CNN :
The Delta variant, a more transmissible and possibly more dangerous strain of coronavirus, now makes up more than half of all new Covid-19 infections in the US, according to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Delta accounts for 51.7% of new infections in the US, according to the CDC. The B.1.1.7, or Alpha variant, which has dominated for months, now accounts for 28.7% of cases, the CDC said.
“If ever there was a reason to get vaccinated, this is it,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
The variant poses a “significant threat,” to unvaccinated people Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said.
The variant is not only more transmissible, it can also cause more severe disease, Fauci said.
And people in areas where the vaccination rate is low are especially at risk, health officials say.
“We’re already starting to see places with low vaccination rates starting to have relatively big spikes from the Delta variant. We’ve seen this in Arkansas, Missouri, Wyoming … those are the places where we’re going to see more hospitalizations and deaths as well, unfortunately,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
“Any time you have large outbreaks, it does become a breeding ground for potentially more variants,” Jha said.
The US is already grappling with variants that are more contagious than the original strain of novel coronavirus. They include the “stickier” Alpha (B.1.1.7) variant, which is currently the dominant strain in the US, and the even more contagious Delta (B.1.617.2) variant, which is on track to become the dominant strain in the US, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
“The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road.”
Parts of the South, Southwest and Midwest are starting to see spikes in cases, and many of those states — such as Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi — are among those with the lowest rates of vaccination, according to the CDC.
States with below-average vaccination rates have almost triple the rate of new Covid-19 cases compared to states with above-average vaccination rates, according to recent data from Johns Hopkins University.
And since vaccines are highly effective but not perfect, some health experts say they will wear masks in certain places despite being fully vaccinated.
“If you’re in a low-infection, high-vaccination area, you don’t need to be wearing a mask indoors if you’re fully vaccinated,” Jha said.
But “if I were in southwest Missouri right now, I’m fully vaccinated, but I would be wearing a mask indoors.”
While many health experts have said available vaccines offer protection from variants now circulating, an analysis in Israel suggests the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine — the one that Israel chose to inoculate its citizens with — may not be as effective as was previously found there, possibly because of the Delta variant.
