Less than two months ago, at the beginning of July, 70% of Americans surveyed in a Harris poll said that the worst of the covid pandemic was behind us. But just a month later, Americans had changed their minds. According to another Harris poll released August 2nd just 46 percent still said “the worst is behind us.” The majority, fifty-four percent, now had the opposite opinion. That “the worst is still ahead of us.”
Is that majority right? Yes.
Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, who leads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warns that “almost every single one of the 100 million unvaccinated Americans who hasn’t had COVID-19 yet will likely get it in the coming months.”
You heard that right. Osterholm says that if you haven’t been vaccinated, your odds of getting covid are almost one hundred percent. Or, to put it differently, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated, you’re setting yourself up for death.
And some doctors warn that covid is here to stay. Like the flu and the common cold, they say, you and I will get covid at some time in our lives. If you want to live through the experience, you have to be vaccinated.
How bad is the new covid wave caused by the delta variant? In early August, all 50[i] states reported a rise in covid cases. Science Magazine, the queen of the science journals, reported that covid cases in the United States skyrocketed from a mere 13,500 cases a day in early June to 106,000 in early August, close to ten times as many cases as six weeks earlier.
In the states where anti-vaxxers rule, some hospitals are now operating at full capacity and new covid victims are waiting up to 14 hours to find a hospital bed. In some cases, those waits are killing them.
Meanwhile, new buzzwords have caught on in the medical community. One is “faster, younger, sicker.” The virus is hitting younger people, it is taking them from health to the brink of death in as little as 24 hours, and yes, it is killing them.
Said Rachel Keech of Missouri’s Mercy health system, “I don’t remember anyone declining within 24 hours, until now. Patients are coming to the hospital sooner. They’re requiring higher levels of oxygen faster. And then maximizing out on what hospitalists can do, and needing to go to the ICU faster.”
But those getting sick and dying have one unifying characteristic: they are not vaccinated.
In other words, if you’ve dodged the vaccine, the delta variant of covid has got you in its sights. And it’s likely to kill you. Even if you live, it’s likely to permanently damage your lungs, your heart, and your brain.[ii]
At the end of July, we also discovered something else strange. The delta virus can infect the lining of your nose and throat even if you are vaccinated. But the virus can’t make you seriously sick. Instead the virus will use you to spray itself into the faces of others.
Which is why even if you are vaccinated, you are now being told to wear a mask in public places. The delta variant will use you as a weapon to infect those around you.
But here’s the trick. Your vaccine will confine the virus to the lining of your breathing passages. It won’t let the virus into your system.
In other words, vaccines protect you from serious illness and death. Vaccines can keep you out of the hospital and more important out of the coffin. And masks can save the lives of your friends.
Meanwhile, the worst is yet to come. We are about to encounter the lambda variant, which Newsweek reports, “has torn through Peru and shows signs of having unusual success in infecting fully vaccinated people.” According to Newsweek, the lambda variant “has already spread to Argentina, Chile, Ecuador…Texas and South Carolina.”
Then there’s what Newsweek calls “A Doomsday COVID Variant.” The covid virus uses everyone it infects as a research and development lab. Every individual who gets covid carries roughly 10 billion copies of the virus. And on a planet with 8 billion humans, that’s a lot of R&D. It means that at this minute, ten billion billion copies of the virus are testing new variants of their spike proteins, the proteins that allow the covid virus to dock with your cells and to invade them. Which is why Dr. Michael Osterholm warns that “The next variant could be Delta on steroids.”
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References:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/what-does-delta-variant-have-store-us-we-asked-coronavirus-experts
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term-effects/art-20490351
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2
https://www.newsweek.com/2021/08/13/doomsday-covid-variant-worse-delta-lambda-may-coming-scientists-say-1615874.html
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain–was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM.
[i] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
[ii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term-effects/art-20490351