US nears 200M vaccinated
The United States is steadily chipping away at vaccine hesitancy and driving down COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations to the point that schools, governments and corporations are lifting mask restrictions yet again.
Nearly 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated and the nation’s over-65 population, which bore the brunt of the pandemic when it started nearly two years ago, is enthusiastically embracing vaccines.
Nearly 98 percent of the over-65 population has received at least one COVID-19 shot and more than 25 per- cent of them have gotten boosters, just weeks after they were authorized. The improving metrics could get a boost from President Joe Biden’s workplace mandate unveiled Thursday and the launch of COVID-19 shots in elementary-age students.
Seniors also are playing a role in getting other family members vaccinated. Erin Lipsker plans to get her 8-yearold daughter and 5-year-old son vaccinated as soon as possible so they can see her parents and her 98-year-old grandmother. An added motivation is that Lipsker was treated for cancer two years ago, and her 8-year-old daughter, Kennedy, has asthma.
“The more children and adults are vaccinated, the quicker we will be able to resume a new normal. I want that for my kids. I want that for our planet,” said Lipsker, of Spokane, Wash. “I think I will feel much safer around our family. I have a 98-yearold grandmother that my kids adore. I will feel safer having my kids around her, and my parents.”
But the pandemic has proven hard to control. In the U.S., winter is coming and diseases like COVID-19 often spread easier with people
indoors and closer together. The worst surge in the nation happened last winter, before the vaccines were widely available.
While cases around the world are declining, the World Health Organization said this week new cases jumped by 6 percent in Europe, compared with an 18 percent increase the previous week. The U.S. plans to open its borders to international travelers Monday.
The trends in the U.S. have health officials feeling better for the first time in months and hoping the progress will continue as long as a new variant doesn’t pop up or the rate of newly vaccinated people declines. But they have also been down this road before and have come to the conclusion that COVID-19 is going to be an issue for years to come.
“It is going to be endemic. It is going to exist in our population for a long period of time,” said Deborah Fuller, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington. “You saw what looked like an inflection point coming and, boom, here came the delta variant.”
The number of Americans in the hospital with COVID-19 is averaging around 42,000, the lowest number since the beginning of August, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hospitalization dip matches a dip in overall cases.
But deaths, which lag behind increasing case counts because it can take weeks for the disease to kill, continue to mount. The U.S. is averaging 1,100 coronavirus deaths per day, down from more than 1,600 two weeks ago.
More than 750,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. in less than two years, about the population of Denver. The latest 50,000 deaths happened in the past month.
With hospital beds emptying, case counts declining and an increase in vaccinated people, however, it has been a slow return to a new normal. Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards last week ended a face covering requirement almost everywhere but schools, saying he was “optimistic, relieved that the worst of the fourth surge is very clearly behind us now.”
Memphis also ended its mask requirement, and so did a number of schools around Atlanta as the spread of the virus decreased. Amazon ended a mask mandate for most vaccinated workers in places where local or state rules don’t require them. Hawaii’s governor ended pandemic capacity limits on businesses like restaurants, bars and gyms, but owners must continue to enforce social distancing rules.
Color-coded virus maps that were a sea of red in September have started to turn yellow and blue in recent weeks, indicating a much slower spread of disease. The CDC says about 350 counties are now experiencing moderate or low transmission, many of them in the Deep South.