Free Republic

(CNN)Twenty four states have seen an uptick of at least 10% in Covid-19 cases over the past week as health experts and the federal government keep pressing for more people to get vaccinated. The rapid spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus has only ratcheted up the pressure. We should think about the Delta variant as the 2020 version of Covid-19 on steroids," Andy Slavitt, a former senior adviser to Joe Biden's Covid Response Team, told CNN on Wednesday. "It's twice as infectious. Fortunately, unlike 2020, we actually have a tool that stops the Delta variant in its tracks:...

The highly transmissible delta variant is now the dominant strain of the coronavirus in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. As of July 3, the latest date for which data was available, the delta variant accounted for 51.7 percent of new Covid-19 cases that had been genetically sequenced in the country. Two weeks earlier, on June 19, the variant accounted for just over 30 percent of new cases. During a news briefing Tuesday, President Joe Biden cited the delta variant's rapid spread to urge people to get vaccinated, "especially young people who may have...

A woman in Missouri was afraid of the effects from COVID-19 vaccines and chose not to get the shots, but later contracted the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus and died in the hospital. Deborah Carmichael, the mother of now-deceased 45-year-old Tricia Jones, is speaking out and urging those hesitant about the vaccine to get the jab after losing her daughter in June. She spoke to Kansas City's news channel Fox 4 WDAF-TV about her daughter's death and vaccine hesitancy in an interview broadcast this week. "She was afraid of the side effects, I think. You hear a lot of...

Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. They're also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say. That's because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person. "Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday. "The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply," Schaffner said. When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more...

The Delta variant of COVID-19 has spawned a new, troubling variant known as Delta-plus that has been identified for the first time in Louisiana, according to officials at Ochsner Health. Delta-plus is thought to have the same higher rate of transmission as the Delta variant, which was originally identified in India and is about two times as infectious as the original coronavirus strain. But it also has a characteristic of variants from South Africa and Brazil that makes it harder for antibodies to block it from entering cells. “It gives you a double whammy,” said Dr. Lucio Miele, who has...