Unvaccinated people are still at risk as the US celebrates Memorial Day weekend maskless

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Sun, 2021-05-30 13:35 — mike kraft

Unvaccinated people are still at risk as the US celebrates Memorial Day weekend maskless A maskless Memorial Day weekend is a huge deal. People are traveling, Covid-19 cases are down across most of the country and vaccines have made their way into millions of arms. Aya Elamroussi, CNN CNN

(CNN) A maskless Memorial Day weekend is a huge deal. People are traveling, Covid-19 cases are down across most of the country and vaccines have made their way into millions of arms.

And while glimpses of normalcy are exciting to see, one health expert is warning that the millions of people who have not been vaccinated may pose high risks to each other.

Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst, said people who are fully vaccinated and are generally healthy "should feel very well protected."

But she offered a more critical insight on those who are not.

"Those who remain at risk are those who are unvaccinated," Wen told CNN on Saturday. "And that includes children who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated as well as adults who just have not been vaccinated yet."

She added that even though 40% of the country is fully vaccinated, the risk remains high because a large portion of the population still hasn't been inoculated. While the number of new Covid-19 cases have dropped significantly, that also means "the virus has fewer places to go."

"And so those people who are unvaccinated are now still at high risk because we do have more transmissible variants, and unfortunately those individuals who don't have immunity are not protected from these variants that can wreak a lot of havoc," Wen explained.

As of Saturday, more than 167 million people in the US -- 50% of the total population -- have received at least one vaccine dose, and more than 134 million people are fully vaccinated, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.

The current 7-day average of daily new cases in the US is 21,627, a more than 22% decrease from the previous week, according to the CDC. ...

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