[jyl]

No, this won't last very long.

The new case and hospitalization rates are rising very fast, and when you look at the charts, consider that the bulk of those new cases and especially new hospitalizations are in the roughly 1/3 (nationwide) of Americans who are unvaccinated, meaning that if we had charts of new cases/hospitalizations among the unvaxed, they would be rising even faster.

I think the Delta variant will move through the unvaccinated rather quickly - not in a few weeks, but in a couple-few months. And then this surge will fade, leaving a substantial number of unvaxed among the deceased, a larger number with serious long-term health issues, many more with a certain level of acquired immune protection, and hopefully many with the vaccinations that they didn't get before.

Then we'll have to see what new variants bring, and to what extent a future variant may evade the acquired immunity that one gets from having had the current variant. Ultimately, the biopharma companies can modify their vaccines to address new variants, but if enough Americans keep refusing to be vaccinated, then we will keep going through this.

If that happens, there are some solutions, but they won't be easy ones.