chief medical officer at our lady of the lake regional medical center. doctor, thank you so much for joining us. how fast is the spread right now in your community? right now in the community the spread is exponential. and that exponential spread is because of the delta variant. we know now that delta variant carries 1,000 times more viral load and everybody who is sick with it and that spreads to more and more people than previous variants. last year s variant we thought was bad enough was far less contagious than this variant and that s resulting in just an exponential number of patients coming into the hospital. this morning we re sitting at 119 covid positive patients in our hospital, that s a 50% increase from just last week. we re looking at that chart right now. that incredibly steep rise you say exponential. you have your arms around it? is this something you can grasp? you don t get your arms around something like this. this isn t a controllable thing at this point. this
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just incredible numbers of patients but we have never seen this cadence that speaks to the delta variant. it s more contagious, spreading throughout community too fast and mitigation measures just aren t out there right now. the patients, what s the vaccination status of most of the patients you are seeing? almost wholly unvaccinated. we are seeing some breakthrough cases, but if you look at everybody under the age of 50 and i say that again because under the age of 50 should be rare in the hospital, but today that accounts for about 50% of our covid positive patients. they are all unvaccinated. when you get to the elderly, especially over the age of 80, you ll find some breakthrough cases. these are patients we don t expect to make great antibodies and respond to the vaccine. we were supposed to protect them by being vaccinated ourselves. dr. katherine o neal, i can hear the frustration in your voice. i hope you get the help you need. i hope this situation turns around some time
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