I recently had an epiphany about the Delta variant. Originally I was happy with the data showing that the mRNA vaccines still provide a 93% reduction in hospitalizations against Delta. For vaccinated people, it puts Delta closer to other flu viruses in terms of the risk of hospitalization or death. However, I realized that because Delta spreads so easily, it's going to give a large fraction of the country the same infection at the same time, and that stands a good chance of overwhelming the medical system, which makes it far more dangerous to get sick or hurt in general.
Thus even if you are individually at reduced risk for serious consequences from Delta because you're vaccinated, society is still collectively at risk, and you don't want to get Delta at the same time that everyone else is getting Delta.
This will be especially true in areas of the US that are less vaccinated; their caseload will go up very quickly, and hospitals will fill up more quickly there as well. The Delta variant has much higher viral loads than the original COVID and is at least as deadly, so being unvaccinated when Delta shows up is really bad.
With the rate at which Delta spreads, caseload in the US will probably go up 20x in the next two months. This has happened already in the UK.
The consequences will depend a lot on vaccination rates, as the graph below shows. Countries with high vaccination rates don't see their explosion of cases turn into an explosion of deaths.
Now's the time to convince any unvaccinated people you know to go out and get vaccinated. Since the vaccine takes 4-5 weeks from the first shot to be fully effective, if someone decides to get vaccinated today, caseload will already be up ~5x by the time they're protected. It's linear time fighting exponential growth, and linear always loses.
Unfortunately, the expected rapid run-up in cases and associated hospitalizations means we're still going to have to take measures to "flatten the curve" again, even if it won't be nearly as bad as last time for well-vaccinated areas.
The easiest solution is to just vaccinate everyone, especially everyone who has not had COVID already. France decided to essentially make vaccination mandatory for access to public transit, restaurants, and other places a couple of days ago, and it has led to a large increase in vaccination rates, but also massive protests. That's almost certainly politically untenable in the US, so instead we'll see the less-vaccinated areas overwhelm their medical systems and have to put other measures in place.
I'm personally still going to unmasked indoor events among my fully vaccinated friend group, but I'm starting to mask up again in crowded public indoor spaces. I'm also skipping out on events if I feel sick with anything. Doing so is easy, and it at least slows down case growth.