West Virginia governor warns of ‘terrible, terrible carnage’ as US passes 40 million Covid cases

New cases are climbing back towards their all-time peaks from over the winter

The US has a case of long Covid, having now topped more than 40 million known cases, more than the population of the whole state of California. Leaders across the country — and the political spectrum — are urging people to get vaccinated to stop what one governor called “terrible, terrible carnage.”

“We’ve got a really big time situation in West Virginia. Rights or no rights, you need to really get vaccinated. You need to give to your neighbours, I know you’re loving, caring people. We’ve got to do this,” West Virginia governor Jim Justice said on Monday, after reading the names of state residents who had died in recent days. “We can stop a lot of this terrible, terrible, terrible carnage.”

His state has the third highest rate of Covid per capita, at 85 people per 100,000, and cases have shot up 63 per cent in the last two weeks.

The Republican governor, who has left mask mandates to local officials, warned, “We’ve got more bad days to come. There’s nothing else we have,” besides vaccination.

The situation across the country is dire. The highly contagious Delta variant, lagging vaccination, and a patchwork of different public health responses has meant that cases are climbing back up towards their all-time peaks, set over the winter, even though now vaccines are widely available.

Last week, the US was averaging 161,000 cases a day, levels not seen since the tail end of the deadly winter Covid surge, when cases reached a record of nearly 260,000 at their peak.

Just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, and vaccination rates have crept up to 950,000 doses a day, from their low of roughly 500,000 in July. The rate of people getting the jab is still lower than it was in the spring.

The highly contagious Delta variant and unvaccinated people are driving this latest outbreak, and those who haven’t gotten the vaccine have been the most likely to be seriously harmed, hospitalised, or killed by Covid in recent days.

States in the US South like South Carolina and Florida have been particularly hard hit, as have rural areas throughout the country. Some medical commentators have noted that if Florida was another country, given its high Covid rates, the US would likely ban travellers from it.

The persistence of Covid has once again put strains on battered healthcare systems. In Idaho, the state has had to activate crisis levels of care in the the north of the state, since there aren’t enough health resources available.

“I wish everyone could have seen what I saw in the ICU last night,” Republican governor Brad Little said last week, urging residents to get vaccinated.

Despite the clear resurgence of the virus, states like Florida have held fast to a hands-off approach to Covid, battling school boards and local officials who’ve sought to impose mask and vaccine requirements.