Month: June 2021

Will wipes away sweat on a hot day while walking down Willow Street in Lynn, Mass., as he looks to distribute safety supplies to drug users on the street. Jesse Costa/WBUR hide caption toggle caption Jesse Costa/WBUR Will wipes away sweat on a hot day while walking down Willow Street in Lynn, Mass., as he looks to distribute safety supplies to drug users on the street. Jesse Costa/WBUR ...

Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm warned on Friday of the possibility of “substantial” local and regionalized surges of COVID-19, telling CNN’s Poppy Harlow that “we’re not done with this virus at all.” Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, doubted another national surge because of the scale of the United States’ vaccination program which to date has seen more than 175 million Americans receive at least one shot. But Osterholm said more localized surges could occur if the highly transmissible Delta variant took hold in the U.S., where it is now quickly spreading. The variant first identified in India has already become the dominant strain of the virus in the United Kingdom, where rising cases have...

But virus variants, particularly the Delta variant, have been a top concern for many experts when it comes to those who remain unvaccinated against the coronavirus. The Midwest and South lag in vaccination rates compared to coastal states, with Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wyoming among the slowest to vaccinate. In Missouri, where 43.4% of the total population is at least partially vaccinated, the Delta variant is on the rise. "We have seen a five-fold increase in hospitalized patients in less than four weeks. Our doctors are describing them as younger, sicker. They're often coming to us later in the disease process so we have less therapy options for them," Steve Edwards, the CEO of the CoxHealth, a system of hospitals and clinics based in Missouri, told CNN on Friday...