Here is my guess on what’s ahead. The Delta variant will continue to overwhelm unvaccinated communities. Right now, Mississippi and Oklahoma, both of which have vaccination rates that are lower than the national average, have unimaginably high rates of test positivity, exceeding 50%; an additional six states have test positivity rates that are higher than 20%. While Florida and Alabama do not release this data to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, they are also likely to be high in both states, given the rising case numbers there.
And these are the rates before millions of unvaccinated pre-teens are marched off to school, many unmasked and undistanced. This will likely lead to more spread and more soul-crushing tragedy, much of it vaccine-preventable. This surge of new cases, which we saw at the start of the school year in 2020, will take a while to settle down. And by then, we will be looking at the winter — when the prospect of being stuck indoors hour after hour will feel particularly grim.
But despite all this, I am somewhat optimistic. At this point in the pandemic, 69% of the eligible US population have received at least a single dose of vaccine and within a few months, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is likely to approve the current mRNA vaccines for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in pre-teens. There are only so many unvaccinated people at this point who can get infected. While breakthrough cases certainly do happen, they remain a small minority of overall cases — at least for now.
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