Kansas has managed to travel backward in pandemic time. Suddenly it’s February again.
Except this time, the state faces a version of COVID-19 that’s twice as contagious.
The delta variant is plowing through a lightly vaccinated population, and multiplying fast. In mid-June, Kansas saw hundreds of new cases a week. Now, there are thousands of new cases per week.
That’s why time really matters.
Say you get a shot of Pfizer tomorrow, then the second dose three weeks later. A couple more weeks must pass before your body has built up its arsenal of antibodies to guard you against hospitalization and death.
“Five weeks is a long time,” deputy state health officer Joan Duwve said. “That’s just a prime opportunity for this virus to find you, to make you sick and to spread to other members of your family.”
Yes, you can still catch COVID-19 after getting a vaccine, but misinformation about what that means deflects from this simple fact: For the vast majority of people, your vaccinated body will be ready for it.
“These are just heroic vaccines,” said Vaughn Cooper, who heads the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. “The chief scientific achievements of my lifetime.”
Around 99% of recent coronavirus deaths in the U.S. and 97% of the hospitalizations involved people who were unvaccinated.
Each day, a few thousand Kansans get a shot of the vaccine that scientists say can stop this pandemic.
Meantime, Kansas hospitals are filling beds fast, and some are turning away seriously ill COVID patients from other areas and asking nurses to sign up for extra shifts.
In late April, Kansas identified its first case of the delta variant. Now almost all the COVID cases here are this flavor.
Kansas sits smack dab in the delta zone, wedged between other states with the same problem — most notably, Missouri, where preventable infections are overwhelming hospitals in Springfield.
And so delta is doing what delta does best: spreading. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists Kansas as one of 17 states with high transmission levels right now.
Not satisfied with hugging the Missouri border, the variant has crisscrossed the state, fueling upticks around Junction City, Wichita and other areas.
