It's Wednesday, July seven. I'm oscar mirrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. The delta COVID nineteen variant continues to cause worry among public health officials, especially in places like Wyoming where only people are fully vaccinated and big events are taking place like a ten day rodeo set to start later this month. Julie Warren, now health and science reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how this variant is gaining
ground among the unvaccinated. Thanks for joining us, Julie, happy to be here. The delta variant of COVID nineteen is still of concern for many public health officials, particularly in states where vaccination rates are low. Obviously, a lot of people aren't getting infected in the same rates as before as as the height of the pandemic, but hospital chains hospitals are still worried about surges, especially when it comes to the delta variant. You wrote a piece looking at
Wyoming in particular. They have a very low vaccination rate and a couple of big events coming up pretty soon, so people are a little worried about what could happen. So Julie help us walk through what we're seeing. So Laramie County in Wyoming is sort of a perfect illustration of what we're seeing in pockets around the country. You've got an area where, you know, they've really struggled with their vaccination rate, sort of the wild West, and people
just aren't signing up anymore to get vaccinate. So they're at about thirty two vaccination rate, which really isn't high enough to kind of prevent the spread of things like
the delta variant in the community. And on top of that, you have the fact that they have completely gotten rid of any of the restrictions around mask wearing and you know, anything that we saw earlier in the pandemic, And so people are sort of returning to normal life in this situation in which the delta variant is showing up and you really only can see it visibly if you're at the hospital itself. On top of that fourth July weekend, and this huge rodeo that's coming to town kind of
has public health officials and doctors. They are concerned about what's to come. Are we still seeing younger patients coming in more often with this? Is this where the bulk of infections is coming from in some ways. Right. The reason we're not seeing as many older patients is because folks on the older end of the spectrum actually do have a much higher vaccination rate in general, right, And so if you are seeing people come through the doors,
you're more likely to see these younger patients. There are pediatric patients that are showing up in addition to you know, I spoke to a woman who is twenty eight years old and she had a very kind of classic case of what we're seeing with the delta variant, which is that once she was exposed, it came on very quickly and then sort of spread within her household. So that is very different than in the past that there's a much wider range of folks at the hospital in terms
of age. You spoke to a number of people at you know, these hospitals and different care centers, and they said that their fight obviously this on two fronts. Still people getting sick, but then a lot of misinformation. You know, a lot of people are sick of hearing about COVID. They don't want to hear about anymore. They don't want to be told to be vaccinated. But the misinformation a lot of times is what keeping is keeping them from
going out and getting those shots. You know, yes, we've had time for you know, the virus and to kind of spread and mutate and change and grow. But at the same time, misinformation has also kind of been changing and growing and spreading, and so earlier on you know, people who said, you know, they didn't maybe they showed up and they said that they felt like maybe you know, there were tracking devices that were being inserted into them
from the vaccine. Now you're hearing things like we don't even want to get tested for COVID because we're concerned that the disease is actually being spread through testing. So there's there's new kind of narratives that keep popping up that the doctors and healthcare workers say that they are sort of combating as they try to take care of this population. To be clear, we're not seeing numbers as I mentioned earlier, the way we did at the height
of the pandemic. But our hospital systems out there being over taxed still. I know they're like bracing for surges and all, but are they being over tax right now
so far? You know what's interesting when I'm when I'm hearing by and large as people saying that they've in one respect actually prepared better now for a situation in which they could become tax At the same time, these really are happening, like popping up into very particular sort of pockets, and so you know, if one hospital system becomes overwhelmed, they are more likely to possibly be able
to rely on another hospital system. So you're not seeing the kind of really over taxed hospital systems quite yet
in a widespread manner, of course. You know, the reasons that health officials are concerned is that if anyone remembers back to when this disease first showed up in the United States, it didn't take very long for something that looked sort of like a very small pocket or blip to immediately we kind of take over the whole United States, right, And so they're always looking for these signs that something that's doubling every day or you know, that kind of thing.
It doesn't take that long for that to actually become really visible to people in the community. And so right now we're waiting to see if the vaccination rates we have been able to get to end the end the social distancing and mask wearing that is going on is enough to kind of prevent the kind of thing that
we saw earlier on in the pandemic. We're talking about Wyoming kind of as a as an example of a state with a low vaccination rates and just getting back to normal and kind of the concern that the delta variant poses in places like that. Cheyenne Frontier Days is a huge rodeo that's coming to town pretty soon. As we said at the beginning, it starts on July garth. Brooks is going to be playing there. It's gonna be a huge ten day event. So this worries these public
health officials. There probably won't be a lot of mass squaring, but this is these big things, is what's concerning That's right. I mean, they say that the Cian Frontier Days has sort of done a lot to try to position themselves in a way that people understand that they what they really do want is for people to show up and be vaccinated and to wear masks if they're not vaccinated.
But at a certain point, the public health officials in the area say, you know, at this point last year at the Frontier Days, we canceled it because no one had a choice to get vaccinated. But this year, people do have a choice, and we can't continue to stop the entire economy to protect people who aren't really interested in taking the vaccine or social distancing or wearing masks. Well, we'll keep an eye on what happens there and around the country, as the delta variant is now the dominant
strain in the country. Julie, we're now health and science reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm Oscar Romeris, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out in the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.