The United States on Thursday opened more distance between itself and much of the rest of the world, close to the 200 million vaccine administered in a race of months to protect the population against COVID-19, even while other countries are fighting, rich and poor. with stubbornly high infection rates and deaths.
Nearly half of American adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine and approximately 30% of adults in the U.S. have been completely vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the picture is still relentless in some parts of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, as variants of the virus feed an increase in new cases and the number of deaths worldwide closes at 3 million.
France suffered 100,000 virus deaths on Thursday, becoming only the eighth country to do so.
India’s two largest cities, New Delhi and Mumbai, imposed business shutdowns and strict restrictions on movement while new infections shot up more than 200,000. Some hotels and banquet halls were ordered to turn their space into rooms to treat patients with viruses and the increase forced India, a major vaccine producer, to delay dose exports to other countries.
Japan also experienced a rapid resurgence of infections just three months before the Olympics were scheduled to take place. The country’s western metropolis of Osaka registered more than 1,200 new infections on Thursday, the highest since the pandemic began. A senior ruling party official suggested the possibility of canceling the games if infections make it impossible.
Worrying signs also emerged in the United States, despite the good news that more than 194 million coronavirus shots have been administered nationwide. The seven-day average of daily shots reached 2.9 million last week.
New daily infections in the US have risen 11% in the past two weeks. Many U.S. states have lifted restrictions on business and public meetings. But there are more sick people admitted to hospitals in some states, including Michigan, which leads the nation with nearly 8,000 new infections a day.
In the suburban city of Detroit, Dr. Nick Gilpin of Beaumont Health compared a growing number of coronavirus patients to a “runaway train.” Staff used tents to handle the flow of people seeking emergency care from Michigan’s largest hospital system, which on Thursday cared for more than 800 patients for COVID-19. That happened to about 500 two weeks ago.
“Our COVID-19 numbers are rising faster and faster and it’s very worrying and alarming to see this,” said John Fox, executive director of Beaumont Health, which operates eight hospitals.
Coronavirus patients statewide were close to a record number in Michigan, which had 3,960 people with confirmed infections hospitalized Wednesday.
Although half of American adults are not yet fully vaccinated, some hospitals in Alabama and Missouri reported declining demand for coronavirus shots. Both states are already lagging behind the nation in vaccinating their populations.
In Alabama, only 37% of adults have even received a dose of vaccine. However, Cullman Regional Medical Center, located north of Birmingham, cited the decrease in appointments in a statement announcing that its vaccine clinic was being moved to an urgent care center. The Eastern Alabama Medical Center, near Auburn University, said it was preparing to end its vaccination program in a county where less than 18 percent are fully vaccinated.
“The number of vaccine applications has reached a plan,” hospital spokesman John Atkinson said in a statement.
Missouri health officials say they are also concerned that there are not enough people looking for shots. A large vaccination site operated by the federal level in the center of St. Louis manages less than half of his 3,000-shot capacity a day. A St. Joseph, Missouri, vaccine appointments have slowed, said Dr. David Turner, chief physician at Mosaic Life Care.
“As a medical professional, I’m concerned,” Turner told St. Joseph News-Press. “We would like more people to be vaccinated. Even if they had COVID, we recommend vaccination.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. government reported Thursday that some vaccinated people, as expected, have become ill with coronavirus, although such cases are rare. The CDC said approximately 5,800 of the “advanced” infections have been confirmed. That’s about 75 million Americans who have been completely vaccinated, but the agency warned that notification of such cases is uneven and incomplete.
Serious illness among vaccinated Americans is even rarer, with fewer than 400 hospitalized and 74 dead. As with the flu, people who receive COVID-19 after being vaccinated are more likely to have a milder illness than unvaccinated people, the CDC reported.
More than a third of the world’s deaths have occurred in three countries: the United States, Mexico and Brazil, where more than 1.1 million have died. The virus claims approximately 12,000 lives each day.
The recent decision to suspend the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to preliminary reports of rare blood clots left South Africa unarmed in its battle against an aggressive variant of the coronavirus. South Africa has more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including at least 53,000 deaths, accounting for more than 30% of all confirmed cases in 54 African countries.
Meanwhile, Germany’s health ministry announced that the country on Wednesday administered a national registry of more than 738,000 vaccine shots, although authorities also warned that hospitals were seeing a dramatic increase in coronavirus patients.
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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Associated Press writers Ed White in Detroit, Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama, Mike Stobbe in New York, and Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas, contributed to this report.