The Biden administration is deploy COVID-19 response teams across the United States focused on tracking and tracing the nation's outbreak of the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House announced Thursday.
Comprised of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials and members of other federal agencies, the response teams will operate in communities at higher risk of major Delta outbreaks and focus on vaccine education and administration, White House COVID Response Coordinator Jeff Zients stated during a press briefing.
"Looking across the country, we have made incredible progress towards ending the pandemic. We continue to see overall low number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. However, looking state by state and country by country, it is clear that communities where people remain unvaccinated are communities that remain vulnerable. This is all true as we monitor the continued spread of the hyper-transmissible Delta variant," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, during the press conference.
"The Delta variant is predicted to be the second most prevalent variant in the United States, and I expect that in the coming weeks it will eclipse the Alpha variant," Walensky continued, referring to the variant which first emerged in the United Kingdom; the Delta variant first emerged in India. "An estimated 25% of all reported SARS-CoV-2 sequences nationwide are the Delta variant. And in some regions of the country, nearly one in two sequences is the Delta variant."
Walensky stated that there are 1,000 counties in the U.S. that have a vaccination coverage of less than 30% of their population. These communities, which are primarily located in the Southeast and Midwest, are most vulnerable to the spreading Delta variant, according to Walensky.
In order to help mitigate the spread of the Delta variant in these under-vaccinated communities, the White House's COVID response teams plan to increase testing, facilitate contact tracing, and provide additional healthcare aid to help treat those infected. The teams will also work with state and local authorities to identity and address the "needs on the ground," in areas experiencing emergency outbreaks, Zients said.
More than 157 million Americans are currently fully vaccinated against COVID, according to CDC data, meaning they have received both doses of either vaccines developed by Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)-BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX) and Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), or one dose of the one-shot vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ). Moreover, roughly 55% of the nation's total population has received at least one vaccine.
The nation's authorized vaccines provide protection against the Delta variant, Walensky added, highlighting that preliminary data from a collection of states over the last six months suggests that 99.5% of the COVID deaths in those states occurred in unvaccinated people.
"Any suffering or death from COVID-19 is tragic," Walensky stated. "With vaccine available across the country, the suffering and loss we are now seeing is nearly entirely avoidable."