mou mountain communities and shelters who are coming here, donating their time and compassion to these evacuees. it s so important, the volunteer element. keep that in mind when looking at how to help out west. i appreciate your time. thank you very much for sharing that context. for more information on how to help the wildfire victims, visit cnn.com/impact. still to come, a new warning from dr. anthony fauci. get vaccinated or a new variant could be even worse than delta and could be on the way. [relaxed summer themed music playing]
the u.s. is now averaging more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day. for context, we have not seen numbers this high since february according to data from johns hopkins. this comes after new infections sank just seven weeks ago. it s the delta variant that s fuelling the surge in cases and hospitalizations and death. almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. dr. fauci says as long as we remain unvaccinated, future variants could come. but if you give the virus a chance to continue to change, you re leading to a vulnerability that we might get a worse variant and then that will impact not only the unvaccinated, that will impact the vaccinated because that variant could evade the protection of the vaccine. joining me now to discuss is the senior director of the special pathogen program at nyc
if you re unwilling to get vaccinated and you re spreading this virus, it fills up hospitals and takes a bed away for people who are a heart attack or stroke or have another need. it can cause death in ways that aren t directly related to covid. then my other piece is about the economic resurgence. we have an economy on fire in kentucky. 1800 new jobs in the last two weeks. the only thing that s going to keep us from reaching a bigger potential than i ever knew was possible is if we can t combat this variant. masks are not a big thing to ask people to do. to save one another s lives or to ultimately help us become something economically that we ve never been able to reach. never, ever to be a flyover state again to be able to take our place in a post covid economy. so a mask, it s not that much to ask and we need to make sure that people aren t tired anymore. i think about our grandparents and great grandparents, who were asked to fight, some of them, in world war i and world war ii.
probably a few more weeks out from the peek of the current surge we re in. to what may be coming, at this point in time, everybody s focused on delta, but experts are closely following the lambda variant, which has been identified in the states. a variant not nearly as worrisome as delta, but studies suggest it could be more transmissible than the original strain of coronavirus. does the fact there are so many different variants emerging mean that covid-19 is basically here to stay and we re just going to have to learn to live with it? so i do think when i look at the end game of what is this going to look like down the line, we know this is not something we re going to, you know, have to, we have to constantly wear masks forever, the answer is no. the end game is a, get as many people vaccinated, but we want to transition into this virus being endemic like the flu.
has become. and going home with gold. the olympic flame extinguished in tokyo. how american athletes, especially american women, stole the show. i m phil mattingly in washington in for fredricka whitfield. right now, the covid pandemic is surging in the u.s. and shows no signs of slowing down. to know how bad it is, all you have to do is look at the numbers. the average number of daily cases has increased nine fold since july, the delta variant fuelling this rise in cases and overwhelming hospitals in many states. hospital even more troubling is how this variant is affecting children. childhood and teen cases have jumped 84% in the past week.