The Latest on Covid, Vaccines and the Delta Variant – The New York Times

August 29, 2021

The Latest News on Coronavirus and the Delta Variant Aug. 29, 2021Updated

Aug. 29, 2021, 10:14 a.m. ET

As childrens hospitals in many parts of the United States admit more Covid-19 patients, a result of the highly contagious Delta variant, federal and state health officials are grappling with a sharp new concern: children not yet eligible for vaccination in places with substantial viral spread, who are now at higher risk of being infected than at any other time in the pandemic.

Nowhere is that worry greater than in Louisiana, which has among the highest new daily case rates in the country and where only 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, putting children at particular risk as they return to school.

At Childrens Hospital New Orleans, the intensive care unit has been jammed with Covid-19 patients, and nurses have raced around monitoring one gut-wrenching case after another. One child was getting a complicated breathing treatment known as ECMO, a last resort after ventilators fail, which nurses said was almost unheard-of for pediatric cases. About half a dozen others were in various stages of distress.

Medical staff throughout the hospital said the causes of illness in children were often simple: parents, family members and friends who were unvaccinated and not wearing masks.

Ive had to kind of make peace with that people are not doing what theyre supposed to, said Mark Melancon, a longtime nurse at the hospital. The kids are suffering.

Not that I accept it, he added, but if I get hung up in the anger of it, I would walk around confronting people in Walmart, here, everywhere.

I cant tell them, Why didnt you isolate this kid? Mr. Melancon continued. So we just tell them, Your kid has Covid. Its really hard on the lungs. Your childs very sick. Well do everything we can to get him better.

Of the roughly 70 children admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 this month, about half were 12 or older and thus eligible for vaccination but only one was fully vaccinated, said Dr. Mark W. Kline, the hospitals physician in chief.

Most children with Covid-19 have only mild symptoms, however, and there is not enough evidence to conclude that Delta makes some of them sicker than other variants do, scientists say. Doctors and nurses at Childrens Hospital New Orleans agreed with that assessment.

Theresa Sokol, Louisianas top epidemiologist, said that people younger than 18 had among the highest test positivity rates in the state and were responsible for a significant share of transmission, with many cases probably undetected.

I dont want any kids to get this, because I cant guarantee that its not going to be your kid thats going to have a problem, she said. But overall, statistically, most of them are doing fairly well.

In Louisiana, where daily deaths from Covid reached their highest levels this week, stretched hospitals are having to modify the intense preparations they would normally make ahead of an expected strike from Hurricane Ida.

Louisianas medical director, Dr. Joseph Kanter, asked residents on Friday to avoid unnecessary emergency room visits to preserve the states hospital capacity, which has been vastly diminished by its most severe Covid surge of the pandemic.

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About this dataSource: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data. Currently hospitalized is the most recent number of patients with Covid-19 reported by hospitals in the state for the four days prior. Dips and spikes could be due to inconsistent reporting by hospitals. Hospitalization numbers early in the pandemic are undercounts due to incomplete reporting by hospitals to the federal government.

And while plans exist to transfer patients away from coastal areas to inland hospitals ahead of a hurricane, this time evacuations are just not possible, Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a news conference.

The hospitals dont have room, he said. We dont have any place to bring those patients not in state, not out of state.

The governor said officials had asked hospitals to check generators and stockpile more water, oxygen and personal protective supplies than usual for a storm. The implications of a strike from a Category 4 hurricane while hospitals were full were beyond what our normal plans are, he added.

Mr. Edwards said he had told President Biden and Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to expect Covid-related emergency requests, including oxygen.

The states recent wave of Covid hospitalizations has exceeded its previous three peaks, and staffing shortages have necessitated support from federal and military medical teams. On Friday, 2,684 Covid patients were hospitalized in the state. This week Louisiana reported its highest ever single-day death toll from Covid 139 people.

Oschner Health, one of the largest local medical systems, informed the state that it had limited capacity to accept storm-related transfers, especially from nursing homes, the groups chief executive, Warner L. Thomas, said. Many of Oschners hospitals, which were caring for 836 Covid patients on Friday, had invested in backup power and water systems to reduce the need to evacuate, he said.

The pandemic also complicated efforts to discharge more patients than usual before the storm hits. For many Covid patients who require oxygen, going home isnt really an option, said Stephanie Manson, chief operating officer of Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, which had 190 Covid inpatients on Friday, 79 of them in intensive care units.

The governor said he feared that the movement of tens or hundreds of thousands of evacuees in the state could cause it to lose gains made in recent days as the number of new coronavirus cases began to drop. Dr. Kanter urged residents who were on the move to wear masks and observe social distancing. Many of the states testing and vaccination sites were slated to close temporarily.

Caleb Wallace, a leader of the anti-mask movement in central Texas who became infected with the coronavirus and spent three weeks in an intensive care unit, has died, his wife, Jessica, said on Saturday.

Caleb has peacefully passed on. He will forever live in our hearts and minds, Mrs. Wallace wrote in a post on GoFundMe, where she had been raising money to cover medical costs.

Mrs. Wallace had said recently that her husbands condition was declining and that doctors had run out of treatment options. On Saturday, he was to be moved to a hospice at Shannon Medical Center in the city of San Angelo so that his family could say their goodbyes, she said.

