The most crucial method of stopping another Covid surge

Key Takeaways:

The Covid-19 outbreak, which spread through large swaths of the country this summer, peaked in early September, with about 160,000 cases per day.
The subsequent drop in cases was rapid, but infections in the United States are rising again after two months.

We have tools to slow the spread of new cases, but we must act quickly. That means making efforts to increase vaccination rates in all age groups, employing various strategies, including broad vaccine mandates, such as the Biden Administration’s requirement that businesses with more than 100 employees have employees get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing.

Perversely, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a previous stay of Biden’s new vaccine mandate last week.

As a result, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has temporarily suspended enforcement of the rule, which was scheduled to go into effect on January 4.

The court’s decision was ill-conceived, and it risks prolonging the pandemic in the United States unnecessarily. Even though nearly 196 million Americans are now fully vaccinated, this represents only 59 percent of the US population.

Although vaccines have been widely available for more than six months, 30 percent of adults are not fully vaccinated.

Although it is unclear what proportion of the population must be immunized to achieve community immunity, Belgium currently has one of the highest Covid-19 case rates in the world despite having fully vaccinated 74 percent of its population.

Germany has vaccinated 10% more of its population than the United States, but its seven-day incidence rate reached a new high of 336.9 cases per 100,000 people this week, up from 249.1 points reported the previous week.

As the number of cases in Europe increases, the World Health Organization says it is “very concerned” and flagged that at the current rate, over 500,000 more deaths could be recorded by March.

A winter spike in Covid-19 cases is expected because the virus spreads more quickly as people spend more time indoors. Still, the magnitude of this latest surge will be determined by the community’s level of vaccination, and we must do better.

The United States has administered more than 437 million doses of vaccines in just 11 months, a remarkable achievement; however, with well over 100 million people still unvaccinated, the level of immunity is not nearly high enough to ward off a new surge.

The American Medical Association also more than 60 other organizations urged employers across the country on Thursday to voluntarily implement the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate plan.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will rule quickly on whether a broad vaccine mandate is constitutional and whether we are a country that is one for all, not all for one.

Source: CNN News