About half of new coronavirus cases in the United States are registered in just five states, a situation that is putting pressure on the federal government to rethink the way it distributes vaccines and send more doses to the sources of infection.
According to data from government agencies in the United States, New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey reported 44% of the new COVID-19 cases, or about 197,500 infections, in the last available seven-day period. by Johns Hopkins University. The total number of infections recorded in the United States in the same week was more than 452,000.
It makes sense to increase the number of vaccines as the number of cases increases, said Dr. Elvin H. Geng, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Washington. But it is also complicated.
“They wouldn’t want to keep people waiting because they’re doing better,” Geng said. “On the other hand, it makes sense to send vaccines to places where the number of cases is on the rise.”
So far, President Joe Biden’s administration has shown no signs that it will change its policy of distributing vaccines to states based on population.
We recommend that you:
The rise in the number of cases was especially significant in Michigan, where the seven-day average of new cases per day was 6,719 on Sunday, more than double what it recorded two weeks earlier.
Although Michigan has had the highest number of new cases in the past two weeks, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has said she has no plans to tighten restrictions. He noted that the rebound was due to fatigue caused by the pandemic, which has led people to exercise more and more contagious variants of the virus.
Meanwhile, the number of daily infections in the United States has fallen dramatically since January’s recovery after the Christmas period. However, since mid-March, the seven-day average of new cases has been slowly increasing.
Jeff Zients, White House coordinator of the coronavirus, said on Tuesday that states will receive more than 28 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine this week. With this, the United States will have distributed more than 90 million doses in the past three weeks.
On the other hand, Biden announced that 150 million vaccines have been administered since he took office, and that all adults can be vaccinated from April 19.