July 12 coronavirus news

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the Delta variant a "bad actor" and stressed the importance of getting more people in the US vaccinated Monday morning.

Fauci said the number of people in the country not vaccinated “really is the concern,” because the vaccines being used in the US do well against the Delta variant — particularly against severe disease that leads to the hospitalization 

He said there is a special concern about the areas that have a level of vaccination hovering around 30% or so.

“You’ve got to do much better than that," he said, or else there could be "a considerable increase in the number of cases that are going to be localized to those areas with low vaccination rates."

More than 99% of US Covid-19 deaths in June were among unvaccinated people, Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week.

“It's really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable,” added Fauci, who is Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci noted that no vaccine provides perfect protection for everyone. 

“Obviously there are going to be some people, because of the variability among people and their response to vaccine, that you'll see some who are vaccinated and still get into trouble and get hospitalized and die,” he noted. “But the overwhelming proportion of people who get into trouble are the unvaccinated.”

Individual states are reporting similar data: On Friday, Virginia's health department announced at least 99% of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been among people who were not fully vaccinated. And on Thursday, North Carolina said 99% of all new cases since May are among people that are not fully vaccinated.

The daily pace of people becoming fully vaccinated has dropped 84% since the mid-April peak, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

An average of about 278,000 people became fully vaccinated each day over the past week, down from an average of nearly 1.8 million people – more than six times as many — on April 16. The daily pace is less than half of what it was even a month ago when an average of nearly 663,000 people were becoming fully vaccinated each day. 

The pace of new vaccinations has also had a steep drop off. CDC data shows that about 246,000 people initiated vaccination each day over the past week, down 88% from the April peak of nearly 2 million people per day and down 43% from a month ago. 

However, many under-vaccinated groups are better represented in recent vaccinations than they have been throughout the vaccination campaign overall. Black and Hispanic people have accounted for a larger share of vaccinations over the past two weeks than their overall share of vaccinations, as have adults under the age of 40. 

More Americans boarded commercial flights on Sunday than the busiest day of the July 4th holiday weekend. 

The Transportation Security Administration said it screened 2,198,635 people at airports across the country on Sunday – the most since Feb. 28, 2020.

Air travel continues to set pandemic-era records, even though international travel remains restricted and business travel is lagging. 

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told CBS’ “Face The Nation” that he expects business travel to start rebound this fall and next summer to be “the biggest year in history” for European travel.

As the Delta variant rapidly spreads, US hotspots have seen cases climbing – and an expert warns a "surprising amount" of Covid-19 deaths could soon follow.

The US is averaging about 19,455 new cases over the last seven days, a 47% increase from the week prior, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And a third of those, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, come from five hotspots:

"In places like Missouri where ICUs are packed, you're going to see a surprising amount of death," Reiner said on Sunday.

At Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, 91% of ICU patients are on ventilators and many are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Chief Administrative Officer Erik Frederick told CNN Saturday. That is especially concerning, he said, because at the peak last year there were only 40 to 50% of ICU patients on ventilators.

Typically, increases in Covid-19 death rates follow three to four weeks behind spikes in cases, Reiner said. It takes a week for patients to get sick enough to need hospitalization and then often another couple of weeks for the infection to become fatal.

"We will start to see an increase in mortality in this country," Reiner said.