Roundup: Holiday gatherings ignite debate as U.S. strives for higher COVID-19 vaccination rates

New York (US), October 5: It is too early to say whether Americans should avoid larger family gatherings for Christmas, while the nation experiences an uptick in new COVID-19 infections among children alongside lagging vaccination rates, according to Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden.
It is "just too soon to tell" whether holiday gatherings should be limited for the second year in a row due to the ongoing pandemic, Fauci told CBS on Sunday, adding that Americans need to focus on lowering the number of new infections and hospitalizations.
"We've just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we're going to do at a particular time," he said. "Let's focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down. And we can do it by people getting vaccinated and also in the situation where boosters are appropriate to get people boosted."
America's current vaccination rate of about 65 percent would have been enough to stop the spread of the original version of the virus that causes COVID-19. Unfortunately, the dominant Delta strain is more than twice as contagious and requires more people to be immune through vaccination or previous infection for the virus to stop spreading, reported USA Today on Monday.
"Now we need 85 to 90 percent vaccinated against Delta," Eric Topol, vice president for research at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, was quoted as saying. However, this seems unlikely to happen, for only about 56 percent of the American population was fully vaccinated now, and 12 percent "adamantly opposed it," said the report.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated on Monday that 215,233,625 people have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, making up 64.8 percent of the whole U.S. population; fully vaccinated people stood at 185,492,579, accounting for 55.9 percent of the total. A total of 5,287,357 people, or 2.9 percent of the fully vaccinated group, received booster shots.
MIXED SCENARIO
On Monday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 95 percent of the city's full-time public school employees are vaccinated against COVID-19, including 96 percent of teachers and 99 percent of principals. Less than 4,000 teachers are now unvaccinated. The school district, which is the largest in the United States, said that it has a robust backup of 9,000 substitute teachers.
"New York's requirement that virtually everyone who works in the city's public schools be vaccinated against the coronavirus compelled thousands of Department of Education employees to get at least one dose of a vaccine in the past week, leading to extremely high vaccination rates among educators," said The New York Times (NYT) on Monday.
The city's vaccination mandate called for public education employees to get the vaccine by 5 p.m. this past Friday. When school returned on Monday, city teachers, as well as all Department of Education employees who are not currently vaccinated against COVID-19, would not be allowed to enter school buildings.
The mayor explained during an interview on Friday that any teacher that does not get vaccinated by Friday afternoon will be placed on unpaid leave and replaced by a substitute teacher.
In a related development, Johnson & Johnson is planning to ask federal regulators early this week to authorize a booster shot of its coronavirus vaccine. It is the last of the three federally authorized vaccine providers to call for extra injections, reported NYT on Monday.
Federal officials have become increasingly worried that the more than 15 million Americans who received the J&J vaccine face too much risk of severe COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has scheduled a meeting on Oct. 15 of its expert advisory committee to discuss whether to grant emergency use authorization of a booster shot of J&J vaccine.
A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis has showed, after the U.S. nursing home deaths over COVID-19 declined for months largely because of the federal effort to vaccinate residents, these organizations reported nearly 1,800 such deaths among their residents and staff in August, which represented the highest monthly toll since February.
"The findings underscore the ongoing vulnerability of nursing home residents, who are old and in poor health, and highlight the importance of getting booster shots to people in this population," reported NYT on Monday.
Source: Xinhua