The anti-vaccine campaign by Republicans is now openly killing hundreds per week, and that number will soon rise back into the thousands as the delta variant of COVID-19 takes over unvaccinated red states, like Bon's neck of the woods in Springfield, Missouri.
The worst of the pandemic seemed behind Mercy Hospital, those weeks last winter when the coronavirus wards were full of people struggling to breathe.
But after months of reprieve, the virus has come roaring back, sending unvaccinated young adults and middle-aged patients from across southwest Missouri there in droves as the highly transmissible delta variant tears through the region. The hospital has been treating more than 130 covid-19 patients each day since Sunday — more than the winter surge — and had to open a sixth ward. It came close to running out of ventilators earlier this month.
“We’re just very disheartened. This was all pretty avoidable,” said Wanda Brown, a nurse unit manager. “Last year, we were looking forward to the vaccine coming out because we really thought that that was going to be helpful for our community. We feel like we’ve taken giant leaps backward.”
Springfield, a city of 170,000 nestled in the Ozarks, has become a cautionary tale for how the more transmissible delta variant, now estimated to account for half of all new cases nationwide, can ravage poorly vaccinated communities and return them to the darkest days of the pandemic.
Missouri has reported one of the nation’s highest per capita increases in new coronavirus cases in recent weeks. Freeman Health System in Joplin, about 70 miles west of Springfield, announced the full reopening of its covid-19 ward in late June after downsizing in the spring because of a lack of patients. The delta variant has been linked to a broader regional outbreak spilling into Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as emerging hot spots in Louisiana, Florida, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Cases and hospitalizations are strongly correlated with low vaccination rates, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Nationally, the coronavirus case rate has more than doubled since late June. The national vaccination rate has settled at close to 500,000 doses per day, one-sixth of the more than 3 million per day in mid-April.
Experts fear that the surge in Springfield, known as the birthplace of Bass Pro Shops and Andy’s Frozen Custard, is a harbinger of tensions to come as people play down the pandemic and refuse to get vaccinated even in the face of overwhelmed hospitals and preventable death. Instead of unifying the community, the surge has hardened divisions, unleashing anger from health-care workers fed up with vaccine misinformation and exposing deep antipathy toward the public health establishment.
New infections are rapidly rising to levels not seen since early January, prompting the school system to reinstate a mask mandate for summer school. Almost every virus sample sequenced in June turned out to be the delta variant, which is significantly more transmissible than the strain that first arrived in the United States. Local health officials are trying to create an alternate care site for stable covid-19 patients as Wednesday’s 231 hospitalizations are on the verge of an all-time peak and are projected to surge beyond available capacity.
Coronavirus deaths in Greene County, where Springfield is located, had plunged this spring, but 23 people have succumbed since June 21. The fire chief described the outbreak as a “mass-casualty event, happening in slow-motion.”
The Springfield-Greene County Health Department has prioritized vaccination in a county where only 35 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates are even lower for people in their 20s and 30s. But new daily vaccinations have largely stayed flat through June despite the outbreak’s toll, and health officials are battling false theories that the vaccines are somehow responsible for a surge in hospitalizations almost exclusively affecting the unvaccinated.
“It’s a sad reality that we are facing,” said Katie Towns, the acting health director. “I don’t think we are coming out of it anytime soon. We are going to see more people get really sick. We are going to see a lot of people die.”
The risks for getting the vaccine are miniscule compared to the much greater risk of the delta variant killing you, by orders of magnitude. That is the hard truth. If you're putting off the vaccine because you're worried about the effects of the vaccine, understand the effects of the virus are "lifelong chronic heart issues if you survive and death otherwise, plus you infect others around you."
Get the vaccine.
Now.
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