(CN) — With Tennessee emerging as the worst state in the nation for Covid-19 infections since the pandemic began, a return to normal is not in sight as medical workers are pleading with the public to get vaccinated.
Covid-19 is here to stay for the foreseeable future, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
“It's part of our microbial ecological system in which we live,” he said in an interview. “It's not going to just disappear. We cope with influenza each year; we will have to cope with Covid in an ongoing fashion.”
That is something that will be an uphill battle for states like Tennessee, where only 43% of the population is fully vaccinated — a 3% increase from last month. Rural counties have an even lower vaccination rate, hovering between the 20 and 30% range, according to New York Times Covid-19 data.
The state has had the most coronavirus cases per capita since the pandemic began, just a few hundred ahead of North Dakota as of Friday, according to the New York Times and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We're seeing perhaps a leveling off [of new Covid-19 cases] in some parts of the state now but not a distinct downturn yet,” Schaffner said, adding that the surge could “smolder on at a reasonably high level well into the fall … But it might take us a long time, and by that time, we will have paid a very substantial ‘price’ for this. Many more people ill, many more people hospitalized and more people having died.”
For the number of cases to go down, the number of people susceptible to the virus — those who don’t have immunity — has to go down, said Loren Lipworth, an epidemiologist at Vanderbilt.
“Unfortunately, that's part of what's contributing to why this surge is just continuing to rise, is that we're not seeing a parallel uptick in vaccinations, which then takes the susceptible group of unvaccinated people sort of out of the denominator,” Lipworth said.
So without more people getting vaccinated, it’s “probably a little too optimistic” to think there won’t be another surge over the holidays, she said.
Meanwhile, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee joined other Republican governors in threatening to fight President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate that calls for businesses with more than 100 employees to require vaccinations or weekly Covid-19 tests.
“To be clear: the vaccine is the best tool we have to combat the pandemic but heavy-handed mandates are the wrong approach,” Lee said.
On Thursday, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III and other conservative attorneys general sent a letter to the president expressing concerns that the “unprecedented assertion” of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s emergency power “does not comply with the requirements of the OSH Act or the restraints of the U.S. Constitution.”
At the same time, the federal government is putting limits on its distribution of Covid-19 antibody treatments amid concerns that a handful of southern states — including Tennessee — were receiving a disproportionate amount of the national supply, POLITICO reported Tuesday.
Monoclonal antibody treatments have been a back-up plan for conservative governors, like Lee, who have touted their effectiveness in treating the unvaccinated who contract the virus. At least 72 centers offer the treatment in Tennessee, Lee said last month.
Until recently, the federal government sent the treatments to states on an as-needed basis, but demand from southern states exploded, reaching up to 70% of all orders in early September, POLITICO reported.
In East Tennessee, where several of the hardest-hit counties are, several hospital leaders held a news conference Wednesday pleading with the public to get vaccinated and shedding light on the domino effect caused by the influx of Covid-19 patients in ICU beds, the majority of whom are unvaccinated.
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