Here's some good news about the pandemic.

At the peak of the Delta surge, the US was seeing around 150,000 new cases of the coronavirus

each day.

That was about two months ago.

But this past week?

The seven-day daily average of cases was about 73,000 cases per day, which represents a decrease

of about 15 percent over the previous week.

CDC director Rachelle Wollensky said Friday, hospital admissions were also down 10 percent,

and the number of people dying each day, still around 1200, is down from a Delta peak of

around 1800.

Those are all good trends for the nation's most important COVID metrics.

But there is another number that public health officials are still worried about.

Currently, around 64 million Americans remain unvaccinated, leaving themselves and their

children, their families, their loved ones, and communities vulnerable.

It's like Alabama, West Virginia, and Wyoming have some of the lowest vaccination rates

in the country, with barely 40 percent of their populations fully protected.

And in those places, the virus is still spreading pretty quickly.

I think we have to be very careful.

Here's what epidemiologists Selene Gounder told NPR this week.

Yes, things are trending in the right direction, but we're far from being on the other side

of this.

That's because we know from past experience that when trend lines look good, people tend

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