Six months after the COVID-19 vaccines became available, almost 60% of adults in the United States have been fully vaccinated — and 69% have received at least one dose. But those numbers hide an uncomfortable truth, writes Dhruv Khullar in the New Yorker: In some parts of the country, fewer than 35% of adults are fully protected, leading to vast swaths of the country where unvaccinated adults are getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying of what is now a preventable disease. Khullar highlights the experiences of two physicians treating COVID-19 patients in Utah — most of them middle aged or younger, and all of them unvaccinated. “We might take as inevitable the loss of life in the pitch of war, but casualties suffered in the battle’s final moments, when peace is so clearly at hand, carry with them an added senselessness,” Khullar writes. “Today’s coronavirus deaths are senseless. We’ve been offered a ceasefire. It’s past time we take it.”
