Experts now think some 80% of Americans need to be vaccinated against Covid to end the pandemic due to the rise of more infectious variants - but some 20% say they won't get the shots. Rates of vaccine hesitancy are particularly high in states like Mississippi, Wyoming and North Dakota, where some 30% of people are estimated to be opposed to vaccination (dark blue on map). As of Monday, 31.6 percent of Americans are fully inoculated against coronavirus. As vaccinations rise, daily infections are beginning to fall off, with the average number of daily cases declining nearly 15 percent to fewer than 50,000 a day in the past week. The seven-day rolling average of daily infections is now the lowest it's been since October 10. Likely as a result of the rising vaccinations and falling caseload, daily deaths have fallen to fewer than 700 on average, holding steady there for the past week. But stalling vaccinations threaten to reverse that progress. Daily shots have plummeted to an average of fewer than 2.5 million a day, down from the peak of nearly 3.2 million on April 11.
There is now widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.
The U.S. may head into the colder fall and winter months with more lingering vulnerability to outbreaks than a country like Israel, where a full 80 percent of adults have already been vaccinated. (In line with a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 55.4 percent of U.S. adults have been vaccinated.)
“The summer is here and people are outside and nobody seems like they’re dying every day,” explains Yahoo News Medical Contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, a Brookings Institution health scholar and former Obama administration official. “People think, ‘Right. I’m done. I don’t need to get vaccinated.’ So we’re probably going to hit 60 to 65 percent [vaccinated] and have to get used to a couple hundred COVID deaths a day. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay.”
The Yahoo News/YouGov poll hints at which communities could have lower levels of vaccination and thus higher risk. While 73 percent of Democrats say they’ve already been vaccinated and another 7 percent say they plan to get a shot as soon as possible, just 56 percent and 4 percent of Republicans, respectively, say the same — a potential 20-point immunity gap. The gap between Joe Biden voters (83 percent plus 6 percent) and Donald Trump voters (57 percent plus 3 percent) is even larger.
The lower you are on the income ladder, the less likely you are to be vaccinated, with the number of vaccinated (74 percent) or eager (5 percent) Americans making $100,000 or more per year far exceeding the same numbers (49 percent and 7 percent) among those making less than $50,000. And while efforts to overcome access issues and historical distrust in Black communities have helped, Black Americans continue to rank among the least likely to say they have already been vaccinated (50 percent) and the likeliest to say they will “never” get jabbed (24 percent).