Delta variant rapidly gaining ground in US west as vaccination rates stagnate
Public health authorities across the US west are sounding the alarm that the Delta variant, a “hyper-transmissible” form of Covid-19 responsible for about 25% of new US infections, is rapidly gaining significant ground.
These concerns come amid stagnating vaccination rates in some communities, spurring still more concerns about heightened transmission.
In California, the Delta variant is on the rise, accounting for 35.6% of specimens sequenced that are categorized as “variants of concern” or “variants of interest” as of 21 June, up from 5.6% in May, according to the state’s public health department. Covid-19 cases have surged in excess of 20% in California since the state lifted the majority of coronavirus restrictions on 15 June, with the Delta variant spurring the greatest proportion of new cases, according to the San Francisco Chronicle,
Authorities in Los Angeles county said that the Delta variant was responsible for almost half of genetically sequenced variants, the New York Times reported. The county’s public health guidance said on 28 June that it “strongly recommends” masking indoors – regardless of vaccination status – due to increased circulation of the Delta variant.
“We have enough risk and enough unvaccinated people for Delta to pose a threat to our recovery, and masking up now could help prevent a resurgence in transmission,” Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying.
Grant Colfax, the San Francisco public health department director, said of the Delta variant: “It’s like Covid on steroids.”
“It’s about 30% of cases locally right now,” the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Colfax as saying. “Within just a few months, we expect it to be over 90% of our cases.”
Officials have repeatedly said that the surge in the Delta variant is all the more reason to get vaccinated. Almost 70% of Californians age 12 and older are partially or fully vaccinated, but some rural counties lag behind.
Rita Burke, an assistant professor
of clinical preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, told California Healthline: “If you live in an area that has low vaccination rates and you have a few people who start to develop a disease, it’s going to spread quickly among those who aren’t vaccinated.”
The Delta variant heightens the risk of outbreaks in regions with low vaccination rates, Burke reportedly said. Vaccines approved in the US – Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer – have all shown effectiveness in preventing infection from the Delta variant, according to multiple reports.
The US south-west and mountain states are also seeing increases in the Delta variant; in Houston, Texas, recent wastewater analysis shows that the Delta variant has been detected in five times as many facilities compared to early May, KHOU-11 reported.
Rodney Young, of Texas Tech Physicians, told NBC affiliate KXAN: “20% of new cases in the US are this Delta variant. It’s not going to be long, it’s going to be measured in weeks to a month or two before we’re talking about Delta as the predominant strain.”
Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, said on CBS’s Face the Nation that this state is “certainly seeing the Delta variant rise in our state, which is concerning.
Hospitalizations are rising again.”
Some experts are also worried that a form of the Delta variant detected, called Delta Plus, could further fan the flames of ongoing coronavirus transmission. “The Delta Plus variant has an additional mutation in spike, where some people are saying is resulting in increased transmissibility,” Nevan Krogan, of the University of California, San Francisco’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute, told the local ABC affiliate.
“It’s mutating compared to other viruses incredibly quickly. I think a big part of that is because there is a significant percentage of people who are getting infected and are asymptomatic,” Krogan reportedly said. “So the world is really a huge petri dish.”