Travel account.
A map showing the risk of COVID-19 in countries around the world from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the United States is one of the most dangerous places to visit in the midst of the pandemic.
The map shows the risk of contracting the virus in each country and classifies the premises with available data into four categories: low, moderate, high and very high risk. The CDC arrives at each determination primarily by calculating the incidence rate of incidents and the new trajectory of cases over the past 28 days.
The United States has a “very high” level 4 designation, as the Delta variant continues to spread across the country, but so does a wide range of other sites that cover various levels of income, vaccine availability. and public health systems.
For example, Somalia also has a level 4 designation, but only 0.07 percent of its total population is fully vaccinated, according to the global vaccine tracker Our World in Data, compared to the United States, which has approximately 53.6 percent of all people completely inoculated, CDC. the numbers are displayed.
Mexico, on the other hand, is a level 3 designation, but has about half the levels of inoculation that the U.S. has.
“If you look at the level four countries, there’s a wide variety of countries, you have countries in Western Europe, you have South America, you have them in Africa, they’re not just high-income countries, not just low-income countries and means, it’s really a tricky equation to solve, ”said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a public health medical epidemiologist at Cornell University and former deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Health.
“[This map is] telling us that there are many factors that affect the spread of the virus, including behavior, variants, population density, [climate, testing] and there are probably issues we just don’t know about. “
He noted that some countries with low-risk designations could test less and the CDC can only calculate risk designations based on available data.
Given the abundance of doses available in the United States and the ease of accessing them now for Americans across the country, Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr of Columbia University said hesitation is what it keeps the United States in the level 4 designation, but it plays a role elsewhere, too.
“People believe that vaccine vaccination is only seen in high-resource countries, but it is alive elsewhere,” the epidemiologist said, noting countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran, which they also have level 4 designations.
Still, access to vaccines remains a problem in the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and a lot of work needs to be done to bridge the gap, El-Sadr said.
“These vaccines can change the game, they can be our way to leave this epidemic behind, both in this country and around the world, but that means we need to make enough vaccines for ourselves and for the rest of the world,” he said. he said. “And we have to work very hard to get people to look for the vaccine and get vaccinated as soon as possible.”