The United States reported 100,000 COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, a six-month high. The rise is being attributed to the Delta variant that has ravaged the country in the last month. Seven states with the lowest vaccination rates – Florida, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi – account for half of the country’s new cases and hospitalizations in the last week, White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters on Thursday.

The seven-day average of daily cases in the US reached nearly 95,000, a five-fold increase in less than a month, Reuters data on Wednesday showed.

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“We’re seeing terrifying #COVID19 trends in our hospitals. At this point if you’re unvaccinated by choice, you’re complicit in this crisis,”  Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo wrote on Twitter.

This data comes as Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top advisor on US health care issues, said that the country might get its own variant of COVID-19 if the community spread of the virus is not curtailed.  

“People who say, ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated because it’s me and I’ll worry about me, I’m not having any impact on anybody else,’ that’s just not the case”, Fauci said, according to reports from ABC News.

He had announced that the US government will supply booster shots to Americans with compromised immune systems. Fauci had earlier warned that cases could double to 200,000 per day due to the variant in the coming weeks.

Amidst the crisis, Florida has come up as the most affected state. The sunshine state set yet another grim hospitalization record on Thursday with 12,373 beds occupied by COVID-19 patients, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More children are hospitalized with the virus in Florida than in any other state, Reuters reported. 

Other states grappling with a large number of coronavirus patients occupying beds are Louisiana and Arkansas. Virginia, New York and California on the other hand have mandated vaccines or weekly testing for all state employees.