https://news.yahoo.com/6-warning-signs-that-the-delta-variant-is-coming-for-unvaccinated-americans-090025468.html

How many unvaccinated Americans are willing to die easily preventable deaths from COVID-19 each day?

As the hyper-contagious and potentially more severe Delta variant becomes dominant here in the coming weeks, the 140 million eligible U.S. residents who haven’t been fully vaccinated yet might want to start asking themselves that question.

“COVID-19 vaccines are available for everyone ages 12 and up,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday at a White House briefing. “They are nearly 100 percent effective against severe disease and death — meaning nearly every death due to COVID-19 is particularly tragic, because nearly every death, especially among adults … is at this point entirely preventable.”

This, of course, wasn’t always the case. During the first year or so of the pandemic, more than 500,000 unvaccinated Americans died of COVID-19. None of them had the option of reducing their risk of dying of the disease to essentially zero by receiving a free shot that had already been safely administered to 178 million of their friends and neighbors.

But now unvaccinated Americans do have that option. By refusing it, they are opening the door to Delta.

And make no mistake: Delta is coming.

https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/

Variants of Concern
A SARS-CoV-2 variant that meets the definition of a VOI (see below) and, through a comparative assessment, has been demonstrated to be associated with one or more of the following changes at a degree of global public health significance:

Increase in transmissibility or detrimental change in COVID-19 epidemiology; or
Increase in virulence or change in clinical disease presentation; or
Decrease in effectiveness of public health and social measures or available diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics.

Hope these image screenshots display below. There are good tables showing the variants and names at the WHO link above.



Variants of Interest
A SARS-CoV-2 isolate is a Variant of Interest (VOI) if, compared to a reference isolate, its genome has mutations with established or suspected phenotypic implications, and either:

has been identified to cause community transmission/multiple COVID-19 cases/clusters, or has been detected in multiple countries; OR
is otherwise assessed to be a VOI by WHO in consultation with the WHO SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution Working Group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/20/why-so-many-republicans-talk-about-nonsense/



The latest numbers on vaccination rates are telling: Mississippi has the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents, followed by Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee. All except Louisiana have both Republican governors and legislatures, as do the next seven on the list. Among the 14 U.S. senators representing the bottom seven, only two (both in Georgia) are Democrats. The Post reports, “Ten states, concentrated in the Deep South and rural West, report fewer than 35 percent of residents are fully immunized.”

Health care in these deep-red states is generally dreadful. Among the 12 states that have neither expanded nor voted to expand Medicaid, all but three have GOP governors and in those three (North Carolina, Kansas and Wisconsin), a Democratic governor faces a GOP legislature.

Of the 15 poorest states, all but two (Maine and New Mexico) are also deep red. Among the 30 Senate seats from those states, 27 are held by Republicans.

By these or just about any other measures, Republican states are failing to meet the basic needs of their residents. Among unvaccinated Americans, infection rates are climbing. More will get sick in those places, and some will die. Republicans are unwilling or incapable of meeting the challenge.

This sorry sight is unsurprising given that Republicans have all but given up on the notion of governance. At the national level, they consume themselves with race-baiting (e.g., scaring Americans about immigration and critical race theory), assailing private companies (e.g., corporations that defend voting rights, social media platforms, book publishers) and perpetrating the most ludicrous and dangerous lie in memory — that the 2020 election was stolen.