Dr. Osterholm On Delta Spread: "That's A Lot Of Human Wood For This Coronavirus Forest Fire To Burn"

Despite what many of us want to believe the pandemic is far from over. Coronavirus is ripping through countries and infecting hundreds of thousands each day. Even in highly vaccinated countries like the US and UK ICU beds are full. And it all seems to be because of the Delta variant. Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm joins the program to discuss.

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Osterholm: Right now we have about 6.4 billion people in the face of the earth that live in low and middle-income countries. For which less than 2 percent have had any access to vaccines. Where that's occurring we are seeing major major activity with the delta. Surpassing any peak we've seen. South Africa right now has just hit the highest peak that any country hit period. Since the beginning of the pandemic in terms of cases deaths and hospitalizations. Tunisia's health care system has crashed. We're seeing even today as we speak on the Olympics the highest number of cases reported in Tokyo since the pandemic began. We're seeing that throughout the world. So what's happening is this virus is in a sense almost rotating around the world in a non-predicted way. Meaning which country is going to be the next one to get hit. Iran right now is in the fifth surge it's had. The worst one so far. so from that standpoint if you look at what's happening throughout much of the world it is at the very peak of the pandemic activity we've seen to date. If you're in the countries that are vaccinated or have access to a substantial vaccine we're still seeing a major problem. Right now we have more people hospitalizing ICUs in Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana than we had at any time in the pandemic to date. If you look at what's happening in all 50 states in the country right now we're seeing sizable increases in cases. And in fact, if you look 30 states right now have had over 100 percent increase in cases in the last 14 days. This is largely among those 100 million people in the united states that have not gotten vaccinated yet. 100 million people. These are also people who have not been previously infected so they have no residual protection. That's a lot of human wood for this coronavirus forest fire to burn. And so we're going to see marked activity here. Those who predicted no summertime peak would be a fall-winter peak I’m afraid you're unfortunately off. This is a summer peak. Why we didn't see more of a peak activity with b117 in April we don't know. It was Michigan and Minnesota. But this one is for real. It's hitting all of us and it's hitting England right now. On Saturday England reported 55 000 new cases they even high have higher vaccination rates than we do. If we had extrapolated that 55,000 to the united states based on population that would have been about 225,000 cases a day in us. They're ahead of us by six to eight weeks maybe four weeks. We surely have every reason to believe right now we're going to see what's happened in England what's happened in the Netherlands what's happening in other highly vaccinated countries here over the course of the next several months.

Sam: And England just opened up.

Osterholm: Freedom Day today is probably the most counterproductive absolutely inane step that anybody could take. It was on the books. They hadn't planned already. So they weren't going to back down. as you know they're prime ministers and quarantine right now. You know it's their health secretary who has been infected. You're watching what it's doing this morning in the Olympics here we are watching noon people literally almost By the hour become documented as having been infected or in quarantine. So I think you know we are in a very difficult state right now with this pandemic. The good news is we do have effective vaccines. The bad news is we don't have them for the world. and even when we do have them we have a sizable number of people who refuse to get them.

Sam: So when we say infected right I mean if you are vaccinated the chances of you going into the hospital and dying seem to be incredibly low is that correct?