83% of COVID-19 cases are the Delta variant — unvaccinated Americans should avoid indoor dining

• The highly transmissable Delta variant has caused a spike of at least 10% of new cases in 48 states over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University.
• Delta is now the most dominant strain of COVID-19.
• Unvaccinated Americans are discouraged from dining indoors.

As cases of the Delta variant continue to surge across the U.S., health experts have offered a stern warning to those that are unvaccinated: Get the jab or stay indoors.

Unvaccinated Americans should avoid restaurants

Less than half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and even as parts of some states brought back mask mandates, going out in public — especially indoors — is risky to some people, according to experts.

“What I would say bluntly is: If you are not vaccinated right now in the United States, you should not go into a bar, you should probably not eat at a restaurant. You are at great risk of becoming infected,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN on Monday.

Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that daily coronavirus cases in the U.S. could quadruple next month because of slowing vaccination efforts.

Currently, the U.S. has roughly 30,000 and 60,000 new cases daily, but numbers could return to where they were in January, when the second surge of the virus happened.

“We’re heading into a rough time. It’s likely, if our trajectory is similar to that in the United Kingdom, that we could see as many as 200,000 cases a day,” Frieden, who led the CDC between 2009 and 2017, said.

He said deaths likely won’t reach levels where they were earlier in the pandemic.

“You will see a steady increase in deaths, and these are preventable deaths,” Frieden said.

Problem spots across the country

Only 49.1% of the U.S. population is vaccinated, according to the CDC. States like Alabama, California, Florida, and Louisiana are seeing the largest number of cases.

The CDC said the Delta variant accounts for 83% of analyzed COVID-19 cases in the U.S., which is especially troubling for states that are falling behind in vaccination rates.

“This is a dramatic increase,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky told a Senate committee Tuesday. “In some parts of the country, the percentage is even higher, particularly in areas of low vaccination rates.”

People are mixing and matching COVID-19 vaccines

Meanwhile, people are using multiple vaccines to stave off infection from the Delta variant, CNBC reported.

Most notably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received Moderna’s vaccine in June despite getting the AstraZeneca vaccine earlier this year. Americans, too, are mixing and matching vaccines, hoping that getting different vaccines (which use different means of stopping the coronavirus) will provide broader protection against newer, more transmissible variants.

Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson executives said they anticipate that Americans will need booster shots, despite the CDC saying that it’s not necessary just yet.