A health expert is warning that the U.S. needs to 'do something dramatic' to stop the rapid spread of COVID-19 cases across the country.
On Thursday, the U.S. recorded 28,412 new cases with a seven-day rolling average of 26,079, a 135 percent increase from the 11,067 average recorded two weeks ago.
Nearly every state - aside from Florida - and the District of Columbia have seen infections rise in the last week, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
What's more, about 40 states have seen their infection rates increase by at least 50 percent with some of the biggest rises seen in hotspots such as Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri.
Officials blame a mix of low vaccination rates and the spread of the Indian 'Delta' variant, which now makes up about 60 percent of all new cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
'We're seeing this because the public misunderstood the CDC guidance for fully vaccinated people as "We can now do whatever we want. Even if we are unvaccinated, we can now behave as if we are vaccinated,"' Dr Leana Wen, a visiting professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
Her comments come as CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. is becoming 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated.'
She said that the majority of coronavirus cases, hospitalization and deaths are now occurring among people who haven't gotten two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
It's unclear how many of these have occurred in Americans who haven't completed their vaccine series.
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The U.S. recorded 28,412 new cases with a seven-day rolling average of 26,079, a 135% increase from the 11,067 average recorded two weeks ago
Nearly every state - aside from Florida - and the District of Columbia have seen infections rise in the last week
CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said the virus is becoming 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated' during a press conference on Friday
Missouri continues to be one of the nation's COVID-19 epicenters with average cases rising by 83 percent from 1,029 per day to 1,892 per day in the last two weeks.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the state's vaccination rate is behind the national average with 46 percent of residents having received received at least one dose, and 40 percent fully vaccinated.
Comparatively, 55.8 percent of the U.S. has received at least one dose and 48.3 percent are fully vaccinated.
Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently admitted that the federal health agency is more concerned about Missouri than any other state
'When I look at the map Missouri actually jumps out as the place that I'm most worried about because there's a lot of cases now happening very rapidly,' he told McClatchy.
'The chances of getting infected in Missouri are getting really high and that means potentially serious illness or even death.'
The outbreak
