According to Becker’s Hospital Review, as of 6 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, March 7, 116,363,405 vaccine doses had been distributed in the U.S. with 90,351,750 administered, or 77.65%.
Some 58,873,710 people had received one or more doses of the vaccine, and 30,686,881 had received the full two doses. That means 17.83% of the U.S. population had received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 9.30% had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, with millions more scheduled in just the week to come.
Arizona has administered 2,162,602 doses or 82.42% of the 2,623,735 vaccines we’ve received. Out of a state population of around 7,520,100, about 28.8% of our state has been vaccinated with at least one dose, averaging a slightly higher rate per 100 people than the national average.
More than 2.9 million Americans got a vaccine shot on Saturday, March 6, alone, which is 20% higher than the last record day.
COVID-19 infections have been on the downswing with overall estimates stating that for every new COVID-19 infection about 30 people are getting vaccinated.
So it would appear based on the continuing rate of infection, adding all those who got infected last year, adding the number of vaccines that have gone out in the last three months, that we may approach effective herd immunity for most of the country by May or June. That means that in two or three months, the United States will effectively have “conquered” COVID-19.
I put “conquered” in quotes because there are still significant numbers of the population that will opt out of vaccinations, meaning the virus will slowly continue to spread in the uninoculated, infectable population.
Additionally, while the United States is far ahead of most Western countries in our vaccination rollout, many developing nations have not even begun any vaccinations, meaning they will still suffer as we did and need to compensate with quarantines, lockdowns, distancing and other preventative measures. These countries could still be suffering with COVID-19 outbreaks that could easily roll into 2022.
Once vaccinations are near completion here, American and other Western biotech companies that manufacture vaccines should continue to roll out vaccines with fervor to make sure we can inoculate people around the world.
It also means the new variants could mutate in these countries and return to the United States from travelers and tourists who unwittingly bring them back into the United States.
Current vaccinations may not be totally effective against the new variations that pop up, but will likely be more so than not having a vaccination at all, preventing, in all likelihood, massive spreads like we had in 2021.
That means COVID-19 may very well become just something we live with for the rest of our lives, witnessing new outbreaks here and there like we do with ebola or plague, hantavirus or the measles. Booster vaccinations or new vaccinations might be required in the future.
But it may be that COVID-19 is simply one of the new dangers we deal with in a more connected world.
No matter our politics or ethnicities or ethics, the first pandemic of the 21st century used our multinationalist world as a means to spread from Wuhan to Washington to West Sedona to Cottonwood to Chile to Cameroon.
The virus jumped national borders and natural barriers with ease, spreading from liberal democracies to totalitarian dictatorships with equal intensity, jumping from capitalist to socialist to communist states and back without hesitation or resistance. Of all the things the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, one is that the old divided world of the last century is no more and that we still have a long way to go to prepare for what may come next.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
