Spread of delta coronavirus variant endagers poorly vaccinated regions

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Wed, 2021-06-23 19:56 — mike kraft

Spread of delta coronavirus variant exposes poorly vaccinated regions to renewed danger Now at 20 percent of new U.S. infections, the variant that overwhelmed India and Britain threatens some parts of the country again, experts say. Ariana Eunjung Cha, Karla Adam, Ben Guarino, Lenny Bernstein Washington Post

The rapid spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus is poised to divide the United States again, with highly vaccinated areas continuing toward post-pandemic freedom and poorly vaccinated regions threatened by greater caseloads and hospitalizations, health officials warned this week.

The highly transmissible variant is taxing hospitals in a rural, lightly vaccinated part of Missouri, and caseloads and hospitalizations are on the rise in states such as Arkansas, Nevada and Utah, where less than 50 percent of the eligible population has received at least one dose of vaccine, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

One influential model, produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, predicts a modest overall surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths this fall. Scott Gottlieb, a former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that a fall surge could occur even if 75 percent of the eligible population is vaccinated.

But experts think that most damage will occur in localized pockets where large numbers of people have declined to be vaccinated or have not gained access to the shots.

“I think a rise in cases is certainly going to happen,” said William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The question “is how large a rise and how consequential it’s going to be.”

“Those under-vaccinated communities are more likely to be severely” affected, he said.

Resistance is greatest among younger people. Just 38.3 percent of those ages 18 to 29 have been vaccinated, according to federal research released Monday. Across all age groups, people living in counties with high rates of poor and uninsured people and less access to computers and the Internet were less likely to be vaccinated, the research showed.

In general, rural and Republican areas have embraced vaccination less than cities and Democratic states in the Northeast and along the West Coast. All of the states in New England have given at least one dose to 61 percent of their residents or more. In San Francisco, 65 percent of residents are fully vaccinated. ...

Karthik Gangavarapu, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego who works on genomic epidemiology, predicted that the delta variant may be responsible for more than 50 percent of cases by July, based on the volume that state labs are seeing. He said the numbers appear to confirm early studies that the variant may be 40 to 60 percent more transmissible than the alpha variant, which is already more transmissible than the original virus that emerged from Wuhan, China. ...

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