Another Week, Another Million Cases as U.S. COVID-19 Totals Top 38M

Another week, another million cases.

A week ago today, the U.S. reached 37 million COVID-19 cases adding a 1 million cases in seven days. 

A week later, the total has surpassed 38 million cases. According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been 38,053,653 cases of COVID-19 resulting in 630,663 deaths representing a mortality rate of 1.7%. 

More than half of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated and while hundreds of thousands of Americans get vaccinated everyday we are nowhere near herd immunity and will never be so long as a critical mass refuse to be vaccinated. As I argued yesterday, I don't believe that full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine is going to change those numbers much. In which case, COVID-19 will mutate as it has with the Delta variant. 

So long as there is this critical mass of vaccine refuseniks then how effective will our existing vaccines be? How many of these 1 million cases a week are breakthrough cases? Unfortunately, we don't know as the CDC only measures breakthrough cases which result in hospitalizations and deaths. However breakthrough cases are measured, Booster shots will be to coming to a clinic and a pharmacy near you starting September 20th where it concerns Pfizer and Moderna. In Israel, booster shots look promising against the Delta variant. But if people still refuse to get vaccinated what other variants will follow?

And, in the meantime, how many more millions will be afflicted with COVID in the coming weeks and months? Well, by this time a week from now the U.S. will probably have added another million cases. Maybe more.