Mrs. Wallace, who is pregnant with the couples fourth child, recently told the San Angelo Standard-Times that when her husband first felt ill, he took a mix of vitamin C, zinc, aspirin and ivermectin a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms in both people and animals that has been touted as a coronavirus treatment but was recently proved to be ineffective against the virus.

Mr. Wallace, 30, who campaigned against mask mandates and other Covid policies that he saw as government intrusion, lived in San Angelo for most of his life and worked at a company that sells welding equipment. He checked into the Shannon Medical Center on July 30.

Earlier that month, Mr. Wallace had organized a Freedom Rally for people who were sick of the government being in control of our lives.

He founded the San Angelo Freedom Defenders, a group that hosted a rally to end what it called Covid-19 tyranny according to a YouTube interview.

Mrs. Wallace had said her husband respected her own decision to wear a mask. We joked around about how he was on one side and I was on the other, and thats what made us the perfect couple and we balanced each other out, she told the San Angelo Standard-Times.

She added that her three children are up-to-date on their vaccines and that she herself planned to get a coronavirus vaccine after the birth of her baby in late September. We are not anti-vaxxers, she said.

Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations have been on the rise in Texas over the past few weeks. In Tom Green County, which includes the San Angelo area, cases have increased by 50 percent over the past two weeks, and hospitalizations have risen by 33 percent, according to a New York Times database.

At Shannon Medical Center, the intensive care unit is about 70 percent occupied, according to a New York Times tracker. The U.S. average of I.C.U. occupancy is about 68 percent, while the state average in Texas is 94 percent.

Under pressure from Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city leaders, the United States Tennis Association reversed its lax coronavirus protocols for the upcoming U.S. Open tournament, which opens to thousands of fans on Monday.

Originally, the tournament did not require any proof of vaccination or a recent negative coronavirus test for fans to enter, and there were no mask mandates, either. But the mayors office stepped in over the past two days to demand stricter protocols.

On Friday evening, the tournament announced on its Twitter account that proof of at least one vaccine shot would now be required for entrance to the grounds for all fans ages 12 and older. No masks are required.

The mayors office was adamant that fans entering Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest venue on the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, be vaccinated. But the U.S.T.A. took it a step further and made it a requirement for all fans entering the grounds of the tournament.

Today, the U.S.T.A. was informed that the New York City mayors office will be mandating proof of Covid-19 vaccination for entrance to Arthur Ashe Stadium, the statement said. Given the continuing evolution of the Delta variant and in keeping with our intention to put the health and safety of our fans first, the U.S.T.A. will extend the mayors requirement to all U.S. Open ticket holders 12 years old and older.

Mr. de Blasio was not the only concerned city official. After the tournament announced on Wednesday that no vaccines or masks would be required, Mark Levine, a City Council member from Manhattan, said he was alarmed that the U.S. Open could become a superspreader event, especially with so many visitors from around the world and the country visiting the tournament in Queens, and also touring Manhattan.

Levine was pleased by the reversal.

I feel enormous relief, he said, and its just in the nick of time with crowds due to arrive on Monday.

The unexpected and unwelcome coronavirus surge now unfolding in the United States has hit hardest in states that were slow to embrace vaccines. And then there is Florida.

While leaders in that state refused lockdowns and mask orders, they made it a priority to vaccinate vulnerable older people. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, opened mass vaccination sites and sent teams to retirement communities and nursing homes. Younger people also lined up for shots.

Mr. DeSantis and public health experts expected a rise in cases this summer as people gathered indoors in the air-conditioning. But what happened was much worse: Cases spiraled out of control, reaching peaks higher than Florida had seen before. Hospitalizations followed. So did deaths, which are considerably higher than the numbers currently reached anywhere else in the country.

It was really hard to imagine us ever getting back to this place, said Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University who until recently worked at the University of Florida and has closely followed the states outbreaks.

The Florida story is a cautionary tale for dealing with the current incarnation of the coronavirus, showing that even a state that made a push for vaccinations about 52 percent of Floridas population is fully vaccinated, the same as the national average can be crushed by the Delta variant, reaching frightening levels of hospitalizations and deaths.

Clearly the vaccines are keeping most of these people out of the hospital, but were not building the herd immunity that people hoped, Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference this past week.

Floridas pandemic data, more scant since the state ended its declared Covid-19 state of emergency in June, reveals only limited information about who is dying. But hospitals have said that upward of 90 percent of their patients have been unvaccinated.

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The best explanation for the crushing surge is that Floridas vaccination rates are good, but not good enough for its demographics. It has so many older people that even vaccinating a vast majority of them left more than 800,000 unprotected, many of them in nursing homes. Vaccination rates among younger people were uneven, so clusters of people remained at risk. Before June 25, people under 65 made up 22 percent of deaths. Since then, that proportion has risen to 28 percent.

And the unvaccinated are only part of the explanation behind Floridas latest numbers. Many states slammed by the virus earlier developed deep reservoirs of natural immunity from prior infections, affording them higher levels of protection than would be evident from vaccination rates alone. Not so in Florida, which was spared the devastating wintertime wave of cases that ravaged other parts of the country in part because warm weather made it possible for people to gather outdoors.

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