Health officials across the state are strongly urging those who have not gotten vaccinated against COVID-19 to do so as soon as possible.

“Begging people to take the vaccine while there is still time. If you could see the exhaustion in the eyes of our nurses who keep zipping up body bags, we beg you,” tweeted Steve Edwards, president and CEO of CoxHealth, a six-hospital system based in Springfield.

According to NPR, in Springfield, firefighters are giving vaccine shots. Churches are scrambling to schedule vaccine clinics. Students and staff at summer school at the public schools are back to wearing masks.

Dozens of traveling nurses are due to arrive at one of the city’s two biggest hospitals over the coming weeks; extra ventilators from around Missouri and Arkansas were transported to the other major hospital after it ran short over the Independence Day weekend.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in southwest Missouri and northern Arkansas has become the nation’s largest and is mostly driven by the highly contagious Delta variant. Officials warn it could continue to grow unchecked if vaccination rates stay low.

“We are truly in a very dangerous predicament,” Springfield Mayor Ken McClure said Monday at a press conference. “While we are one of the unfortunate few early hot spots of the Delta variant, we are not giving up. It is not too late. We need to stay the course.”

In Missouri, the seven-day average of new cases is near 1,400 new positive cases each day, up more than 150 percent from a month ago.

According to a local hospital official, “This Delta variant is awful and is knocking on our door. So many people traveling to Branson and Springfield and will bring this back. The time to get vaccinated is now.”

According to the hospital official, Fitzgibbon Hospital in Marshall will be planning a series of walk-in vaccine events in its atrium. More information will be released soon.