According to this analysis by David Leonhardt of The New York Times, the bad news about COVID right now in the US is that the number of new infections has leveled off after having fallen dramatically week after week for many weeks going back to mid-April—see above graph. The main cause is evidently the so-called Delta variant, the one originating in India that's now responsible for around ten percent of new cases in our country. The Delta variant is an unusually contagious form of the disease and makes people sicker faster than any strain we've faced so far.
The good news about COVID in our country right now is that the vaccines are effective against all variants, including Delta. If you've been vaccinated, you have little to worry about: you're unlikely to be infected, and, if you are, you're unlikely to get sick enough to notice it. The chance of dying, or even of having to be admitted to a hospital for treatment, is essentially zero.
The bad news about the good news is that the number of people being vaccinated has dropped considerably in the last few weeks. It's pretty clear that the remaining part of the unvaccinated population is reluctant to be vaccinated or, worse, determined not to be. The Times has also looked at the state-by-state vaccination trends and compiled a table, published June 3, of how long it will take a state, given current vaccination rates, to get 70 percent of adults in that state protected. Here are the 15 states with the farthest to go, from at least a year (Alabama and Mississippi) to three months (Indiana).
| Alabama | Tennessee | South Carolina |
| Mississippi | North Dakota | Idaho |
| Wyoming | Missouri | West Virginia |
| Louisiana | North Carolina | Montana |
| Oklahoma | Arkansas | Indiana |
The red-blue divide is evident not just in the fact that Trump won all of these states. A list of Trump's best 15 states (in terms of percentage of the statewide vote) has eleven in common with the above list of 15 states with the farthest to go on vaccinations. The vaccines were developed while Trump was in office and provide his fanboys with their chief talking point when the topic at hand is his administration's bungled response to the crisis. That his supporters are the most vaccine-averse segment of the population is therefore a bit of a mystery, at least to me. It would help a lot if Trump urged people to get vaccinated, in fact it would undoubtedly save lives, but of course then he'd be aligning himself with Biden, who has set the goal of 70 percent of adults being fully vaccinated by the Fourth of July. Perhaps MAGA people don't want Biden to reach his goal. In that case, they are risking illness and death in order to own the libz. A 70-percent national vaccination rate means pockets in Trumplandia where it's low enough for the Delta variant to gain a foothold and spread. What's exasperating is that such a result could so easily be averted. The vaccines are available but instead we might be writing a new chapter in The Darwin Awards.
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