(Fort Lauderdale) The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 100,000 new confirmed daily infections on Saturday, an event that was recently surpassed during a winter wave driven by a highly contagious delta variant and a poor vaccination rate in the south of the country.
Health officials fear that the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths will continue to rise if more Americans are not vaccinated. Nationally, 50% of the population is fully immunized and more than 70% of adults have received at least one dose.
“Our models show that if we don’t vaccinate more people, we could reach several hundred thousand cases per day, similar to the increase we saw in early January,” said the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ), Rochelle Walinsky, on CNN This Week.
It took nine months for the US to cross 100,000 average daily cases in November before peaking at around 250,000 cases in early January. Cases bottomed out in June, averaging around 11,000 a day, but six weeks later the number had reached 107,143.
Hospitalizations and deaths are also increasing, although they are still below the high levels seen at the beginning of this year before vaccines became widely available. More than 44,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 30% increase in one week and nearly four times more than in June.