It’s unclear if these developments will do anything to change the minds of unvaccinated Americans, the group that is both most vulnerable and least concerned about the variant. To get a better sense of this new stage of the pandemic, and how worrisome the rising caseloads in all 50 states are, Nightly talked with University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm about how he envisions Delta playing out in the U.S, and around the globe. This conversation has been edited. The summer Covid surge is here. You predicted this months ago. It’s not so much that I predicted this would happen. I said we have to prepare, because this virus is doing things that have not been predictable at all. There’s no way at this point to project into the fall at all. But isn’t the United States in a much better place to deal with a surge this summer than it was last year? We still have 100 million people in the United States who are not yet vaccinated or have not yet had Covid, so they don’t have natural immunity. That’s more than an adequate amount to fuel a major upsurge. My biggest fear is that this virus is going to find them before they have a chance to get vaccinated, if they’re going to at all. We track this stuff by every 12-hour period. Of the 51 states, which includes the District of Columbia, right now, 41 states including D.C. have seen increases of over 100 percent in the last 14 days. That’s the most we’ve seen since the pandemic began. If you look at the other surges, they were much more regional: the southern Sun Belt states, the Northeast, the Midwest. Here we’ve got 41 states with increases of over 100 percent. We have 42 states with increased hospitalizations and 26 states are now seeing increases over 20 percent in the last 14 days. We’re seeing increases over 100 percent, but aren’t cases and hospitalizations much lower than we saw last year? You’re absolutely right, the numbers are much lower right now. But the point is where we’re at. It’s like comparing the second inning to the second inning versus the second inning to the ninth inning. Figures from the Financial Times show that the rate of increase is actually higher than it was at the peak in January. If you look at Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, places like that, what the Financial Times showed is that for both total number of Covid patients and patients in ICU, they’re outstripping the previous peaks we saw in January. It fits with under-vaccination in the U.S. A state like Minnesota, for example, overall we have 67.8 percent of our population vaccinated with one dose, 16 years of age and older. That number looks pretty good overall. But when you look inside though, we’ve got five counties here in the central part of the state where the vaccination rates range from 43 to 47 percent. Even in a blue state like Minnesota, we’ve got these pockets of really under-vaccinated populations. We just don’t know how that’s going to unfold. How do you expect Delta to play out on a global scale? If you take the world’s top 10 to 12 countries of highest case rates: Three are located in Asia, or the Middle East. Three are located in Africa. Three are located in Latin America. And three are located in Europe. This is occurring globally at the same time. Delta is doing it. We’ve got a long way to go globally, where we’ve got 6.4 billion people living in low- and middle-income countries where less than 2 percent of the population has had any access to vaccines. I keep hearing people worried about variants spinning out of the cases in the U.S., which is surely a concern, but that pales in comparison to what the risk is of variants spinning out of the 6.4 billion people. This is going to burn around and through the world for years to come yet. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author directly at mward@politico.com or @MyahWard.
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