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Washington – As the United States continues to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb said parts of the country could experience “very epidemics. dense ”with the persistence of the worrying Delta variant. circulate.
“It’s going to be hyper-regionalized, where there are certain pockets of the country [where] we can have very dense epidemics, ”Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS News’s“ Face the Nation ”.
The most vulnerable areas continue to be those with low vaccination rates and immunity rates against previous infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many southern states have vaccination rates below the national average.
“I think looking across the United States, if you’re a community that has low vaccination rates and you also think there was low immunity from a previous infection, then the virus didn’t really not crossed the local population, these communities are vulnerable, “he said.” So I think the governors need to think about how they are building health care resources in the areas of the country where you have still a lot of vulnerability. ”
Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a state where hospital admissions have increased by 30%, has expressed concern about the Delta COVID-19 variant and low vaccination rates in his state.
“The Delta variant is of great concern to us. We are seeing that this has an impact on the increase in the number of cases and hospitalizations,” Hutchinson said on “Face the Nation.” The governor also noted that vaccine reluctance is high in his state, which he attributed to conspiracy theories, the Johnson & Johnson one-shot diet hiatus in April, and individuals simply not believing not to the effectiveness of the virus.
After
The Delta variant, first discovered in India, has now been found in 49 states and Washington, DC. The variant is more transmissible and can lead to more serious illness than other strains of the coronavirus.
In the UK, the Delta variant now accounts for 99% of new COVID cases, according to Public Health England. Gottlieb says the US is only a month or two behind the UK in terms of experience with the variant.
“They are seeing the cases increasing. They are certainly not taking off with the same speed that we have seen in past outbreaks. The other thing we are seeing about the UK experience right now is that it does. has not the same impact. So they had about 90,000 cases, they had about 1,000 hospitalizations. The vast majority are unvaccinated people. Only 8% of people who have been fully vaccinated are hospitalized patients, “he added. Gottlieb said. “And so you have a situation where you have a population that has more immunity, not only from vaccination, but also from past infection. So it doesn’t have the same impact in terms of death and serious illness as in the last outbreak. ”
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