Adam Serwer writes:

A year and a half into the pandemic, Texas is running out of hospital beds.

The Texas Tribune reported on Tuesday that nearly 10,000 COVID-19 patients are in intensive-care units, some in areas where hospitals are close to capacity. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order asking hospitals to delay elective procedures and authorizing local facilities to seek out-of-state medical staff to help with the coronavirus surge, which is approaching levels not seen since winter. Despite the desperate situation, Texas’s case rate is not even the worst in the nation—Louisiana and Florida have more cases per capita.

The coronavirus pandemic should have been over by now, but instead the U.S. is facing what some medical experts have described as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Last week, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff held a press conference urging residents to get vaccinated, offering a dramatic chart showing that close to 90 percent of new infections are among the unvaccinated, who in turn make up 95 percent of hospitalizations. Out of the nearly 9,000 Texans who died of the coronavirus from February 8 to July 14, just 43 were known to be vaccinated. In other words, unvaccinated people constituted 99.5 percent of coronavirus deaths in Texas during that period.

Calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated, however, may mislead some people into believing that the current wave is merely a problem for those who haven’t gotten the shots. The surge is straining the state’s hospital capacity, forcing Texans to delay medical procedures. Children under 12 remain unvaccinated, and some adolescents and adults who have gotten the shot, including those who are immunocompromised, remain vulnerable to infection and serious illness because of the Delta variant. The longer so many people go unvaccinated, the more likely the evolution of even-more-deadly strains of the disease becomes. And, put simply, you should care when the people around you are dying in droves of a preventable illness. [Continue reading…]