| With COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations increasing in communities with low vaccination rates, an expert says Americans face a choice: Get vaccinated or continue dealing with the impacts of the pandemic.
“We can’t have it both ways; we can’t be both unmasked and non-socially distant and unvaccinated. That won’t work,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University.
COVID-19 cases rose a sharp 47% over the past week as the more transmissible delta variant spread, but not all communities were impacted equally.
Reiner said about a third of the nation’s cases came out of five states —Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Nevada. And impacts were felt most among the unvaccinated. Of all the deaths from the virus in June, more than 99% were among unvaccinated people, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have to pick sides and the side we need is to be vaccinated,” Reiner said. “We have the tools to put this down — we can put it down this summer — but the way to do that is vaccination.”
To get more Americans vaccinated, officials will need to address the reasons behind some of the population’s hesitancy.
For some, it is that the vaccines have not been fully approved, which Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN is only a matter of time. And for some, political divide has inhibited vaccinations, but Reiner emphasized that with more than 600,000 Americans dead, it is the virus that should be seen as the enemy, not vaccines.
Read more about this story. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.