Austin, Texas – Texas is scheduled to receive more than 520,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine this week, more than state officials said they initially expected to receive.
In El Paso, the University Medical Center vaccination center will receive 8,775 of those doses, while the center operated by the city of El Paso will receive 5,000.
Texas Department of Health Services officials said the increase in dose distribution to the state is due to two factors: a 30% increase in the Modern vaccine being provided by the federal government and a single return of 126,750 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Texas was forced to set aside for a federal program that is vaccinating residents and employees at long-term care institutions.
The state health department said that these returned doses will be given to counties where allocations were significantly less than their share of the population, which is not the case in El Paso, where allocations are above their population percentage.
The state received nearly 2.9 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Texas providers administered nearly 2.3 million doses of vaccine, according to the state’s health department. More than 1.8 million people received at least one dose and more than 448,000 were fully vaccinated.
On Sunday, Texas health officials reported 11,155 new and probable cases of coronavirus and 171 deaths due to the disease caused by the virus.
There have been nearly 2.1 million cases of the virus and 36,491 deaths as a result of Covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to the Texas Department of Health.
Hospitalizations in the state continued to decline, with 11,220 patients reported on Sunday. This fell from a high of 14,218 on January 11.
Over the past two weeks, the seven-day continuous average of Covid deaths in Texas has increased from 305.71 per day to 325.86, according to data from Johns Hopkins University and Texas ranked eighth in the country in number of new cases per capita with 882.41 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
The moving average of new cases in the state dropped from 22,520.29 a day to 16,962.71, according to Johns Hopkins data.