| For millions of Americans, this was a week where everything changed. Again. And not for the better. What President Joe Biden promised would be a "summer of joy" as the U.S. emerged from the coronavirus pandemic was now looking like a summer of confusion, retrenchment and despair. Mask guidance changed yet again, local governments practically begged their residents to get vaccinated, education officials scrambled to avoid chaos as the back-to-school season neared, Pfizer warned of a possible need for booster shots, and big companies like Google delayed their return to offices. We got a hint of what was to come on Sunday, when Biden's chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, hit the talk shows to warn that the U.S. was moving in the wrong direction in combating the highly transmissible delta variant. Based on modeling, the U.S. faces a worst-case scenario of daily deaths reaching the winter peak of 4,000, he said.
Two days later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once again changed its guidance for wearing masks, telling vaccinated people they should return to using face coverings in places of high transmission, which is pretty much every major U.S. city and many states. The reason: New data suggest that some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant can transmit the virus to others.  Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC. Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times/Bloomberg The about-face — the CDC had told vaccinated Americans in May they didn't need to wear masks — opened a predictable political fault line, with Republican leaders in states like Florida and Missouri vowing to ignore the new guidelines while California and companies like Apple embraced them.
This week we also learned just how good the pandemic has been for Pfizer, whose vaccine it makes in partnership with BioNTech is on pace to become one of the best-selling medicines of all time. The drugmaker also said rather ominously that emerging real-word data "suggests immunity against infection and symptomatic disease may wane," underscoring the need for boosters.
If there was a silver lining, it was data that showed the most vaccine-resistant parts of the U.S. are now leading the country in the number of people getting a first dose.
"We've seen our daily new administrations double, and this week they're on pace to triple or quadruple," says Joseph Kanter, state health officer for Louisiana, which has one of the worst vaccination rates in the nation.
It was a rare bright spot in an otherwise dreadful week. We're keeping our fingers crossed about the next one.—Mark Schoifet | 
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