THE EDITOR: Masking is important, but vaccinations remain the number one method of lowering hospitalisations.

The World Health Organization (WHO) places a lot of importance on the safety of vaccines and has an advisory committee on vaccine safety. These experts are from all over the world. These vaccines are put through clinical trials to assess their safety and efficacy.

As such, the same thing is happening with children now. The director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, told CNN on Sunday: 'The way you protect children who because of their age cannot yet get vaccinated is to surround the children with fully vaccinated people - be it friends, family, school teachers and personnel in the school'

The question for TT is: Can we really do this since most adults are not fully vaccinated? It is extremely difficult to separate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, especially among friends and loved ones. As of Monday, the number of fully vaccinated people in the country was 413,737 or roughly 34 per cent of the population (probably not counting those who are not registered or regularised). So how are we going to protect our young ones?

We seem to be divided between taking the vaccine and not taking it - and it is a world problem. We probably need a world leader who can guide us in the right direction. In the meantime, I believe the way forward is to trust the science, do your research and listen to the experts - the qualified experts.

In Washington at least 41 per cent of children between the ages of 12 and 15 are fully vaccinated and just under half of the 16-17-year-olds are fully vaccinated. Masking is important, Fauci noted, but vaccination is the number one method of lowering hospitalisations. He warns that tough choices loom about who gets an ICU bed. 'We are perilously close,' he said.

Across the US, almost 80 per cent of ICU beds are in use - almost a third of which are occupied by covid19 patients, according to the US Department of Health and Human Resources. Eight states had more than 90 per cent of their ICU beds occupied - Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada and Kentucky.

A federal medical team is in Kentucky to offer assistance. The governor said 'our situation is dire, we are hit very, very hard but we are going to continue to fight. When you are at war, you don't get to cry about what you can or can't do. You've got to do your very best every day because this is a battle of life over death.'

In Georgia, the emergency department is full. 'Anytime a patient is discharged, we have patients waiting'

There have been 4.8 million cases of covid19 in children since April 2020, according to the American Association of Pediatrics - approximately 15 per cent of all documented cases in the US - and in the last month the number of new weekly cases has surged.

In areas where there are lower vaccination levels, such as Mississippi, where only 37.7 per cent of residents are fully vaccinated, there has been a 29 per cen