New Delhi, July 21:
The Delta mutation of the coronavirus (Covid-19) now makes up 83% of all sequenced Covid-9 cases in the United States, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, informed in a Senate hearing on Tuesday. The latest figure is up from 50% from the first week of July.
In a testimony before the Senate Health Committee, Walesnky also said that areas of the country with limited vaccination coverage are allowing the spread of the highly transmissible variant, which was first identified in India. “Each death is tragic and even more heartbreaking when we know that the majority of these deaths can be prevented with a simple, safe, available vaccine,” Walensky said as per a Bloomberg report.
The top federal medical official also said that the best way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 variants is “to prevent the spread of disease, and vaccination is the most powerful tool we have.”
She also told the senators that the “overwhelming majority” of Covid-19 deaths are occurring in the unvaccinated population. Earlier as well, Walensky had stressed on the need for maximum people to be vaccinated, warning that this “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
“We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well,” she had said last week.
The US has inoculated less than half of the population so far, while states that have the lowest rate of vaccination are seeing a surge in cases amid the threat of a third wave looming over the country. States that have the lowest rate of vaccination are Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Over the last few weeks, the national vaccination campaign chalked out by the Biden administration has slowed down significantly. The US is administering 5,21,000 doses daily, an 85 per cent decrease from a peak in April when 3.38 million doses were administered every day.
The country has a total caseload of 34,173,020 and as many as 609,521 people have succumbed to the viral disease that first originated in China in 2019.
