Newton, [Massachusetts] is an outlier even among outliers: More than 95 percent of people older than 30 have gotten at least one dose. It’s one of the safest places in the world with respect to the coronavirus.
The outlook is dramatically different elsewhere in the country. COVID-19 cases are rising sharply in several states with low vaccine coverage, fueled by the spread of the coronavirus’s more transmissible Delta variant. In southwest Missouri, understaffed hospitals are already having to send COVID-19 patients hundreds of miles away.
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Delta’s increased transmissibility only exacerbates the divide between the inoculated and the un-inoculated. As my colleague Ed Yong writes, “Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants.” For people who are fully vaccinated, Delta poses very little direct threat. Its mutations do erode immunity slightly, but most breakthrough infections that result are mild or even asymptomatic. For entirely unvaccinated people, however, this means that Delta actually poses a double danger. They cannot rely on direct immunity from a vaccine, of course. But they also cannot rely as much on the herd immunity of vaccinated people around them if the variant is causing more breakthrough infections.
