Emergency medical technician Lenny Fernandez, medical assistant Rodnay Moore and certified medical assistant Calvin Davis, from left to right, prepare doses of the COVID Pfizer vaccine while Vernon City Department of Health staff used the city’s new mobile clinic to administer COVID-19. vaccinations to about 250 essential food processing workers at Rose & Shore, Inc. on March 17, 2021 in Vernon, California.
Al Seib | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Covid-19 cases are on the rise and hospitalizations have risen in the United States, even as the country set a new record for coronavirus vaccine doses administered on a Saturday.
The U.S. saw a seven-day average of 61,359 new cases of Covid-19 per day on Friday, a 12 percent increase over the past week, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
Daily hospital admissions for coronavirus dropped steadily from January to February, but now hospitalizations are shrinking. The country on Thursday recorded a seven-day average of 4,790 hospital admissions to Covid-19, up 2.6% from a week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I remain deeply concerned about this trajectory,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House briefing on Friday. “We’ve seen cases and hospital admissions go from historic falls to stagnation and increases. We know from previous rises that if we don’t control things now, there’s real potential for the epidemic curve to skyrocket again.”
The rise in cases and the stagnation of hospitalizations are occurring as more and more Americans are vaccinated. More than 3.4 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine were administered on Saturday, according to CDC records. Saturday’s total broke the previous record of most Covid-19 vaccines administered on a set day Friday with 3.37 million doses reported.
The vaccination rate is rising rapidly with an average of seven days on Saturday of more than 2.6 million shots administered daily. According to the CDC, more than 140 million doses of Covid vaccine have been administered in the U.S. since Saturday.
President Joe Biden set a new target on Thursday to administer 200 million coronavirus vaccines in his first 100 days in office.
The push to increase vaccinations comes as highly infectious and potentially deadliest variants of the virus continue to spread to the U.S. White House chief medical officer, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on March 19, said the coronavirus variant first identified in the UK would likely account for 30% of covid infections in the US
The new strains are a special concern for public health officials, as they could be more resistant to antibody treatments and vaccines. However, the World Health Organization stated in February that Covid-19 vaccines have been shown to be effective in preventing serious illness and death in those who become infected.
Covid-related deaths in the U.S. have declined. The United States experienced an average of seven days of 992 new coronavirus-related deaths daily on Friday, a 14% drop from a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data.