfizer has said its Covid-19 vaccine appears to stay 84% effective after six months.
- Moderna said last week its Covid-19 vaccine showed 93% efficacy against symptomatic disease through six months.
Boosters could come too late for immunocompromised people
Concerns over vaccine protection are different for people who are immunocompromised, have had a transplant or are undergoing cancer therapy.
“We know for sure that they never did get an adequate response — most of them, not all of them, but most of them,” Fauci said.
“We need to look at them in a different light than the durability for a normal person, which means that we will almost certainly be boosting those people before we boost the general population that’s been vaccinated.”
Research published in JAMA Network Open estimates that 6 million people in the US are taking immunosuppressants that could interfere with the vaccine — a number the researchers say is likely an under-estimate.
The FDA is moving quickly to make a decision on Covid-19 vaccine boosters for people with compromised immune systems, and a decision could come sometime before early September, a Biden administration official told CNN.
Even if the decision comes soon, it may not be soon enough for people who are immunocompromised amid the spread of the Delta variant, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA.
“Because by the time you actually make that decision … and you start operationalizing a booster campaign, you’re talking about maybe late October if the decision comes in September, that you can start getting a sizeable number of people boosted,” Gottlieb told CBS Sunday.
“It takes time to get that stood up and get people into the doctors’ offices to get injections. And it will take a couple of weeks for the immunity to mature.”
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Source: CNN
