Nevada near the bottom in vaccination efficiency

For one day, the disgrace at the Capitol pushed the 10-monthold pandemic down the scroll bar. But it hasn’t really gone anywhere, of course.

U.S. coronavirus deaths reached nearly 4,000 on Wednesday, the highest yet recorded. Nevada also set a record with 60 fatalities that day. Meanwhile, vaccinations continue at a snail’s pace. According to Bloomberg News, the state has distributed fewer than 40,000 of more than 187,000 doses received.

This is unacceptable.

To be fair, Nevada isn’t alone. States across the country have been slow to administer inoculations, sometimes because of bureaucratic inertia, other times because of debate over flawed plans that prioritize healthy young people over the vulnerable elderly (see Megan Mcardle’s analysis on the opposite page).

Yet Nevada lags behind virtually every other state in terms of the percentage of available shots administered, and — at 21.1 percent — it is well below the national average of 28.9 percent. Only Georgia, Alabama, Kansas and Mississippi are worse, according to Bloomberg.

In addition, Nevada has yet to finalize its “revision” of the CDC guidelines regarding vaccine priority. Why not? It’s been weeks since the agency issued updates. In addition, there’s nothing to stop Gov. Steve Sisolak from exerting his authority and moving all seniors to the front of the line. Instead, the death toll rises while officials dither.

On Wednesday, the Southern Nevada Health District took a baby step in that direction, announcing it would soon begin a “mass” vaccination program featuring four or five dispensing locations capable of inoculating up to 1,000 people per day.

“Most of the vaccine was received in the last two weeks,” Dr. Fermin Leguen of the health district told the Review-journal. “Therefore, we are now in the initial phase of really going into a more active, and mass, vaccination campaign beyond the hospital setting.”

This is good news, as far as it goes. But the ultimate goal must be to expand vaccine availability far beyond a handful of county-designated locations. Identifying areas with high senior populations should be a routine exercise, as should be setting up inoculation centers there.

At the state level, officials should be as meticulous about releasing daily vaccination counts as they are about tabulating the daily number of new confirmed cases. The former is far more meaningful at this point. The state has also failed to launch any effective informational campaign to inform seniors and others about how and where to get their vaccinations.

There were bound to be glitches during the vaccine rollout, particularly given that states are attempting to do something they’ve never done before. But there seems to be a woeful lack of urgency among state officials. The time to get moving was yesterday. Lives depend upon it.