One in five COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks has been detected in Florida, a White House adviser said Thursday.
Jeff Zients, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, said the Sunshine State accounted for around 20 percent of the entire country’s new confirmed cases.
“For the second week in a row, one in five of all cases occurring in Florida alone — and within communities, these cases are primarily among unvaccinated people,” Zients said at a press briefing.
Meanwhile, around 40 percent of new infections this week came from just three states — Florida, Texas and Missouri, Zients said.
Currently, around 47 percent of people in Florida are fully vaccinated against the virus — lower than the national average of nearly 49 percent, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Meanwhile, Texas and Missouri have only fully vaccinated around 43 percent and 40 percent of their populations, respectively, the data shows.
“Importantly states with the highest case rate are actually seeing their vaccine vaccination rates go up,” Zients said, adding that Florida had a higher vaccination rate last week than the national average.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday said the seven-day average of new cases in the US was up 53 percent over the previous week — with the Delta variant comprising around 83 percent of infections nationwide.
“It is clear that we’re experiencing what many other countries are experiencing — increased case counts driven by the more transmissible Delta variant,” Zients said.
But Zients stressed that vaccines provided sufficient protection against the variant.
“The good news is that current scientific evidence shows that our current vaccines are working as they did in clinical trials, even against the Delta variant,” he said.