CHICAGO – Officials in at least 20 states have pledged in the past few days to open coronavirus vaccine appointments to all adults in March or April, part of a rapid expansion as states rush to meet President Biden’s goal of universal eligibility until May 1st.
In Ohio, all adults will be able to get vaccines from March 29. In Connecticut, April 5. In Alaska and Mississippi, all adults can now book appointments.
And on Thursday and Friday, the authorities in Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maryland, Missouri, Maine and Vermont said all adults would be allowed in April to sign up for an injection, while governors of Utah and North Dakota set universal eligibility to start this month.
But even with the accelerated rate of vaccination for around 2.5 million vaccines per day across the country, the country is at a precarious point in the pandemic. Cases, deaths and hospitalizations have fallen dramatically since the peaks of January, but infection levels have peaked this month, at around 55,000 new cases per day. As governors relax restrictions on businesses like bars, indoor gyms and casinos, highly infectious variants are spreading and some states, especially on the East Coast, have been fighting for weeks to make some progress in reducing cases.
“I think it’s a race against time,” said Dr. Stephen J. Thomas, head of infectious diseases at SUNY Upstate Medical University. “Every person that we can vaccinate or every person that we can put on a mask is an opportunity unless a variant has it.”
As parts of the country continue to see progress, many Americans are booking spring break trips, dining at newly reopened restaurants and rescheduling summer weddings that were abruptly canceled in 2020. On Friday, federal health officials relaxed a distance rule of almost two meters for primary school students, saying they need to stay just one meter away in classrooms, while everyone is wearing a mask. This change was intended to encourage more schools to open face-to-face classes.
At the same time, the way forward – and public guidance on how people should behave at this time – seems uncertain, even contradictory.
Although deaths have dropped considerably in New York, progress in reducing cases has stalled. The state has more recent cases per capita than anywhere else except New Jersey, and the New York metropolitan area has the second highest rate of new infections in the country, behind Idaho Falls, Idaho.
“People are going to be reckless, I don’t know how to say it any other way,” said Carol Greenberg, a pet care worker in Jersey City, NJ, who said she was concerned that people were starting to act in ways that did not accurately reflect the number of new virus cases in that state, where more than 26,000 new infections were reported in the seven-day period that ended on Thursday.
Mrs. Greenberg, 61, was fully vaccinated, but her adult children were not, and she said she wondered if all the reopening announcements were recently agreed. In the past few days, Governor Phil Murphy has asked for a back to face-to-face instructions in New Jersey schools and announced a loosening of restrictions on restaurants, bars, beauty salons and other businesses.
No vaccine has yet been authorized for use in children under 16, although studies are underway to verify that they are safe and effective in children.
Epidemiologists said they see the current moment of the pandemic as a race between vaccinations and newly confirmed cases of the virus, particularly infections that are spreading because of variants that may be more contagious. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, warned on Friday “that it is indeed very risky to declare victory before the level of infection in the community is much, much less than 53,000 cases per day.”
“So it is unfortunate, but not surprising to me, that you are seeing increases in the number of cases per day in areas – cities, states or regions – although vaccines are being distributed at a fairly good rate of 2 to 3 million per day ”, Said Dr. Fauci.
In Chicago, where students in the nation’s third-largest public school system have returned to classrooms and where parks, bars and cinemas have reopened, city officials have announced that restaurant employees, construction workers and people with pre-existing health problems existing ones would be newly eligible for vaccination at the end of March. Cook County, which includes Chicago, averaged between 600 and 700 cases a day for almost a month, compared to 4,500 cases a day at the peak of November.
“We have withstood many storms over the course of this year,” Mayor Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said after visiting a vaccination site this week. “We have to be diligent. We have to keep working hard. But we are moving in exactly the right direction. “
Still, the city’s overwhelming enthusiasm for observing a springtime ritual – going out on St. Patrick’s Day – was muted, at best. On Wednesday, few pedestrians wandered downtown streets, usually packed with revelers on holiday. The Chicago River had been tinted in its traditional shade of bright green, but the popular Riverwalk beside it was almost empty.
Jacob Roberts, 29, was at the center on Wednesday, taking a vacation from his home in Washington state. The trip to Chicago was a visit he always wanted to make.
“I was confined to Washington and sick of everyone who looked kind of depressed,” he said. “But honestly, it’s the same everywhere you look now.”
Although tourism has yet to return strongly in places like New York and Chicago, the country’s prospects for fighting the virus look much better than when the winter began.
No state is reporting case numbers close to record levels, and the type of explosive case growth seen in hard-hit areas by 2020 has declined almost completely. Kansas has an average of 215 new cases of coronavirus a day, down from more than 2,000 in early January. In California, about 2,900 cases are reported most days, down from around 40,000 in mid-January. And North Dakota, which has the country’s best-known per capita cases, is now regularly adding less than 100 cases a day, in a state with a population of 762,000.
A projection by the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment suggests that coronavirus cases will continue to decline slowly in the United States in the coming months.
But with most Americans still unvaccinated and the variants continuing to spread, there are warning signs in the data. Vermont, which escaped the worst of the pandemic in 2020, has struggled all this year to contain an outbreak. Michigan, which appeared to have brought the virus under control in January, has seen the number of cases rise by more than 80 percent in the past two weeks, although they remain well below the December peak. In South Florida, infection levels remained persistently high, with nearly 1,000 cases reported each day in a single county, Miami-Dade.
Even in states where the virus seemed far from under control, authorities began to lift restrictions on companies and companies pushed for the reopening. On Wednesday, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced that indoor gym classes could resume on March 22. In Southern California, where cases peaked earlier this winter, Disneyland officials said that after more than a year of closure, the theme park would open on April 30 with rules in place to limit capacity.
Across the country, some people have said that they hesitate to return to the old routines, even though their elected officials have indicated that it is allowed to do so.
“I used to go to the gym more or less twice a week, and I haven’t been since last February,” said Paul Eustice, 64, who lives in downtown Chicago. “I will not go there where people are breathing heavily.”
Last week, air travel in the United States reached its highest level since the arrival of the pandemic, and airline executives said reservations in the coming months indicate Americans’ eagerness to return in large numbers.
Some of them are among the newly vaccinated.
Since vaccines started in December, the federal government has distributed more than 154 million doses of vaccine, and about 77 percent have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of Friday, 67 percent of the country’s elderly population had received at least one dose of vaccine, according to CDC data, with 40 percent fully vaccinated.
Most states have said they will expand the vaccine’s eligibility to its general population on or before May 1, the deadline that Biden set last week, and officials have been speaking more openly about what life will be like when the pandemic ends. .
“As more Montana residents get the vaccine,” said Governor Greg Gianforte, announcing that all Montana adults would be eligible on April 1, “we will begin to approach the time when we will no longer be in a state of emergency. and we can remove our masks and throw them in the trash. “
Contributing reports were Brandon Dupré from Chicago, Will Wright from Jersey City, NJ, Danielle Ivory, Alex Lemonides and Isabella Grullón Paz from new york, Alyssa Burr of Muskegon, Mich., and Zach Montague and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of Washington.