Health

CDC: US has vaccinated 10 pct. of its population against Covid-19

Washington, Feb 10 (efe-epa).- The United States has reached the 10 percent threshold with 33.7 million people having received at least one of the 44.7 million doses of anti-Covid-19 vaccine that have been administered so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Wednesday.

Some 10.4 million people have received both doses of the two-dose vaccination series and, with the exception of Kansas, Missouri and Alabama, elsewhere in the country the rate of vaccine administration exceeds the figure of 11,000 per 100,000 residents.

According to the CDC, since the start of the pandemic more than 27 million cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the US and 466,400 people have died from among the US population of about 330 million.

President Joe Biden has promised that his administration will ensure that 100 million people receive at least their first vaccine dose within his first 100 days in office, that is by April 30.

But it will be difficult to fulfill that promise at the current rate of vaccination, given that since the vaccination program was launched in mid-December the process has run into difficulties both in terms of the volume of vaccines produced and in their distribution to the public and the public’s access to them.

According to the latest figures, there remains a significant gap between the number of doses distributed to medical centers for administration (65.9 million) and the number actually administered (44.7 million).

The various states have adopted different methods for prioritizing who gets the vaccines and, in general, the first people to have received access to them have been long-term patients, including people in elderly care facilities as well as medical personnel.

As of Feb. 1, 29 states and the District of Columbia had increased vaccine eligibility to include people aged 65 and older.

However, other states have encountered delays in their vaccination campaigns. For instance Delaware, where local authorities reported Tuesday that the state will not launch – as had been expected – a second vaccination phase for other segments of the population because of an “extremely limited supply” of doses.

According to CDC figures, 23.4 million doses of the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech have been administered, while 21.2 million doses of the Moderna vaccine have been administered.

The government hopes that the approval of new vaccines means that there will be an increase in the daily vaccination figures and is expecting that later this month the vaccine being produced by Johnson & Johnson, which one study says has a 66 percent effectiveness at preventing moderate and serious Covid cases, will be given emergency use authorization.

The North Carolina government’s Web page says that 78 percent of the people who have received the vaccine there are white, 14 percent are African American and 2 percent are Latinos.

This does not square with CDC figures indicating that in the first month of vaccination, from Dec. 14, 2020 to Jan. 14, 2021, 11.5 percent of those who received at least one dose were Latinos and 60.4 percent were white, although Hispanics represent 18 percent of North Carolina’s population, a disparity that has been criticized by numerous groups.

EFE

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