Dr. Luis Medina-Garcia, an infectious disease specialist in Nevada, offered an unambiguous warning to Americans on Wednesday night: “If you’re not vaccinated, getting Covid is inevitable.”
The vaccine hesitant might finally be getting the message. According to Bloomberg, “Some of the most vaccine-resistant parts of the U.S. are now leading the country in the number of people getting a first dose of vaccine.”
“The increase in vaccinations is concentrated in the Southern and Central parts of the U.S., with the highest daily rate of shots happening in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri — states that have had some of the lowest rates of vaccination in the eight months since vaccines became available,” adds the outlet.
It’s those very same areas that have been rocked by the highly transmissible delta variant. Earlier this week in Louisiana, for instance, the state saw the biggest single-day increase of Covid-19 hospitalizations since the pandemic’s start.
The good news is that vaccinations are also on the rise there. “We’ve seen our daily new administrations double, and this week they’re on pace to triple or quadruple,” Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s state health officer, told Bloomberg. “Everybody knows someone who is sick right now. Those people who are not real anti-vaxxers but were just not real confident are saying, ‘I’m not waiting a day longer.’”
It’s a similar situation in other Southern states. Earlier this week, News & Guts offered this round-up:
There’s some room for optimism. According to Axios, vaccine adoption is on the rise in Arkansas: “The state saw its highest single-day number of doses since May 21 (when it had 12,521 doses) on Friday [the 23rd], with 14,294. Over the weekend, numbers continued to be high, according to data from the Arkansas Department of Health.”
NBC News flags a similar trend in Missouri: “Over the first three weeks of July, residents in Greene County, where Springfield is the county seat, have already received more first-dose vaccinations than they did through all of June, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Neighboring Christian County, another Covid hot spot, has outstripped its June numbers by nearly 30 percent.”
In addition, CNBC reports that in Mississippi, “the state administered almost 27,000 first doses over the seven days through Sunday, a 42% jump from the prior week.”
WKYT reveals that Kentucky is also seeing an uptick in vaccine adoption: “More than 30,000 people were vaccinated in Kentucky last week, which is 10,000 more than the week before.”
Vaccine hesitancy might be fading, but the issue has become so politically fraught that some holdouts who have recently gotten a jab are trying to keep it secret. From CNN:
[Dr. Priscilla Frase, a hospitalist and chief medical information officer at Ozarks Healthcare in West Plains, Missouri] said one pharmacist at her hospital told her “they’ve had several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine.'”
Frase told CNN:
Anything we can do to get people in a place that they’re comfortable receiving the vaccine. It’s not a large number, but every single person that we can reach who wants to get vaccinated and we can provide that for them, that’s a win. And we take every win that we can get.
