The COVID-19 outbreak in the US on Saturday surpassed 100,000 new confirmed daily infections — a milestone last reached during a surge last winter — as the highly transmissible Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 spreads and people in southern regions hesitate over getting vaccinated.
Health authorities fear that cases, hospitalizations and deaths are to continue to soar if more Americans do not embrace the vaccine, although nationwide, 50 percent of residents are fully vaccinated and more than 70 percent of adults have received at least one dose.
“Our models show that if we don’t [vaccinate people], we could be up to several hundred thousand cases per day, similar to our surge in early January,” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky told CNN this week.
Photo: Reuters
It took the US about nine months to surpass 100,000 average daily cases in November last year, before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June, averaging about 11,000 per day, but six weeks later, the number is 107,143.
Hospitalizations and deaths are also increasing, although all are still below peaks seen early this year before vaccines became widely available.
More than 44,000 Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19, the CDC said, up 30 percent in a week and nearly four times the number in June, while more than 120,000 were hospitalized in January.
The seven-day average for deaths was nearly 500 per day as of Friday, up from about 270 deaths per day two weeks ago, Johns Hopkins University said.
Deaths peaked at 3,500 per day in January. Deaths usually lag behind hospitalizations as the disease normally takes a few weeks to kill.
The situation is particularly dire in the southern US, which has some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates and smaller hospitals.
In the southeast, the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients jumped 50 percent to a daily average of 17,600 over the past week, up from 11,600 the previous week, the CDC said.
Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky represent 41 percent of the nation’s new hospitalizations, the CDC said, twice their overall share of the population.
Alabama and Mississippi have the lowest vaccination rates in the country — less than 35 percent of residents are fully inoculated, the Mayo Clinic said.
Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas are all in the lowest 15 states.
Alabama saw more than 65,000 doses wasted because health providers could not find people who wanted the shots before they expired, Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris said.
That represents less than 1.5 percent of the more than 5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses that Alabama has received.
“Sixty-five thousand doses have been wasted. That’s extremely unfortunate when we have such a low vaccination rate and, of course, there are so many people in the world that still don’t have access to vaccines,” Harris said.
Florida has been especially hard hit. It makes up more than 20 percent of the nation’s new cases and hospitalizations — triple its share of the population.
Many rural counties in the state have vaccination rates below 40 percent, with the state at 49 percent.
On Saturday, Florida again set a record, reporting 23,903 new confirmed COVID-19 cases.
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