US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that COVID deaths in the United States will continue to rise due to the spread of the “dangerous” delta variant, calling it a “serious concern,” NBC News reported.
“Six-hundred-thousand-plus Americans have died, and with this delta variant you know there’s going to be others as well. You know it’s going to happen, we’ve got to get young people vaccinated,” Biden said at a community center in Raleigh, N.C.
The variant, Biden said, is more easily transmissible and potentially deadly, “and especially dangerous for young people.”
He warned that Americans who are still unvaccinated are especially at risk.
“The data couldn’t be clearer, if you’re vaccinated, you’re safe,” Biden said. “You are still at risk of getting seriously ill or dying if you in fact have not been vaccinated, that’s just the fact.”
The delta variant now accounts for at least 20% of all new COVID cases in the US, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
The agency has designated the more transmissible variant a “variant of concern.”
Biden had set a goal of administering one or more doses of a COVID vaccine to 70 percent of US adults by July 4, but White House COVID response team coordinator Jeffrey Zients conceded this week that goal will not be reached.
The death toll in the US from COVID-19 surpassed 600,000 people last Tuesday.
In late February, the US became the first country to surpass a half-million coronavirus deaths. That it has taken more than three months to reach 600,000 deaths is a testament to the slowing pandemic, as it took just a month for the US to jump from 300,000 to 400,000 COVID-19 deaths.
The rate of severe illness and death has fallen dramatically as more and more people get vaccinated, but hundreds of people are still dying daily.