As the numbers increase, governors are taking further steps to put vaccines distributed into arms more quickly: including mobilizing National Guard members and training more volunteers to administer the vaccines.
This means that only about 28% of the doses distributed were administered.
See how states are stepping up vaccination efforts
“Everyone is struggling to get as many vaccinators as possible, while every member of the team is needed to help raise,” said Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer on Tuesday.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has promised “aggressive action” to speed up the process, including granting an exemption that will allow dentists to administer the vaccine after training.
Meanwhile, Arizona National Guard members have “conducted refresher training for the first wave of Arizona residents who have volunteers to support vaccination sites across the state.”
Both the launch of the vaccines and their administration had a “slow start,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, but added that things are likely to move faster across the country in the coming months.
“We need to do better at all levels, but I believe we will gain momentum as we move through the holiday season in the first weeks of January,” Fauci told Randi Marshall of Newsday on Tuesday.
“We have to be very careful, Randi, not to jump to conclusions based on a very short period of time, because we have just started,” said Fauci. “The government and local residents, including governors, mayors and others, started in the last weeks of December, right in the middle of the holiday season.”
In one county, more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths in one week
“We have three times the hospitalizations we saw in November and almost seven times what we were in October,” said Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, medical director of the Ohio Department of Health, on Tuesday. “Our ICU beds are also very busy. In fact, our ICUs serve more than 1,000 patients and more than a quarter of our ICU beds are filled with Covid’s care.”
“Although vaccines are a powerful tool, we don’t have to wait for vaccines to prevent new cases of COVID-19, hospitalizations and deaths. We can do that now,” said Ferrer, county health director, in a statement. “It is necessary for each company and each resident to purposely follow public health guidelines and safety measures. Please stay at home and leave only for essential work or services.”
In Georgia, about one in 15 residents was infected with the virus and more than one in 1,000 died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
About 91% of ICU beds across the state are occupied and 85% of all inpatient beds are occupied, according to estimates published by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Arizona health officials, meanwhile, reported that only 8% of all ICU beds were available on Monday. About 62% of people in the ICU are Covid-19 patients and 57% of the ventilators available in the state are in use, according to the state’s Covid-19 panel.
CNN’s Cheri Mossburg, Joe Sutton, Sarah Moon, Gisela Crespo, Deidre McPhillips, Maggie Fox, Gregory Lemos and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.