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 | | New York Times |
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Unvaccinated seniors drive Delta deaths |
The U.S. has a far higher share of older adults without full vaccine protection than many other wealthy countries, and it has made the Delta wave deadlier. |
Younger, unvaccinated adults are making up an increasing share of new hospital visits, but a vast majority of people dying from Covid-19 are older and unvaccinated. In many counties, especially in the South and the Mountain West, seniors without full vaccination make up more than 10 percent of the total population. |
By contrast, unvaccinated seniors in Britain are relatively rare. |
Even London, which has higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among older adults than the rest of Britain, is far ahead of most of the U.S. in its vaccination rates. |
That discrepancy may help explain why the Delta wave has led to a higher rate of deaths, public health experts say. Although cases surged in both countries, Britain had proportionally fewer hospitalizations and deaths. |
Vaccine hesitancy is not unique to the U.S., but it is more widespread and forceful in the country than in Europe, and it breaks down more clearly along political lines. State and local governments have also been less willing than European leaders to use mandates to pressure residents to be vaccinated. |
Signing up older Americans for vaccines is a struggle: Those who really wanted a vaccine have already gotten it. Many holdouts are resistant to immunization because of their politics and personal beliefs, or those of their friends and family. |
"We have really tried to get them vaccinated," said Molly Howell, the immunization director for the North Dakota Department of Health, where health officials have sent letters to every unvaccinated senior in the state. "There just seems to be a lack of trust in public health and government, and even a lack of trust of medical professionals." |
Confused by Covid science? It's not just you. |
Sometimes it seems as if scientific understanding of the coronavirus changes by the hour. |
We're living with science as it unfolds in real time, our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli reported this week. The process has always been fluid and unpredictable. But rarely has it moved at this speed, and rarely has it been so crucial to pay close attention. |
For some frustrated Americans, public health officials have seemed at times to be flip-flopping — or even to be intentionally misleading the country. |
Then, in May 2020, the agency said that vaccinated people could ditch their masks, but did not sufficiently emphasize that masks might be needed again. Now, with a new surge in infections, they are. |
One central problem, Apoorva said, is the relatively low level of scientific literacy in the U.S. "We also don't really talk about health as a public good, as a community goal," she added. "It's not like deciding to exercise or deciding to eat well, which are very individual activities. Infectious disease is, by its definition, something that connects people." |
"This wouldn't be happening if public health authorities had done a good job of educating the public from the start," she said. "You can't really come into a pandemic not ever having talked about these things before and expect people to understand everything and get on board." |
Doctors and researchers have worked with unrelenting speed and focus to fight the pandemic. But they have often fallen short in terms of communicating the shifting landscape to their fellow citizens. |
"Scientists don't really understand what people know or don't know, so they leave out key pieces of information that people need to connect the dots," Apoorva said. "In that knowledge gap, somebody else can come in and fill it with a bunch of misinformation." |
What else we're following |
It's me again, the tired occupational epidemiologist. Sixteen months into this pandemic and I seem to have answered all manner of questions about the virus for my clients. The questions often contain scary words like risk, transmission, mitigation or liability. On reflection, the most meaningful question I've gotten during this pandemic, likely the only question that matters, came from a university president, a Jesuit priest responsible for many. He asked me, "Shannon, what's the most loving thing we can do for our community?" The answer to this question has changed throughout the pandemic, but for now, without question, the most loving thing we can do for each other is to get vaccinated. — Shannon Magari, Syracuse, N.Y. |
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