CHICAGO – Officials in at least 20 states have committed in recent days to opening coronavirus vaccine appointments for all adults in March or April. It is part of a rapidly growing expansion as states seek to reach President Biden’s universal qualification by May 1.
In Ohio, all adults may seek shots from March 29. In Connecticut, April 5th. In Alaska and Mississippi, all adults can already book appointments.
And on Thursday and Friday, officials in Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maryland, Missouri, Maine and Vermont said all adults would be allowed to report for a shot in April, while the governors of Utah and North Dakota consider universal to start this month.
But although the rate of vaccinations nationwide has increased to about 2.5 million shots every day, the country finds itself at a questionable point in the pandemic. Cases, deaths and hospitalizations have dropped sharply since the January peak, but infection levels looked at around 55,000 new cases per day this month. While governors are easing restrictions on businesses such as pubs, indoor gyms and casinos, extremely contagious variants are spreading and some countries, especially on the East Coast, have struggled for weeks to make progress in reducing business.
“I think it’s a race against time,” said Dr. Stephen J. Thomas, head of infectious diseases at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said. “Every person we can vaccinate, or every person we can get a mask on, is one chance less likely to have a variant.”
As parts of the country continue to see progress, many Americans are booking spring break trips, eating in newly reopened restaurants, and planning their summer weddings, which were abruptly canceled in 2020. On Friday, federal health officials relaxed a six-foot distance rule for elementary school. students, saying they should only stay three meters apart in classrooms as long as everyone wears a mask. The move was intended to encourage more schools to open up for personal classes.
All the while, the road ahead – and public guidance on how people should act at the moment – seems uncertain, even contradictory.
Although deaths in New York declined significantly, progress in reducing business slowed. The state has more recent cases per capita than anywhere else but New Jersey, and the New York City metro area has the country’s second highest infection rate, just behind Idaho Falls, Idaho.
“People will be reckless, I do not know how to say it differently,” said Carol Greenberg, a pet care worker in Jersey City, NJ, saying she was concerned that people were starting to act in a way that did not new virus cases in the condition, where more than 26,000 new infections were reported in the seven-day period ending on Thursday.
Greenberg, 61, was fully vaccinated, but her adult children were not, and she said she wondered if all the reopening notices of late were wise. In recent days, Governor Phil Murphy has called for a return to personal instructions announced at schools in New Jersey and weakened restrictions on restaurants, bars, salons and other businesses.
No vaccine has yet been approved for use among people under 16, although trials are underway to see if it is safe and effective in children.
Epidemiologists have said they see the current moment in the pandemic as a sprint between vaccinations and newly confirmed cases of the virus, especially infections that are spreading due to varieties that can be more contagious. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, warned on Friday that it’s really risky to declare victory before the level of infection in the community is at a much, much lower level than 53,000 cases a day. ‘
‘It is therefore unfortunate, but not surprising to me, that you are seeing an increase in the number of cases per day in areas – cities, states or regions’, even though vaccines are distributed with a fairly good amount of 2 to 3 million per day. , ”The dr. Fauci said.
In Chicago, where students in the third largest public school system in the country have returned to classrooms, and where parks, pubs and cinemas are reopening, city officials announced that restaurant workers, construction workers and people who already have health conditions would be eligible for vaccination by the end of March. Cook County, which includes Chicago, dropped an average of between 600 and 700 cases each day for nearly a month, from about 4,500 cases per day at its November peak.
“We have endured many storms over the course of this year,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said after visiting a vaccination site this week. “We must remain diligent. We need to keep working hard. But we are moving in exactly the right direction. ”
Yet the city’s usual exorbitant enthusiasm for performing a spring ritual – on St. Patrick’s Day – at best muted. On Wednesday, few pedestrians wandered the streets of the city center, usually with holidaymakers full. The Chicago River colored in its traditional bright green color, but the popular Riverwalk next door was almost empty.
Jacob Roberts, 29, was downtown Wednesday and took a vacation at his home in Washington state. The trip to Chicago was a visit to the bucket list he had always wanted to do.
“I was caged in Washington and got sick of everyone looking in the garbage dumps,” he said. “But it’s honestly the same thing everywhere you look now.”
Although tourism in places like New York and Chicago is not yet in place, the country’s prospects look much better than winter.
No state reports case numbers nearly near record levels, and the kind of explosive growth in cases seen in hard-hit areas by 2020 has almost completely slowed. Kansas has an average of about 215 new cases of coronavirus a day, up from more than 2,000 in early January. In California, about 2,900 cases are reported most days, compared to about 40,000 in mid-January. And North Dakota, which has the country’s most notorious cases per capita, now regularly adds less than 100 cases a day, in a state with a population of 762,000.
A projection from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests that cases of coronavirus will slowly decline in the coming months in the United States.
But with most Americans still unvaccinated and variants continuing to spread, there are warning signs in the data. Vermont, which escaped the worst of the pandemic in 2020, has struggled all year to curb an outbreak. Michigan, which apparently brought the virus under control in January, has seen numbers increase by more than 80 percent over the past two weeks, although it remains well below their December high. In South Florida, infection levels have remained consistently high, with about 1,000 cases reported daily in one state, Miami-Dade.
Even in countries where the virus was far out of control, officials continued to lift restrictions on businesses and insisted on companies reopening. On Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced that indoor fitness classes could resume on March 22. In Southern California, where business peaked early in the winter, Disneyland officials said the theme would open on April 30 after more than a year of closure with rules limiting capacity.
In the country, some people have said they are reluctant to dive back into old routines, even though their elected officials have indicated it is permissible.
“I used to go to a gym twice a week, and I haven’t been at all since February,” said Paul Eustice, 64, who lives in downtown Chicago. “I will not go in where people are breathing heavily.”
Last week, air travel in the United States rose to its highest level since the pandemic, and airline executives said discussions in the coming months indicated an eagerness on the part of Americans to start traveling in large numbers again.
Some of them were vaccinated under the new.
Since vaccinations began in December, the federal government has delivered more than 154 million vaccine doses, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 77 percent have been administered.
As of Friday, 67 percent of the elderly population in the country had been vaccinated at least one dose, with 40 percent fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.
A majority of the states said they would extend admission to the general population on or before May 1, the deadline that Mr. Biden ruled last week, and officials spoke more openly about what life could be like when the pandemic ends.
“As more Montanans get the vaccine,” said Gov. Greg Gianforte, announcing that all adults in Montana would be eligible on April 1, “we will begin approaching the time when we are no longer in a state of emergency and we can remove masks and throw them in the trash. ”
Contributing Reporting was Brandon Dupré of Chicago, Will Wright from Jersey City, NJ, Danielle Ivory, Alex Lemonides and Isabella Grullón Paz of New York, Alyssa Burr of Muskegon, Mich., and Zach Montague and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of Washington.