The Messiest Phase of the Pandemic Yet
The numbers are remarkable. More than 100 million people in the United States have likely been infected by SARS-CoV-2 and 167 million people are fully vaccinated. Yet despite this huge population of people with at least some level of immunity, the Delta variant has sent case and hospitalization numbers soaring. Florida is on its way to having twice as many people hospitalized now than during any previous wave, when essentially no one was vaccinated.
One way to think about it, as the epidemiologist Ellie Murray has laid out, is that if Delta is as transmissible as the CDC thinks, we need a much higher percentage of our population vaccinated for immunizations and natural infection alone to cause the virus to peter out. Even when the huge majority of people in a given place have gotten the coronavirus or a shot, there might still be outbreaks, as the Brown University public-health expert Ashish Jha fears will happen in South Dakota after the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
These realities have already smashed the more optimistic projections of late spring, including my own. Having stared at these numbers for months and months with the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, I never thought that we’d see hospitalization numbers higher than they were during the winter peak in any state. But here we are.
It’s time for a data-driven reset on the basic knowns and unknowns of this pandemic, a task that must be undertaken with great humility. The virus keeps changing, and so does our understanding of the social and biological components of the pandemic. But in exploring both the knowns and the unknowns, we can see how complex the pandemic has become—and that we’re still lacking crucial data because of the failings of state and federal government.
The Knowns
1. The vaccines work very well to reduce the likelihood of an individual being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19.
Let’s begin with the best bit of good news. Based on the available data, all the vaccines given in the United States appear to confer a solid level of immunity against severe outcomes such as hospitalization and death. Over a three-month period this summer, the CDC recorded 35,937 deaths from COVID-19—but just 1,191 of those who died were fully vaccinated. In other words, 96.7 percent of deaths this summer have been in the unvaccinated. Hospitalization data look similar, with few fully vaccinated people requiring hospitalization.
The CDC’s data mirror what other institutions have found. was able to compile data from most states on the . Although the proportion of breakthrough patients varied by an order of magnitude from as low as .2 percent of total hospitalizations in Texas to 4.7 percent in Arkansas, in every state more than 95 percent of hospitalized people were unvaccinated. This is also , which, because of its National Health Service, has better data than exist in the U.S. show very similar results.
