Story at a glance:
- Cases are increasing the fastest in Louisiana and Florida.
- Louisiana has an average of 444 new cases per week per day, the highest acceleration of cases in the country
- Florida has already outpaced its 2020 summer infection rate.
The coronavirus is accelerating in the U.S., but each state varies based on the percentage of people who are vaccinated — a resisting factor against the delta variant, a new study shows.
Calculating case acceleration rates, the report behind the latest STAT analysis found that Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi are leading the country in how fast cases are accelerating — “a reasonable indicator of how intense that wave might be and how long it might last.” Overall, the analysis found that this new wave of COVID-19 infections is already outpacing those of spring and summer 2020.
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Louisiana, the state with the highest acceleration rate, is reporting an average of 444 new cases per week per day, which calculates to 2.38 cases per 100,000 people per day per week.
As Changing America previously reported, while around 48 percent of the total U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, data shows a group of states, including the aforementioned accelerating states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, are lagging behind national numbers and seeing an uptick in cases.
Stat reports only 36 percent of Louisiana’s residents are vaccinated, making it among the least vaccinated in the country.
Florida, where about 48 percent of residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, is the second most accelerated delta infectious place and has already outpaced its 2020 summer infectious rate.
In fact, five of the top states where cases are accelerating the fastest are all below the national average vaccination rates.
The data was collected from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and Our World in Data. The data also uses a combination of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its findings as STAT calculated the rate of weekly case acceleration.
The only exemption to correlation between low vaccination and delta variant infection is Massachusetts, where about 63 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, but there is 351 percent increase in cases in the past 14 weeks, according to The New York Times’ Covid Dashboard.
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