Avera Medical Group Vice President David Basel speaks at a municipal COVID-19 briefing in Sioux Falls on December 14, 2020.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO.com) — Mass vaccinations are essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic, a top doctor at Avera Medical Group says.
“The only path out of the pandemic is to get 70, 80 percent of the population vaccinated,” Dr. David Basel, Avera’s vice president for clinical quality, said on a conference call with reporters.
Basel added that waiting for everyone to contract the virus would be far too deadly to warrant consideration. He estimated about 15% of people have contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, a number that has put serious strain on hospital systems.
“Waiting for 75, 80 percent of the population to get infected, that’s just going to be unfathomable how many people are going to have to die to get us to that level,” Basel said.
Avera and other major hospitals in Sioux Falls have already started distributing doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to their workers, who are first in line to receive the shots under South Dakota’s vaccine plan. A second vaccine, from Moderna, got a green light from a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday and is expected to be approved soon.
(Jerry Oster, WNAX, contributed to this report.)
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