he head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday said that the highly transmissible delta variant is responsible for over 80% of new coronavirus infections.
"CDC has released estimates of variants across the country and predicted the delta variant now represents 83% of sequenced cases," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing.
It's a large jump from CDC's previous estimate that the delta variant caused over 57% of new cases earlier this month. Walensky called it a "dramatic increase."
"In some parts of the country the percentage is even higher, particularly in areas of low vaccination rates," she said.
Nearly 49% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Still, almost two-thirds of counties in the U.S. have vaccine coverage rates of under 40%, according to Walensky.
"In areas where vaccine coverage is low, cases and hospitalizations are starting to climb again," she said.
U.S. health officials said last week that cases are expected to keep rising as the delta variant spreads. Walensky said that COVID-19 is becoming a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
"There is a clear message that is coming through," Walensky said at a press briefing last week. "This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well."
The delta variant has brought disruption to both the stock market and masking mandates in recent days. While the CDC has maintained its masking guidance in the face of the variant, some have started to question if mandates should be put back into place even for vaccinated individuals. Earlier this week the American Academy of Pediatrics went against recent CDC guidance for schools and urged all students and staff regardless of vaccination status to wear masks when returning to in-person learning this fall.
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