From the New York Times: COVID and Vaccination Rates in the US and Californiae

The surge of the Delta variant has been a real-life experiment in the effectiveness of vaccines, one that appears to have helped Gov. Gavin Newsom survive a recall election on Tuesday. For the most part, places with high vaccination rates have been protected from the virus.

And in California, the Delta surge appears to have done something else as well: pushed vaccination rates even higher.

The number of people getting vaccinated here began to stall in June, but then spiked as the Delta variant took hold in late July. Ultimately, about 1.6 million Californians got a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine in August, up from the 1.1 million who did so in July.

It’s difficult to tease out what exactly led to the rise in vaccinations. California has recently mandated vaccines for state employees, teachers and health care workers. There’s also been new evidence of the strong protections the vaccines offer, even against the Delta variant.

Some Californians may have been persuaded to seek out a shot after witnessing first-hand harm wrought by the virus. We’ve all heard stories of people hospitalized with Covid-19, struggling to breathe, and wishing they had gotten the vaccine.

Since early August, the biggest rise in vaccinations in California has been in the San Joaquin Valley, the Sacramento region and far Northern California — parts of the state that have recently been hardest hit by coronavirus cases.

Those regions had low vaccination rates to begin with, so they admittedly had more room to increase. But it’s likely that some people were also influenced by seeing overwhelmed hospitals in their communities.

“The question is: What gets you to make a different decision today than you’ve made the last few months?” said UCSF epidemiologist Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo. “I think fear is somewhat of a motivator, unfortunately.”

Bibbins-Domingo told me she thinks that social pressure, community outreach and availability of the shots also play a role in who gets vaccinated. The coming months will reveal which strategies work best as California health officials try to encourage holdouts to get immunized.

The Delta variant is too contagious to wipe out, even in communities with high vaccination rates, Bibbins-Domingo said. But the shots will remain an essential part of minimizing future surges.

“It all starts and ends with vaccination. It doesn’t mean once you cross some magical threshold, the virus magically disappears,” she told me. “How many people are vaccinated — it’s like how many barriers can you put up to withstand the onslaught.”

For more:

• Los Angeles County officials said Wednesday that proof of vaccination will be required to enter indoor bars, clubs and other drinking establishments starting next month.Contra Costa County announced earlier this week that customers would have to show vaccine cards at bars, restaurants and gyms. San Francisco already has a similar mandate in place.
• The unvaccinated are 11 times more likely than the vaccinated to die from Covid-19.
• Look up Covid-19 rates in your California county with our coronavirus tracker. Or explore global trends in coronavirus spread here.
• Researchers are beginning yearlong studies to examine any possible connections between vaccination and irregular menstruation.
• California counties with the lowest vaccination rates were most likely to vote to oust Newsom, finds an analysis from The Los Angeles Times.

Even if you’ve been following news of the virus closely, it can be hard to know which way the pandemic is headed. To help sort it out, I gathered a few charts that give us a clearer picture.

Virus cases, which had been accelerating rapidly since early July, seemed to have leveled out before Labor Day. There was chatter that perhaps the worst of the Delta wave was behind us. The holiday weekend caused case numbers to fluctuate wildly, but now that the dust has settled, the U.S. finds itself in more or less the same place.

“The truth is, we’re right around 150,000 cases per day, which is lower than the peak this summer,” said Mitch Smith, who tracks the virus for The Times. “But that’s still like 50 times higher than we’d like.”

The positive news is that the national case rate is not growing, even at a time when most of the country is open and schools and colleges are back in session. Some of the states that were hit the hardest this summer — including Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — also seem to be turning a corner.

Cases are rising in the Mountain West, the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. But Mitch said he expects case levels to remain well below those seen in the South this summer. We may even see cases decline over the next few weeks.

However, the national outlook appears much more dire when tracking hospitalizations and deaths.

While hospitalization numbers are beginning to come down nationally, they are hitting crisis levels in some regions. In the South, health care centers are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units. In Alaska, emergency room patients are waiting hours in their vehicles, forcing medical teams to ration care.

One in four U.S. hospitals now reports more than 95 percent of I.C.U. beds occupied — up from one in five last month. When all or nearly all I.C.U. beds are occupied, experts say it can become difficult to maintain standards of care for the sickest patients.

Most worrying, Mitch said, are the death numbers, and what they will look like in the weeks ahead.

“We’re fast approaching 2,000 deaths a day on average, and we never wanted to be anywhere near that number again,” Mitch said. “Unfortunately, the hospitalization case numbers suggest that the death rate is not going to start going down for a while. And, tragically, we are now closing in on 700,000 total deaths.” (The U.S. recently passed another grim milestone: 1 in 500 residents has now died of Covid-19.)

Unvaccinated Americans are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than the vaccinated, according to the C.D.C. Several of the states with the highest rates of I.C.U. occupancy, including Alabama and Mississippi, are also among those with the lowest vaccination rates.

Put simply, the vaccines save lives. Unlike most countries, the U.S. has more than enough for everyone. That means many of the recent deaths were preventable.

The New York Times Opinion section set out to quantify how many lives could have been saved during the last wave if all states had managed to vaccinate their residents as quickly as the state with the highest vaccination rate (usually Vermont).