CHICAGO – Officials in at least 18 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 Joe Biden’s goal universal eligibility until May 1.
In Ohio, all adults will be able to seek injections from March 29. In Connecticut, April 5. In Alaska and Mississippi, all adults can now book appointments. And on Thursday, officials in Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maryland and Missouri said that all adults would be allowed to apply in April, while Utah Governor Spencer Cox said universal eligibility would begin there next week. .
But even with the accelerated rate of vaccination for around 2.5 million vaccines a day across the country, the country is at a precarious point in the pandemic. Cases, deaths and hospitalizations have dropped dramatically since the peaks of January, although infection levels have stabilized this month, at around 55,000 new cases per day. As governors relax restrictions on businesses like bars, in-house 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.
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“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 redesigning summer weddings that were abruptly canceled in 2020. At the same time, the way forward – and public guidance about how people should behave at the moment – it 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 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 will be reckless; I don’t know how to say it anymore, ”said Carol Greenberg, a pet care worker in Jersey City, New Jersey, who said she was concerned that people were starting to act in ways that didn’t accurately reflect the number of new ones. virus cases in that state, where more than 26,000 new infections were reported last week.
Greenberg, 61, was fully vaccinated, but her adult children were not, and she said she wondered if all the recent reopening announcements had been agreed. In recent days, Governor Phil Murphy has called for a return to face-to-face teaching at New Jersey schools and announced a loosening of restrictions in 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.
Public health researchers said they see the current moment of the pandemic as a race between vaccinations and new confirmed cases of the virus, particularly infections that are spreading because of variants that may be more contagious. Dr. Anthony 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 a 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 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 would be eligible for vaccination again by 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 remain 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 drowned out, at best. On Wednesday, few pedestrians wandered the downtown streets, usually packed with revelers for the 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 in the city 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% 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 Cuomo of New York announced that indoor fitness classes could resume on Monday. In southern California, where cases peaked earlier this winter, Disneyland officials said that after more than a year closed, the theme park would open on April 30 with rules in place that limit capacity.
Across the country, some people have said they are hesitant to return to the old routines, even though their elected officials have indicated that this is permitted.
“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’ anxiety about starting to travel in large numbers again.
Some of them are among the newly vaccinated.
Since vaccines started in December, the federal government has distributed more than 151 million doses of vaccines, and about 77% have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of Thursday, 66% of the country’s elderly population had received at least one dose of vaccine, according to CDC data, with 39% fully vaccinated.
At least 23 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 people in Montana receive 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. “
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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