More than half of American adults have now had at least the first dose of coronavirus vaccine and there are promising signs that the shots are working: the daily average of plummeting over the past week.
The seven-day average death toll has dropped a quarter to 737 compared to seven days ago, when 987 people die every day. There were 477 deaths on Monday, according to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University DailyMail.com.
However, the average daily death toll has risen slightly this week, 0.4% more than last week according to data from Johns Hopkins and 2% more according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases (CDC) as of Monday.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday that there had been six consecutive days of increased fatalities.
Cases have risen in at least 17 U.S. states in the past two weeks, according to follow-up by DataUSA.io.
States like Michigan, where more than 50 per cent of cases are caused by the UK variant, see cases increase, while Texas, fully reopened, with only 42 per cent of cases caused by the variant, continues to decline.
Texas has seen continuous declines in the number of daily cases of Covid-19, despite total reopening. Cases have fallen by around 12% in the last two weeks
Meanwhile, cases nearly tripled in Michigan this month (though they are now declining), although it kept the capacity limit of restaurants. One expert says the UK variant, which accounts for more than 55% of state cases, is to blame
States like Michigan, where more than 50 per cent of cases are caused by the UK variant, see cases increase, while Texas, fully reopened, with only 42 per cent of cases caused by the variant, continues to decline
Daily hospital admissions for COVID-19 are also declining, with a seven-day rotating average dropping nearly three percent compared to last week, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show.
However, new daily infections are rising nationwide, about six percent from last week, to more than 68,000 a day, including the 67,933 recorded yesterday.
‘I want to acknowledge that we are still in a complicated stage [of the pandemic]”Dr. Walensky said during a press meeting of the White House Covid response team on Monday.
“On the one hand, more people are being vaccinated every day in the United States at an accelerated rate. On the other hand, cases and hospitalizations are increasing in some areas of the country and also increasing the cases of younger people, who are still ‘they vaccinated.
Divergent trends are, in fact, driven by the dominant variant of the UK, which is the most common in Tennessee, Michigan and Minnesota, and which has seen an increase in daily infection over the past 14 days.
Meanwhile, Texas has seen its daily average of cases decrease by 12% over the same time period.
This meets the expectations of public health experts, if only reopenings lead to upward trends in cases.
Both Michigan and Texas lifted Covid’s restrictions last month. In fact, Texas lifted more of its restrictions and did so before Michigan, which still has a statewide mask mandate and a 50 percent capacity limit for eating indoors.
Still, Texas “is doing much better than might be expected in this circumstance,” Dr. Barry Bloom, a professor of public health and immunology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told the Wall Street Journal.
“I guess it would be more of the strain spreading rapidly in Michigan.”
Michigan has one of the highest variant rates in the country, only after Tennessee.
It is estimated that 58% of Covid cases are caused by the most infectious (and probably deadliest) variant B117, which arose in the UK, according to CDC data.
In Tennessee, about 61 percent of cases are caused by the variant.
And Minnesota is a close third, with B117 causing about 56% of infections.
Texas is not too low on this list, reaching sixth place with 43 percent of its infections caused by the variant.
But this is a difference of about 26% compared to the prevalence of the variant in Michigan, and this may be enough to drive case trends in opposite directions to the two states.
Encouragingly, the tide may be changing in Michigan as well, although the federal government has denied requests from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and public health experts to increase the supply of vaccines to the state.
For her part, Governor Whitmer also refused to reinstate further restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19 in her state, despite calls from Dr. Anthony Fauci to do so.
After nearly tripling in a month to the last peak of an average of 7,870 daily cases on April 10, daily infections are now down 18%, to 6,458 a day in Michigan.
Other states with high prevalences of variant B117 are also not affected.
In Tennessee, which has the highest rate of cases due to the UK variant in the nation, new average daily infections have risen nearly 40%, to 1,682 a day.
Still, the race between vaccines and variants continues.
States like Michigan and Tennessee will need to start getting vaccinated faster if they want to overcome variants that interfere with their progress toward herd immunity and lead to accelerated spread of the virus.