Daily Coronavirus Cases Up over 300% from Last Labor Day Despite Vaccines

Daily coronavirus cases are up by over 300 percent compared to last Labor Day despite the prevalence of vaccines, data from Johns Hopkins University shows.

According to the data, daily infections are “more than four times what the U.S. was seeing on Labor Day last year, or a 316% increase,” according to USA Today. Hospitalizations are also up 158 percent, and daily coronavirus-related fatalities are “almost twice as high,” according to the outlet.

This comes despite the fact that vaccines, which politicians have presented as the key to returning to the state of pre-pandemic normalcy, are widely available. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 176 million people in the U.S., or 53 percent of the U.S. population, are considered “fully vaccinated,” and over 206 million have received at least one dose.

USA Today, however, squarely places the blame on the Delta variant and “a swath of Americans refusing easily accessible vaccines that most of the developing world is furiously scrambling to obtain.”  The newspaper is hardly the only source to place the blame on the unvaccinated for rising case levels. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief White House medical adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, has also placed blame on the unvaccinated population, telling NPR’s Mary Lousie Kelly that it is impossible to predict when the U.S. will turn the corner on the pandemic due to 90 million unvaccinated Americans.

“You can’t have 90 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated and expect that you can make a good prediction about where we’re going to be,” Fauci said at the time.

“Because when you have people unvaccinated to the extent that they are unvaccinated, you have the possibility of the virus continuing to circulate, mutating, forming more variants and getting us back into another situation similar to or worse than Delta,” he continued.

Nonetheless, the Biden administration and other local officials have failed to reach their goals to get as many people  vaccinated as possible, as vaccination rates wane. Originally, the Biden administration aimed to have 70 percent of the U.S. population vaccinated by July 4. Again and again, the administration has presented the vaccine as the answer to returning to pre-pandemic life. Yet, some states and localities have ushered mask mandates back in, forcing the vaccinated to cover up yet again.

Recent surveys, however, suggest that the majority of unvaccinated Americans remain rigid in their decision to refrain from getting the shot.