Our picks: COVID-19 responseDelta Variant Upends World’s Pandemic Response | What We’ve Learned from COVID-19 | Australia: The Cost of Zero Covid

The Delta Variant Upends the World’s Pandemic Response  (Jason Douglas and Gabriele Steinhauser, Wall Street Journal)
The strain’s fast transmissibility means higher Covid-19 vaccination rates are needed to contain it.
The variant’s ability to spread more easily than previous dominant versions of the virus has driven rapidly rising Covid-19 caseloads even in highly vaccinated countries such as the U.K. and Israel. There, the vaccines have suppressed serious illness and deaths. But, in many parts of the rest of the world, the pandemic that has already sickened at least 200 million people and killed more than four million is intensifying.
The good news that vaccines are highly effective against Delta at preventing severe illness and death in those fully inoculated is a vindication of governments’ bold bets on the shots as the surest way back to normalcy.

U.S. Is Split Between the Vaccinated and Unvaccinated – and Deaths and Hospitalizations Reflect This Divide  (Rodney E. Rohde and Ryan McNamara, The Conversation)
We are two researchers who work in public health and study immunity, viruses and other microbes. Since the start of the pandemic, public health experts have been concerned about what might happen if large sections of the U.S. population, for whatever reason, did not get vaccinated. Over the past few weeks, the answer to that question is starting to emerge.
As long as SARS-CoV-2 is circulating in the U.S., unvaccinated people will continue to experience the full, dangerous clinical effects of COVID–19. But in addition, while the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, it will also continue spreading at a low level to vaccinated individuals. Though most of those infections will not progress to severe COVID-19, according to the CDC, as of mid-July more than 5,000 vaccinated people, mostly over 65 years old, had been hospitalized and 1,000 had died. These numbers are of course sad, but they pale in comparison to hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated population.
The vaccines are doing exactly what they were designed to do: prevent severe COVID-19 with amazing efficiency. With vaccines free and widely available, for most people in the U.S. it is a choice: Do you want to be part of the unvaccinated America or the vaccinated one?

Vaccine Passports Are a Step on the Road to Hell  (Tim Stanley, The Telegraph)
We may criticize China for its social credit system, but we too are on the way to big state surveillance.