One thing doesn't add up. They keep saying vaccination rates are too low but one fact that they don't want to admit is that more people are vaccinated every day than there have ever been.
There is something called 'herd immunity' - where the Ro for a virus drops below 1 because so many of the people have been vaccinated or have developed natural immunity from having been infected. Once you have an Ro below 1, the number of infected people steadling drops without any further containment effort, with an Ro > 1 the number of infected continue to grow unless there is containment effort. For the original COVID-19 - R was 2-4, for Alpha it was 3-5, for Delta it is 8-10. The number of vaccinated for herd immunity depends on the initial Ro. The formula is 1 - 1/Ro_initial. So for Alpha Herd immunity required between 1-(1/3) and 1-(1/5) or 67%-80% of people vaccinated/immune. For Delta it is 1-(1/8) to 1-(1/10) so between 87.5% and 90% of people need to be vaccinated/immune before we reach herd immunity.
Herd immunity thresholds also depend on vaccine efficacy and how efficacy changes over time. The above calculations assume 100% efficacy. The lower the efficacy and the greater the drop in efficacy over time, the greater the percentage need to be vaccinated.
The 'effective R' drops significantly the more people are vaccinated even before herd immunity - so . Also you can have 'local herd immunity'. So a city with extremely high vaccination rates might be effectively herd immune, even if the rest of the country isn't.
So vaccination is the single most important thing a person can do, masking is useful and should be done also - particularly by the unvaccinated.
So we had 11k per day in June and now we have over 107,000. Are fewer people vaccinated now than in June? We are averaging more cases today than we were way back in November. Were more people vaccinated back in November? No, not likely. Not even possible.
So what changed if it wasn't fewer people being vaccinated?
If you look at the graph of cases from last July, there is a peak then as well - . It is a combination of hot weather driving people indoors and 4th of July celebrations. This year though we also have Delta.
That is the power of exponential growth - Delta is to the 10th power, Alpha was to 4th power, original was to the 2nd power.
in 5 generations of delta starting with 10 people - 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000.
in 5 generations of alpha starting with 10 people - 40 160 640 2560 10240
With delta within a few seconds of hanging around someone you can likely catch it. (There is video footage of someone who the only contact they had was walking by another individual)
With alpha you have to typically hang around a person for 10-15 minutes.
Well, Biden and his lapdogs at the CDC decided to make a totally political call based on no science whatsoever to take a victory lap and declare a big win and said it was safe for people to take their masks off, that's what happened. Vaccinated people supposedly but with a so called honor system anyone in their right mind knew meant a free for all.
CDC followed the science at that time - the evidence showed that vaccinated people had extremely little chance of catching or spreading COVID and so VACCINATED PEOPLE could safely go unmasked. Certain idiotic governors banned mask or vaccination requirements entirely and many unvaccinated people decided to go unmasked. It is still pretty safe for VACCINATED PEOPLE to go unmasked. If ONLY VACCINATED PEOPLE went unmasked there would be essentially no spread.
So again it is only the UNVACCINATED CHOOSING TO GO UNMASKED - that is causing the spread.
And I support the CDC going back to recommending masks even for the vaccinated but it's too little and too late. Obviously too late but better late than never. And too little because it's ridiculous that they are saying it only applies to areas with surges. That's dumb it should apply everywhere just like it did when we had 10x fewer cases than we are getting right now.
The goal is is to keep community spread to the levels where it doesn't overwhelm hospitals. Places with high vaccination rates should have low community spread, and thus have little need for reinstating mask mandates.
That said - the CDC should probably recommend based on community spread and vaccination rate.