Experts Warn Of Coming 'Delta Wave,' New Mu Variant
“If you’re unvaccinated, boy, the virus is looking for you," director of the National Institutes of Health says
While dropping off to nearly negligible levels earlier this summer — facilitated by the Biden administration's determined efforts to vaccinate all eligible Americans — the COVID-19 pandemic has come roaring back in recent weeks, powered by those on the political right who have refused to get vaccinated as well as the more-virulent Delta variant.
And, as bad as the pandemic is now, it's only a taste of the spread of the disease expected after the Labor Day holiday, experts warn.
Meanwhile, there's already a new, My, variant which Americans will next have to contend with, these public health professionals said.
After the Biden administration's aggressive vaccination efforts drove new COVID cases down to just 4,087 nationwide on June 27 —from a high of more than 300,000 in January in the weeks before President Biden's inauguration — that number has rebounded to nearly 66,000 new cases on Saturday.
The sudden growth in new cases has been largely due to the Delta variant and those on the right who often have been spreading misinformation — or downright disinformation — about the available vaccines.
Much of the nation should expect to see much worse from the more-dangerous Delta variant, according to Dr Scott Gottlieb, former administrator of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, and now a member of the board of Pfizer, manufacturer of one of the vaccines in use against COVID-19.
“I don’t think that that was the true Delta wave. I think that that was a Delta warning. I think our true Delta wave's going to start to build after Labor Day here in the Northeast and northern part of the country. This is going to be a highly regionalized epidemic,” Dr Gottlieb said. “And so I do think that Labor Day and return to school are going to be incubators for spread that’s going to lead to that Delta wave.
“Now, whether we see a wave of infection as dense and severe as the south, I don’t think that’s going to be the case because we have a lot more vaccination” in the Northeast, he added. “We have had a lot of prior infection, which we also know is protective, but we will probably see a build in cases here in the Northeast. I don’t think that we’re done with this. I hope we are, but I don’t think that we can conclude that just because the cases are coming down from the mini-surge that we saw over the summer.”
The best advice is still to get vaccinated, said Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
“I think it’s a pretty wise recommendation that Delta variant is still spreading rapidly across many areas of the country. We are now seeing 160,000 cases every day. We are seeing over 100,000 people in the hospital, almost all of the people in the hospital are unvaccinated and sadly we’ve now seen deaths climbing up….” Dr Collins said. “If you’re unvaccinated, boy, the virus is looking for you and you don’t want to be in a vulnerable place and travel, of course, puts you in circumstances that you can’t completely control.
“I would totally go with CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] on this. If you’re unvaccinated, don’t go into a travel-risk situation. Instead get yourself vaccinated,” he added.
Meanwhile, the latest variant, known as Mu, is already out there and will be something Americans eventually will have to likely deal with.
The new coronavirus variant is not at the moment posing a great risk to Americans, according to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“We’re paying attention to it, we take everything like that seriously, but we don’t consider it an immediate threat right now,” Fauci said Thursday during a White House COVID response news briefing.
Earlier this week, Mu, known by scientists as B.1.621, was added to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “of interest” list of variants. The variant was first identified in Colombia and has been confirmed in at least 39 countries, according to the WHO.
The good news is that it's still early enough not to be alarmed by Mu, said Dr Collins.
“Well, it is a variant that was first seen in Colombia and Ecuador. In Colombia it’s like 40 percent and South America and it does have a whole lot of mutations, 10 or so of them that make it different from where we started and some of those are in places that you might worry would interfere with the antibodies or even the vaccine,” Dr Collins said. “It’s worth tracking, who has called it a variant of interest. CDC hasn’t named it that.
“We have relatively few cases in the U.S. But what I’ve seen so far and we are tracking this day by day, very carefully suggest that the vaccines still will work quite well against so I’m not quite anxious and look forward with experts and scientific community assessing exactly what its consequences might be,” he added.
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