According to reports, in the United States, COVID 19 cases are increasing rapidly as the Delta variant dominates and vaccination stagnates in the country.
In accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the seven-day average of fresh cases of COVID 19 was 13,859 as of July 6. Almost an increase by 21 percent when compared with the past two weeks. The CDC stated that the spike comes as the Delta variant that is more transmissible than any previous strains, accounted for nearly 52 percent of the cases in the two weeks that concluded on July 3.
Considering the highest availability of vaccines in the country, America’s immunization campaigns have declined steeply since the month of April.
Reportedly, President Joe Biden missed his aim of having 70 percent of adults partly vaccinated by Independence Day. Currently, the figure stands at 67 percent.
In the Midwest and South regions of the country that reports lower vaccination rate has witnessed higher case rates when compared to the Northeast regions that have higher vaccination rates.
According to local media, a hospital in Springfield, Missouri ran out of ventilators to treat hospitalized COVID patients over the weekend. The Kansas City Star claimed that the city of 160,000’s two hospitals was treating 213 COVID 19 patients as of Monday, increasing from 168 on Friday and 31 on May 24.
Amesh Adalja of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security informed ‘AFP’, ” The trajectory that we are likely to see in two different flavors of the pandemic in the United States, one in which it’s more of a problem in places where there’s a high level of unvaccinated individuals.” Furthermore, he stated that in other parts of the country, the pandemic is largely going to be something that’s managed more of an ordinary respiratory virus”.
Amesh Adalja further elaborated that even with the Delta becoming the dominant strain, he proposed a ‘decoupling’ of hospitalization and deaths from rising cases in the highly vaccinated region as seen in Israel. ” Increasingly, I think we have to start to shift our focus from cases and really look at hospitalization because that’s what the vaccine was designed to do”, he expressed. He added that vaccines were designed to decouple cases from hospitalization.
As per experts’ opinion, real-world data has exhibited that the Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines have retained high efficacy against severe COVID and the same is almost certainly true of the Moderna vaccine.
