the worst of it. but you noted the u.s. is roughly at the same point today in terms of deaths daily and new infections as we were last summer when with the big difference was there was no vaccine. what does that tell us? there was no vaccine and we had a fully susceptible population. now we have a population where half of americans have received the vaccine and many have been already effected which provided some level of immunity. the big difference is one, the delta variant. that is not the virus that was circulating last summer. and our behavior has changed. we are much looser about how we deal with. this but to get to the ron desantis thing, what he has done is in ex plickable. you have two weapons in the war, one the vaccine, and two for people for example who are too young or who have cancer or on chemotherapy or biological agents for their diseases mask.
vaccine. jonas sox vaccine and when that rolled out in 1955, we couldn t wait to get the vaccine. there were none of the forces in now were in play then. it is a much more cynical and litigious and conspiracy laden society that we have now. but the end result is that the fight is not just against the virus, which was true against polio, the fight is against ourselves. the worst parts of ourselves and that makes this much, much harder. my father told stories of his mom not letting him go to pools because of polio as well. given the wide availability of vaccines, available, free and effective, far more than some vaccines we think about, this is, it is a pandemic not just of the unvaccinated but the willfully unvaccinated because they have the option to be. do you believe there should be more man dates? is that the answer. i think it is the only answer at this point. i think we solved the problem of
start remote because of quarantines. well it is hard to know when it is we re going to have a vaccine available for children less than 12. but we specertainly need it. and we need it before late fall and heading into winter. we have the delta variant and two is winter which is allowing for more easy spread of this virus and three, i think most importantly you re going to have a relatively unvaccinated or undervaccinated group less than 12 and basically an undervaccinated group between 12 and 17 and only about 35% in the age group who can be vaccinated have been vaccinated. let me ask you about this. because we do have other countries that have faced the delta variant before us. and i don t want to over or underestimate, but if you look at u.k., they have tailed off. can we learn anything from that. is that something that we might be able to expect here as well?
have received one vaccine, for the mrna, it is a two-dose vaccine so it doesn t count until you are fully vaccinated and we have a long way to go to 90%. we have to get those numbers off. dr. paul offit, good to have you on. thank you. this just into cnn on the topic we were just discussing. mcdonald s the latest company to require staff and customers to wear masks crucially in high transmission areas. this regardless of their vaccination status. matt egan, lead writer for cnn business joins me now. we re beginning to see something of a pattern here. businesses implementing rules and different stages of the dial in terms of how far they go. but tell us what you re seeing across the board? well, jim, we re seeing that the changes to corporate policies are coming in fast and furious. business leaders are trying to catch up to the rising covid numbers. the latest is mcdonald s as you said, they are now going to require both workers and