By Peter Szekely and Dan Whitcomb
(Reuters) – The Trump administration on Tuesday moved to accelerate vaccinations of Americans against COVID-19, releasing the rest of the doses it held in reserve and recommending that states immediately open vaccinations for those aged 65 and older.
Federal and state health officials have been scrambling for the past few days to step up vaccination programs that have shot down only 9.3 million Americans because coronavirus infections in many U.S. states were on record for almost two weeks in the new year.
Many U.S. states have introduced strict rules to give shots to first-time health care workers and nursing home residents, telling ‘non-essential workers’ that they can wait months in turn.
“We have already distributed more vaccine than our health workers and people in nursing homes have,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC News. “We need to get to more channels of administration.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 27.5 million doses have been distributed to states by the U.S. government so far. Azar said the outgoing government, which kept doses in reserve to make sure everyone who received a first vaccination received their second shot on schedule, was now confident in the supply chain to release the stock.
Last week, a spokesman for Joe Biden said the president-elect, who will take office on January 20, will release more of the reserved doses.
The rate of vaccinations has risen nationwide to 700,000 a day and is expected to reach 1 million a day within ten days, officials said.
“Michigan and states across the country remain ready to get more shots, which is why the Trump administration’s decision to grant our request and release millions of doses of the vaccine is so important,” the governor said. Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, said in a statement.
Whitmer, who supported the lower vaccination age, is seeking permission from the US government to get 100,000 vaccine doses directly from manufacturer Pfizer Inc. for sale.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the vaccine from Pfizer and partner BioNTech SE and a second vaccine from Moderna Inc. for emergency use.
As of Monday night, the United States reported a total of 22.5 million coronavirus infections and 376,188 deaths during the pandemic, the most of any country. Nearly 130,000 Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 at midnight on Monday.
GRIM SCENES AT CALIFORNIA HOSPITAL
A Reuters report showed that the number of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization has flattened out, at least temporarily, although public health officials warn that further spread could still be seen during holidays.
The health secretary of California, dr. Mark Ghaly, has cited several promising trends in COVID statistics across the country over the past few days, including a slowdown in confirmed daily case numbers and a decline in positive tests.
The number of new COVID surveys nationwide has dropped to about 2,500 surveys per day over the past two days from a daily average of about 3,500 surveys in previous days. Ghaly calls it ‘the biggest sign for me that things are starting to flatten and could possibly improve.’
Despite the encouraging statistics, Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, California, said the situation is bad.
“Where in the beginning we were overloaded with a lot of patients – we still have a lot of patients – but now they seem to be sicker than they ever were before,” says Mary Mendy, executive director of acute care services. in the hospital about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
“And there is Code Blues on the floor every day and more and more patients are being updated to the ICU. It’s devastating,” Mendy said.
The latest surge may have been exacerbated by a more contagious variant of the virus first seen in the UK and now found in at least ten US states – California, Florida, New York, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Connecticut, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Texas. .
(Reporting by Peter Szekely, Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Anurag Moon in Bangaluru and Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Peter Cooney and Cynthia Osterman)