Updated vaccination news for the US and NC and it continues to be good news for both (Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker):
US Vaccinations:Total Vaccination Doses Available: 62,908,653
Total Vaccination Dose Administered: 44,413,509 <== 10.2% of population have received 1st dose
Percentage of Available Doses Administered: 70.6%
NC Vaccinations:Total Vaccination Doses Available: 1,722,715
Total Vaccination Dose Administered: 1,436,745 <== 10.5% of population have received 1st dose
Percentage of Available Doses Administered: 83.4% <== currently rank 6th in US for available doses administered
As you can see from the latest update, NC has made tremendous progress in using the available vaccines. Where NC still lags is the vaccination of LTC facilities. Currently, only 35.8% of the doses allocated to the LTC facilities have been used. For LTC, 104K first doses have been administered and 36K of the people in these facilities have completed all doses.
The graphs below show how both the US and NC are tracking compared to the 100M doses in 100 days (NC it is 3.2M doses in 100 days) and 150M doses in 100 days (NC it is 4.8M doses in 100 days). As you can see, NC is on track to meet the more aggressive target. For the US, we are on track to beat the 100M doses goal, but there is some work to do to reach the 150M doses target.
Assuming the J&J vaccine is approved at the end of this month, the US should have 300M doses available by June. This should be enough to vaccinate anyone who wants to receive the vaccine. Given these numbers, I really do not understand why some experts (including Dr. Fauci) continue to say it will be late Fall to early Winter before we can start to relax restrictions. He says it will take this long to vaccinate 75% to 80% of the population to reach herd immunity, but this seems to discount those people (approximately 10% to 15% of the population) who have already had the virus and developed natural immunity. I have also seen some people starting to move the goal posts by saying we can not begin to lift restrictions until the virus is eradicated.
As far as overall infection trends are concerned, we continue to see rapid declines in the number of people hospitalized. Going forward, this should be the measure of how we are using, instead of a focus on cases. Even with the vaccine, people will continue to test positive. The vaccine does not prevent infection in many people, it only lowers the severity of illness. The key is to get the severity down enough that it lowers the impact on hospitals and lowers the deaths. This should be enough to allow us to resume more normal activities.
US Vaccination Tracking (Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker):NC Vaccination Tracking (Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker):NC Hospitalizations and % of Active Cases Hospitalized: