Vaccination Sites Close In DFW Even As COVID-19 Cases Spike

DALLAS, TX — No one can tell you that you must get vaccinated against COVID-19. But here's what will happen if you don't: More people will die because the delta variant of COVID-19 will kill them.

And that's a tragedy when the people getting sick will do so in a post-vaccine environment.

That number includes infected younger folks once thought to be less at risk than older people and infected kids under 12 who are still not eligible for vaccination. But too many of the new patients are denialists and those who hesitated because they worried about the side effects of immunization.

Places like Fair Park are closing their doors because so few people are walking through them. What is happening is fueling a resurgence of coronavirus-related sickness, hospitalization, and soon there will be the inevitable spike in deaths that always follows.

This time, it will largely be unnecessary.

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As long as people —even vaccinated ones — can get and pass the coronavirus, COVID-19 will have a foothold in the community. But study after study has shown that mortality drops off by as much as 96 percent for those who have been immunized by either the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

While there have been complications and side effects from the vaccines, the vast majority of those inoculated have done just fine and are at lower risk of illness and serious outcomes that could include death.

The protection offered by all vaccines includes that against the now-widespread delta variant. But a portion of the population still resists being vaccinated: The audience actually cheered last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference when it learned that President Joe Biden's goal of inoculations was falling short. Because of this, the virus survives in the community and will continue to mutate.

Eventually, it's a scientific probability that the current vaccines will lose power to fight it, and the country will be right back where it was a year ago, only worse, since we will have created a more virulent version of the coronavirus.

Every few days for a while now, there's been a Patch story explaining how scientists and health workers in the DFW area worry that the virus will mutate beyond the vaccine's ability to fight it before the metroplex reaches herd immunity.

Two weeks ago, the nonprofit Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation announced that the city surpassed the threshold for herd immunity at 80 percent on July 4. But their numbers are rubbish. The organization counted 48.7 percent of the area as having natural immunity because they'd recovered from a COVID-19 illness. But no one knows how long natural immunity lasts.

Only 46.6 percent of the population has been vaccinated, and that's far below the 70 percent minimum level for herd immunity.

The very fact that cases are climbing across the metroplex lends credence to that argument. And soon, there will be a group of people who don't care about your health, coughing and sneezing and helping to breed a supercharged version of the delta variant, which as already been described by scientists as "COVID on steroids."

No one believes Gov. Greg Abbott would dare institute another mask mandate, considering the political consequences of having done so last year.

So you're reading it here in the plainest of English: If you don't want to get sick or die, or get someone else sick and potentially kill them, you need to get vaccinated. Yesterday would have been better than today, and today is better than tomorrow.

The alternative is that more Texans will die, and this time, the virus won't be to blame.

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