The gloomy milestone supports the growing demand from government officials for more vaccines so that Americans can be vaccinated faster.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s Covid Coordinator Jeff Zients announced governors that the allocation would increase by about 16% from next week, according to a source familiar with the call.
Biden campaigned for 100 million vaccination shots in the first hundred days of his presidency, but with a long road ahead for vaccinations, he also called for a hundred days of masking.
With the additional doses, Biden said there would be enough to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans – almost the entire American population – by the end of summer or early fall.
Supply of vaccines that do not meet the demand
Struggling after the stress of nearly a year to respond to the pandemic, states are eager to administer vaccines quickly and are trying to return to normal.
“We have to defeat it because Mississippians are done. We are buried to bury loved ones who have been lost by this virus. We are done with stressed hospitals. We are done with the terrible talk of closure and closure. We are ready again for the community, “said the Mississippi government’s Tate Reeves, who announced that the state is celebrating about 200,000 delivered vaccines.
The director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said he was “very encouraged” by the new presidential government’s approach to vaccinations, but that the state is still struggling with the lack of vaccinations.
“We know that the number of individuals who want to be vaccinated is currently much greater than we have available,” said Dr. Nirav Shah said.
The government of Colorado, Jared Polis, said his talks with the Biden government made him feel hopeful about the future of vaccine distribution, but that “we can not yet count on additional supplies.”
Even if the government increases the 16% increase in promises, New York government Andrew Cuomo told Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC, that it will not be enough.
“We are functionally outside, we are starting to get a new award in the next few days,” Cuomo said.
Variants cause demand and fears
The spread of coronavirus variants contributes to public fear.
Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky, announced on Tuesday that two cases of the variant first identified in the UK have been confirmed in the state.
The threat of variants has made the reopening of the state of California a major concern, a recent epicenter of the U.S. pandemic, Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said.
“This is not the time to think just because we’re reopening that things look rosy,” she said, adding that asymptomatic spread is a problem. “We do have to move through the next few weeks with caution. In many other places where we have reopened our sectors, we have actually seen a boom in our cases we can not really afford it.”
For his part, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tried to calm the fears surrounding the variant with the assurance that the foundation had already been laid to fight it.
“We should not be afraid, but I think we need to be prepared,” Bourla said at the Bloomberg The Year Ahead event on Tuesday. “Once we discover something that is not so effective, we will very, very quickly deliver a booster dose that will be a small variation in the current one.”
School reopens safety
Meanwhile, there was some good news on Tuesday for parents hoping to get their kids back to school.
A report by the CDC states that with the right mitigation strategies, it is possible to open up K-12 schools for personal learning with minimal Covid-19 transfer.
These mitigation strategies include wearing masks, social distance, and time constraints in shared outdoor spaces, according to the study from the CDC’s weekly report on morbidity and mortality.
In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine said he aims for everyone working in a school to get their first vaccine dose in February at least in hopes of sending them back to school by March 1st.
People over 75 and people with certain medical conditions can currently receive vaccines. On February 1, the 70 and older and employees of K-12 schools will be eligible for the vaccine, he said during a press conference on Tuesday.
The reopening of schools has been a priority for many officials as students across the country have been learning at a distance for months. But local leaders have approached the return in different ways.
Of the 20 largest school districts in the country, nine are currently all online, eight offer a choice of whether they are personal or all online, two have a hybrid plan and one in Hawaii varies with the infection rates among different islands.
CNN’s Amanda Watts, Virginia Langmaid, Mj Lee, Sara Murray, Jamiel Lynch, Anna Sturla, Keith Allen, Mirna Alsharif, Taylor Romine, Elizabeth Cohen, Rebekah Riess, Stella Chan, Amanda Sealy, Jennifer Henderson and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report. contributed.