Plenty of the local news of late is trumpeting some version of “pandemic easing.” We love hearing that, but there should be new caution in the wind. The Delta variant of COVID-19 – the highly contagious and more dangerous mutant virus that devastated India – has come to states near you: namely Georgia and North Carolina, and yes, Tennessee,.
The Delta variant, first seen in January in India and now overrunning Great Britain, has been detected in at least 6% of cases sequenced in the U.S. as of Wednesday.
That puts the U.S. at what Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and a White House COVID leader, calls “a tipping point.” He says a Delta variant rate of 6% is the point where that strain took over in England, turning the long decline in British cases back into a upward turn. It now threatens to cause a delay in the end of the lockdown measures there.
“We cannot let that happen in the United States,” Fauci said at a White House press briefing Tuesday.
But by Wednesday, the Delta variant had shown up in more than a dozen states in the U.S, including ours, according to a tracking map maintained by the company Helix, which works with the CDC and performs genetic sequencing on the virus variants. That mapping also shows the Delta variant in Florida, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona and California.