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People walk on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., August 13, 2021. Louisiana holds one of the U.S.'s lowest vaccination rates with just 38 percent of its residents fully vaccinated. /CFP
U.S. COVID-19 cases could break 200,000 a day as the latest surge of the virus driven by the Delta variant is "going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out," said National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on Sunday.
"I will be surprised if we don't cross 200,000 cases a day in the next couple of weeks, and that's heartbreaking considering we never thought we'd be back in that space again. That was January-February, that shouldn't be August," Collins told Fox News Sunday.
"But here we are with Delta variant, which is so contagious, and this heartbreaking situation where 90 million people are still unvaccinated who are sitting ducks for this virus, and that's the mess we're in. We're in a world of hurt, and it's a critical juncture to try to do everything we can to turn that around," said Collins.
The infection rate in the U.S. has been mostly driven by a surge in the south, as many states in the region have been slow to vaccinate residents.
"This is starting to look really ominous in the south. If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they're actually probably the highest in the world," Dr Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN on August 13.
According to CNN, Louisiana has the highest rate of new cases per capita in the U.S., followed by Florida.
"That's how badly things have gotten out of hand. There is a screaming level of transmission across the southern states right now. And now we're starting to see this happening among younger age groups," Hotez said.
The sharp rise in the number of pediatric cases in the country is "very worrisome," he said, noting at least 400 children have died from the virus.
"And right now we have almost 2,000 kids in the hospital. Many of them in ICU, some of them under the age of 4. So anybody who tries to tell you, 'Well, don't worry about the kids, the virus won't really bother them,' that's not the evidence," said Collins. "Especially with Delta being so contagious, kids are very seriously at risk and it's up to all of us to do everything we can to protect them as well as we're trying to protect everybody else."
Children under the age of 12 have not been authorized to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
As of Saturday, the country has averaged about 129,000 daily new cases over the last seven days, a number that has risen every day since July 5, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Almost 94,000 COVID-19 cases among children were reported in the past week, "a continuing substantial increase," said the American Academy of Pediatrics in a report updated on Monday.
Nearly 4.3 million children had tested positive for COVID-19 in the country as of August 5 since the onset of the pandemic.
(With input from Xinhua)
