Why COVID cases are surging in states with high vaccination rates
Coronavirus cases are surging in several U.S. states with relatively high vaccination rates, prompting concern among health officials who had hoped inoculations would help curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current uptick — arriving exactly one year after last winter’s massive COVID wave — appears to be the start of a seasonal spike in places with cooler weather that were spared the worst of the initial U.S. Delta surge, which hit undervaccinated Southern states hardest this summer.
The question now is whether above-average vaccination coverage and continued mitigation measures in states such as New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont, Illinois, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Colorado — the seven states that have seen the largest increases in COVID cases during the past two weeks — can keep rising infections from turning into the kind of tsunami of hospitalizations and deaths that plagued the entire country last holiday season, before vaccines were widely available.
If so, it could signal a new, less dangerous phase of the pandemic, particularly in areas with higher levels of immunity.
If not, much of America could soon look like Florida over the summer, when more residents were dying of COVID each day than ever before.
On paper, the latest case numbers seem ominous. In Vermont, which has the highest vaccination rate of any state in the country, new daily cases are up 49 percent in the past two weeks. More than 72 percent of Vermonters have been fully vaccinated, compared with 59 percent nationally.
In neighboring New Hampshire, new daily cases are up 84 percent in the past two weeks (compared with a 7 percent jump over the same period nationwide), despite 63 percent of its population being fully inoculated.
In New Mexico, new daily cases are up 46 percent in the same period, even though 63 percent of its residents are fully vaccinated.
And in neighboring Colorado, new daily cases are up 42 percent, despite 62 percent of its population having received their shots.
Cases are also up significantly in Minnesota (50 percent), Illinois (49 percent), Rhode Island (43 percent), New York (27 percent) and Massachusetts (24 percent) — states where more than 6 in 10 residents are fully vaccinated. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, more than 70 percent of the population has received all necessary vaccine doses. Even California is starting to see a rise in cases.
Similar spikes started earlier this fall in European countries with corresponding vaccination rates — another worrisome sign for the U.S.
Several factors are driving the sharp increase in cases, health officials say: colder weather forcing people indoors, sometimes without masks; the hypercontagious Delta variant, which can cause breakthrough cases; and waning protection against infection for those who got vaccinated early, especially seniors.
So far, new daily hospitalization numbers across the affected states have not shot up as rapidly as new daily case numbers, rising anywhere from 4 percent in New Hampshire to 20 percent in New Mexico during the past two weeks. (In New York and Massachusetts, hospitalizations continue to fall after summer Delta bumps.)
But hospitalizations lag cases by several weeks, and deaths lag hospitalizations.
Numerous studies have shown that the vaccines become substantially less effective at preventing COVID infections over time and in the face of Delta, and that seniors tend to lose some protection against severe illness as well.