WASHINGTON – Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly in the United States (US), as the highly contagious Delta variant dominates and vaccinations stagnate, data showed yesterday.
The seven-day-average of new cases was 13,859 as of July 6, up 21% compared with two weeks earlier, according to the Disease Control and Prevention Centres (CDC).
Cases attributed to the most recent days may rise further because of a reporting lag following the July 4 holiday weekend.
The spike comes as the Delta variant, which is more transmissible than any previous strain, accounted for around 52% of cases in the two weeks ending July 3, according to CDC.
Despite having among the highest availability of vaccines of any country, America’s immunisation campaign has dropped off steeply since April.
President Joe Biden narrowly missed his goal of having 70% adults at least partly vaccinated by Independence Day, with the current figure at 67%.
Regions in the Midwest and South with lower vaccination rates are experiencing higher case rates than regions with high vaccination rates such as the Northeast, a trend that has become increasingly clear in recent weeks.
A hospital in Springfield, Missouri, ran out of ventilators to treat hospitalised Covid-19 patients over the weekend, reported local media.
The city of 160,000’s two hospitals were treating 213 Covid-19 patients as of Monday, up from 168 on Friday, and 31 on May 24, said the Kansas City Star.
“The trajectory that we are likely to see is two different flavours of the pandemic in the US, one in which it is more of a problem in places where there is a high level of unvaccinated individuals,” said Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security.
“In other parts of the country, the pandemic is largely going to be something that is managed as more of an ordinary respiratory virus.”
He said even with Delta becoming the dominant strain, he envisioned a “decoupling” of hospitalisations and deaths from rising cases in highly vaccinated regions, as has been seen in Israel.
“Increasingly, I think we have to start to shift our focus away from cases and really look at hospitalisations, because that is what the vaccine was designed to do – it was designed to decouple cases from hospitalisation.”
Real world data has shown that the Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines have retained high efficacy against severe Covid-19, and the same is almost certainly true of the Moderna vaccine, according to experts. – AFP, July 8, 2021
