More than three months after vaccination in the United States, many of the numbers show an increasingly encouraging picture, with 70% of Americans age 65 and older receiving at least one dose of the vaccine and deaths from COVID- 19 have fallen below 1,000 a day on average for the first time since November.
In addition, dozens of states have opened vaccines to all adults or plan to do so in a matter of weeks. And the White House said 27 million doses of both single-shot and two-shot vaccines will be distributed next week, more than the triple that President Joe Biden took office two months ago.
Still, Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Wednesday he was not ready to declare victory.
“I’m often asked, are we turning the corner?” Fauci said at a White House briefing. “My answer is really more like we’re around the corner. It remains to be seen whether or not we will turn this corner.
What makes Fauci pause, he said, is that new cases remain at a stubbornly high level, at more than 50,000 per day. According to the data, the US surpassed 30 million confirmed cases on Wednesday collected by Johns Hopkins University. Now the death toll stands at more than 545,000.
However, the outlook in the United States contrasts with the deteriorating situation in places like Brazil, which on Tuesday reported more than 3,000 deaths from COVID-19 in a single day and across Europe, where another wave of infections is leading to new blockades.
The gloom in Europe is exacerbated because the deployment of vaccines on the continent has been slowed by production delays and questions about the safety and effectiveness of AstraZeneca shooting.
U.S. public health experts take every opportunity to warn that easing social distancing and other preventative measures can easily lead to another increase.
Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translation Institute, sees red flags in the states lifting mask warrants, air travel back and out of the holiday control crowds out of Florida.
“We’re getting closer to the exit ramp,” Topol said. “All we have to do to reopen is to jeopardize our shot to finally achieve, for the first time in the American pandemic, the containment of the virus.”
Across the country there are unmistakable signs of progress.
According to the CDC, more than 43% of Americans age 65 and older, the most vulnerable age group, which accounts for a huge proportion of the nation’s more than 540,000 coronavirus deaths, have been completely vaccinated. The number of older adults presenting to the emergency department with COVID-19 has dropped significantly. Vaccines in general have increased from 2.5 to 3 million shots a day.
Daily deaths in the U.S. for COVID-19 have dropped to an average of 940, below the all-time high of more than 3,400 in mid-January.
Minnesota health officials reported Monday that no new deaths from COVID-19 occurred for the first time in nearly a year. And in New Orleans, the Touro Nursing Hospital did not treat any cases for the first time since March 2020.
And Fauci cited two recent studies showing negligible levels of coronavirus infections among fully vaccinated health workers in Texas and California.
“I stress how we should stay there for a while longer,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday. This is because “the first data is really encouraging.”
Nationally, new cases and the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 have plummeted over the past two months, although Walensky remains concerned that this progress appears to have stalled in the past two weeks. New cases exceed an average of 53,000 daily, down from a maximum of a quarter of a million in early January.
It is uncomfortable, approximately, at the levels observed during the COVID-19 wave last summer.
Biden has pushed for states to make it possible for all adults to be vaccinated before May 1st. At least half a dozen states, including Texas, Arizona and Georgia, open vaccines to everyone over the age of 16. At least another 20 states have pledged to do so in the coming weeks.
Microsoft, which employs more than 50,000 people at its global headquarters in Seattle, on the outskirts, has said it will begin reclaiming workers on March 29 and reopen facilities that have been closed for nearly a year.
New York City’s 80,000 municipal employees, who have been working remotely during the pandemic, will return to their offices starting May 3rd.
Still, experts see cause for concern as more Americans begin to travel and socialize again.
The number of daily commuters at U.S. airports has steadily exceeded one million over the past week and a half amid spring break at many colleges.
In addition, states like Michigan and New Jersey are seeing cases on the rise.
National numbers are an imperfect indicator. The downward trend in some states may obscure an increase in the number of cases in others, especially in smaller ones, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. .
And the most contagious variant that originated in Britain has now been identified in almost every state, he said.
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AP journalists Terry Tang and Suman Naishadham contributed from Phoenix. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed from Washington.