Covid relief could be fleeting in US regions with lower inoculation rates: Experts
Iran Press TV
Monday, 14 June 2021 8:29 AM
American health experts are warning that relief from the coronavirus pandemic could be fleeting in US regions where few people get vaccinated.
The warning on Sunday came despite new Covid-19 cases decreasing across most of the country, even in some states with vaccine-hesitant populations.
Yet, almost all states where cases are rising have lower-than-average vaccination rates.
Overall, cases nationally have fallen in a week from a seven-day average of about 21,000 on May 29 to 14,315 on Saturday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
According to experts, some states were experiencing increased immunity because there were high rates of natural spread of the disease, which is on the brink of having killed 600,000 people in the US.
"We certainly are getting some population benefit from our previous cases, but we paid for it," said the Mississippi state health officer, Thomas Dobbs. "We paid for it with deaths."
Only in Mississippi, over 7,300 people have died in the crisis and the state has the sixth-highest per capita death rate.
Dobbs predicted that nearly 60% of the state's residents now had "some underlying immunity".
"So we're now sort of seeing that effect, most likely, because we have a combination of natural and vaccine-induced immunity," Dobbs said.
Only eight states – Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Missouri, Nevada, Texas, Utah and Wyoming – have seen their seven-day rolling averages for Covid-19 infection rates increase from two weeks earlier, Johns Hopkins data showed.
Except for Hawaii, all the others have recorded vaccination rates that are lower than the US average, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The 10 states with the fewest new cases per capita over that time period all have fully vaccinated rates above the national average. That includes the three most vaccinated states - Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Medical experts said a host of factors was playing into the fall in case counts across the US, including vaccines, natural immunity from exposure to the virus, warmer weather and people spending less time indoors.
"Just because we're lucky in June doesn't mean we'll continue to be lucky come the late fall and winter," said Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University.
"We could well have variants here that are more transmissible, more virulent and those who do not have immunity or have waning immunity could be susceptible once again," added the former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore.
States and cities have, for weeks, been lifting pandemic-related restrictions and mask mandates even indoors.
But last week, the Director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci said the Delta coronavirus variant -- the B.1.617.2 variant first identified in India -- is still threatening to spread in the US.
During a White House COVID-19 briefing, Fauci warned that spread of the Delta variant in the United Kingdom could be repeated in the US if people don't get vaccinated.
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