As N.Y. salutes health workers, Missouri fights a new surge

New York held a ticker-tape parade Wednesday for the health care workers and others who helped the city pull through the darkest days of COVID-19, while authorities in Missouri struggled to beat back a surge blamed on the fast-spreading delta variant and deep resistance to getting vaccinated.

The split-screen images could be a glimpse of what public health experts say may lie ahead for the U.S. even as life gets back to something close to normal: outbreaks in corners of the country with low vaccination rates.

“We’ve got a lot to appreciate, because we’re well underway in our recovery,” declared New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who rode on a parade float with hospital employees down the Canyon of Heroes, the skyscraper-lined stretch of Broadway where astronauts, returning soldiers and championship teams are feted.

In Missouri, meanwhile, the Springfield area has been hit so hard that one hospital had to borrow ventilators over the Fourth of July weekend and begged on social media for help from respiratory therapists, several of whom volunteered from other states. Members of a new federal “surge response team” also began arriving to help suppress the outbreak.

Missouri not only leads the nation in new cases relative to the population, it is also averaging 1,000 cases per day — about the same number as the entire Northeast, including the big cities in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

California, with 40 million people, is posting only slightly higher case numbers than Missouri, which has a population of 6 million.

Northeastern states have seen cases, deaths and hospitalizations plummet to almost nothing amid widespread acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Vermont has gone 26 days with new case numbers in single digits. In Maryland, the governor’s office said every death recorded in June was in an unvaccinated person. New York City, which was the lethal epicenter of the U.S. outbreak in the spring of 2020, when the number of dead peaked at more than 800 a day, regularly goes entire days with no reported deaths.

The problem in Missouri, as health experts see it: Just 45% of the state’s residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared with 55% of the U.S. population. Some rural counties near Springfield have vaccination rates in the teens and 20s.

At the same time, the delta variant is fast becoming the predominant version of the virus in Missouri.

Epidemiologists say the country should expect more COVID-19 outbreaks in areas with low vaccination rates over the next several months.

“I’m afraid that that is very predictable,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “If politician seize on this and say, ‘Who could have predicted this?,’ the answer is every licensed epidemiologist in the country.”

Republican Gov. Mike Parson said Wednesday that his administration has done “everything possible” to fend off outbreaks.