More Americans received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine than tested positive for the virus, an early but promising milestone in the race to end the pandemic.
As of Monday afternoon, 26.5 million Americans had received one or both doses of current vaccines, according to data collected by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. Since the first American patient tested positive outside Seattle a year ago, 26.2 million people in the country have tested positive for the disease and 441,000 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The United States has administered injections at a faster daily rate than any country in the world, giving about 1.35 million doses a day, according to data collected by Bloomberg. Although the implementation stumbled in its early days, in the six weeks since the first vaccines went into action, almost 7.8% of Americans received one or more doses and 1.8% are fully vaccinated.
“It is important to note that today, for the first time, the data indicates that more people were vaccinated than reported as newly diagnosed cases,” said Paula Cannon, professor of microbiology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “It is worth celebrating. I am totally in favor of this victory.”
Only a few other countries have passed this milestone: Israel, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates beat the United States in the line of more vaccinations than cases days or weeks ago.
After a wave of holidays in American cases, staff at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention are calling the top, although this is likely because of behavioral changes and the non-generalized impact of the vaccine. New cases of COVID-19, hospitalizations and visits to the emergency department are beginning to decline, said Jay Butler, deputy director of the agency for infectious diseases.
“While these trends are encouraging, I want to emphasize that the numbers nationally are still high, and are as high as at any point in the pandemic so far,” he said at a briefing on Friday presented by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “If this pandemic were a stock, we might want to sell.”
It is still possible that the virus will roar again, especially if the variants that are emerging in South Africa and elsewhere are established. Studies suggest that vaccines, particularly the latest vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Inc., are less potent against this strain and at least one other.
The goal is to achieve collective immunity, when so many Americans have protection thanks to a vaccine or natural infection, the virus struggles to spread and eventually dies. Public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease physician, estimate that 70% to 85% of the 330 million Americans must be exposed to the pathogen through a virus or vaccine to reach that level.
Although a past infection can create immunity, it is not clear how long it lasts. And it comes at a cost – not just deaths, but hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and some that report prolonged illnesses and a range of disconcerting symptoms, including fatigue, depression and breathing problems.
“There is a price to pay in terms of suffering and cost to the health system,” said Alessandro Sette, a professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “It is prolonged and severe.”
No deaths, however, have been conclusively linked to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s voluntary system for tracking adverse events includes reports of about 290 deaths following the administration of a coronavirus vaccine on January 22. The majority were elderly people with other health problems and none was determined to be linked to immunizations.
The questions persist. It is still unclear exactly how many people have been vaccinated or infected, and it may never be. Many more people had the virus than the positive test, particularly those with mild or asymptomatic cases.
The reported vaccinations are also less than the number actually given because people are more focused on injecting them in the arms than recording the data on tracking systems, Cannon said. Two injections are needed for total immunity, which only 5.82 million Americans received.
It is still at the beginning of the immunization effort, which has been plagued by a lack of coordination, confusion about who should have access and a scarcity of supply that reduced the number of people who managed to get the vaccine in the first weeks of the launch.
It is also important to make sure that the right people are being immunized for maximum benefit, said Bill Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University.
“There are many people who are being vaccinated who are not in the high-risk categories,” he said. “If that is the case, it will take longer to see a reduction in serious illnesses and deaths. Everyone needs a vaccine at some point, but I am concerned about the injustices in how the system was implemented ”.
The emerging variants created a new urgency to increase the rate of vaccinations, said Daniela Weiskopf, assistant professor of research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Each time the virus replicates, there is a chance that a variant will emerge.
“The faster we stop this, the more likely we are not to see more variants appear,” she said.
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