As the United States passes a rather inglorious milestone of one year of COVID-19 health restrictions and lockdown measures, some good news did come on the possibility of ending the pandemic in the months ahead. While new cases are still occurring and people continue to die from coronavirus, in many places the case counts are dwarfed by increasing numbers of reported vaccinations.
The US now has three different proven, safe COVID-19 vaccines: one from Moderna, another two-shot treatment from Pfizer and a third one-shot treatment from Johnson + Johnson. In recent weeks, as supplies of those three are distributed across the country, the number of vaccinations has increased dramatically and sparked considerable hope that the pandemic’s impact on life in America is reduced and soon eliminated altogether.
Saturday brought even more good news: nationwide reporting of vaccinations set a new record, with more than 4 million shots reported in a single day.
It’s not exactly clear what’s driving the record number. J&J’s new shot certainly contributed. But that doesn’t account for everything—*cumulative* J&J vaccinations are up to 1.19 million. Not every state set a new vaccinations record—but a lot did 2/ pic.twitter.com/TDJMImMbWU
— Tom Randall (@tsrandall) March 13, 2021
The number of global vaccinations has also been
. Today’s numbers would be a less impressive if you backed out the U.S., but it’s still in line with several weeks of exponential expansion of the global campaign 4/ pic.twitter.com/Crx3w8L2EM
— Tom Randall (@tsrandall) March 13, 2021
The numbers are staggering but as some pointed out, some of those reported numbers came from earlier in the week as reporting in some cases has lagged.
Due to a delay in data syncing on March 13, 2021, 4,575,496 new doses administered were reported; however, only 2,977,732 of those doses were reported as of March 13 at 6:00 AM ET (the regular cutoff time for daily reporting). The remainder were reported after 6:00 AM ET
— Cyrus Shahpar (@cyrusshahpar46) March 14, 2021
Just to be clear this caused by a reporting change. Still, the apples to apples number for the day is 3 million, which is still a record and very encouraging.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) March 14, 2021
But as more people are vaccinated, those given the jab continue to be safe and practice good masking and social distancing, and eligibility restrictions loosen as more doses become available, the country is slowly moving toward the herd immunity necessary to finally loosen the deadly disease’s grasp on American citizens.