After an all-too-brief respite, the United States is again at a crossroads in the pandemic. The number of infections has ticked up — slowly at first, then swiftly — to 51,000 cases per day, on average, more than four times the rate a month ago. The country may again see overflowing hospitals, exhausted health care workers and thousands of needless deaths.
The more contagious delta variant may be getting the blame, but fueling its rise is an older, more familiar foe: vaccine hesitancy and refusal, long pervasive in the United States. Were a wider swath of the population vaccinated, there would be no resurgence — of the delta variant, alpha variant or any other version of the coronavirus...
...The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant or have not yet gained access. The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again.
And they will not be the only ones who are singed. Vaccinated people will be protected from severe illness and death, but there may be other consequences. Already in some communities, they are being asked to wear masks indoors. If the numbers continue to soar, the restrictions that divided the country before may return. Workplaces may need to close again, and schools, too.
And some number of vaccinated people will become infected. Breakthrough infections were expected to be vanishingly rare with the original virus, but recent data suggest they may be less so with the delta variant. It is roughly twice as contagious as the original coronavirus, and some early evidence hints that people infected with the variant carry the virus in much higher amounts.
“The larger the force of infection that comes from the pandemic in unvaccinated populations, the more breakthrough infections there will be,” Hanage said.
To the religious right, Jehovah's witnesses, the political right, and you other fucking whackos: Please do not fly the American flag as you are not worthy of it.
Poll
