Coronarivus Hotspots... More Than Half the US!

When I wrote about resurgent Coronavirus infection rates yesterday I wasn't the only one. The CDC published new guidance, too, in light of increase risks of infection. They now recommend that everyone, including those vaccinated, wear masks indoors in places with widespread levels of transmission.

What counts as "widespread"? According to the CDC it's any place with a substantial or high level of transmission. That's more than two-thirds of the country as seen in this graphic created by CNBC from CDC data:


Link to full CNBC article with graphic [retrieved 28 Jul 2021].

The CDC stopped short of making mask wearing more than a recommendation. Of course, they never have gone further than that. The federal government continues to kick that can down to the states to handle. The states, in turn, are kicking the can down to localities... except for a few states which are outlawing local masking requirements. ...And those states include some of the worst infected!

Consider for a moment what red means in the map above. A rate of 100+ new cases per 100k residents over the past week means 16/day per 100k. 16/day is higher than we had all last Spring and most of last Summer— back when the need for masking, social distancing, and preventive closures was taken the most seriously. Now the rate is higher but most people have stopped giving a fuck.

A Tale of Two Americas

In my previous blog, about how health mandates are at an all-time low even as Covid rates have risen back to dangerous levels across most of the US, I attributed the lack of precautions to too many people just not giving a fuck anymore. I'd like to expand on that. There are actually two kinds of people who've stopped giving a fuck. 😆

On the one hand are the fully vaccinated. The roughly 55% of us in the US who've had a full course of inoculation are less concerned now about getting sick. The vaccine gives us up to 95% immunity against contracting Covid, according to scientific studies last year, and around 99% resistance to severe enough sickness to land us in the hospital. Of course, preliminary data about the newer Delta variant suggests a lower effectiveness, so we vaccinated folks do need to be more cautious today than two months ago.

On the other hand are the vaccine rejecters. These are the 30-40% of people in the US who state in polls that they either outright refuse to get vaccinated or consider themselves unlikely to do it. Many of them also think the harms of Coronavirus are exaggerated by a political-media conspiracy. Some think the vaccine itself is part of a Big Brother conspiracy.

Vaccine rejecters make up most of the Covid cases nowadays. That makes sense when you consider that vaccinated people are mostly out of the pool when it comes to sickness. We're one-tenth as likely, or less, to get infected. That actually makes the overall rates even scarier— for the unvaccinated, For the unvaccinated the infection rates are over 2x, close to 3x, the overall average. That means Coronavirus is almost as rampant now as it was at the worst peak of the past 16 months— but only for the unvaccinated. Meanwhile those of us who've gotten our shots are relatively safe. It's a tale of two Americas.