The jump in cases has resulted in hospitals with too many children and an increase in infections among children, which is of particular concern when many students return to their classrooms. And experts fear that a holiday weekend will make things worse.
Last week, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, advised unvaccinated Americans not to travel for the holidays and reminded vaccinated people that the high rate of virus transmission meant they could also be risky.
A big difference between this year and last is the more transmissible Delta variant. Another is that Americans over the age of 12 can get highly effective Covid-19 vaccines, which experts say is the best defense against the virus.
But only 53% of the total U.S. population is fully vaccinated and only 62% of eligible Americans are vaccinated, leaving tens of millions very vulnerable.
“Here’s the important thing: everyone I’m hospitalizing isn’t vaccinated. In general, across the country we don’t need to hospitalize people who have received both doses of the vaccine,” said the emergency medicine professor and associate dean. public Said Dr. Megan Ranney of Health and Brown University. “This is a disease of the unvaccinated right now.”
“Takeaway food for everyone is getting your shots on and definitely wearing a mask for that added layer of protection if you’re in public indoor spaces right now,” Ranney said.
Many students return to school without nurses
Experts have encouraged adults to get vaccinated to protect young children returning to school.
“The way to protect children who, due to their age, cannot yet be vaccinated, is to surround the children, whether they are friends, family, school teachers, school staff, and surround the children of vaccinated people, “said the director of The Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN Sunday at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The situation becomes even more worrying, as it is estimated that a quarter of the schools where students return do not have any school nurses. The CDC recommends that schools have one full-time nurse for every 750 students.
Based on the latest data from a study on the national school nurse workforce, published in the Journal of School Nursing in 2018, approximately 39% of schools employ full-time nurses and approximately 35% work nurses part-time, while 25% do not work them. school nurses. Experts stress that the nation has lacked school nurses for years, but the pandemic now highlights the severity of the shortage.
Schools in rural areas appear to be “significantly more likely” than schools in urban areas to report that they do not have a nurse, according to the study published in the Journal of School Nursing in 2018. In this study, 23.5% of rural schools report not having a nurse compared to 10.3% of urban schools.
“Funding is a key issue. There is an inconsistent mix of state and local funding that puts small rural school districts at a disadvantage with inadequate tax bases,” said Laura Searcy, a pediatric nurse who was president of the National Association of Pediatrics. Practitioner nurses and a member of the American Association of Professional Nurses told CNN.
“And it’s likely that these areas will also have a shortage of pediatric primary care providers.”
The governor of West Virginia frustrated at an accelerated pace
Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will meet Sept. 17 to discuss Covid-19 booster shots. Last month, the White House said people who received the two mRNA vaccines (the two-shot vaccines manufactured by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna) could receive boosters starting Sept. 20.
In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Monday he was eager for the boosters to begin.
“If we only got our government’s approval to start administering absolutely these booster shots, we would do everything and we will do it immediately,” Justice said. “We’re ready to go.”
Justice accused the federal government of having kept West Virginia to lead its Covid response.
“We have people who are well over six months old over 60 and who need the reinforcement shot. And we can’t give it to them because we’re holding on to, you know, the nation and the federal government right now,” he said. Justice.
On Sunday, Fauci predicted that Moderna could deploy its booster dose later than Pfizer.
With the possible temporal discrepancy, researchers are studying whether different types of Covid-19 vaccines can be mixed and combined.
“We’re aligning Pfizer against Pfizer, Pfizer for Modern and vice versa,” Fauci told Weijia Jiang on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We hope that in a reasonable period of time, measured in a couple of weeks, we will have this data.”
Right now, it’s okay for healthy vaccinated Americans to wait and see what the CDC and FDA have to say before they go to receive a booster dose, said Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst. The most important thing right now is to get the unvaccinated to have the first two doses, he added.
CNN’s Deidre McPhillips, Jacqueline Howard and Hannah Sarisohn contributed to this report.