This weekend brought good news. Vaccination rates still haven't returned to the old trendline—which just goes to show the danger of drawing a trendline from early data—but they have recovered from last week's dismal performance. In all, we had three consecutive days above 2 million shots and a record 2.45 million shots on Sunday.
If we could keep the daily average above 2 million, that would be fantastic!
Higher is better, of course, but so far, this has been very promising.
The drop in shots the last two weeks was almost certainly due to weather. As better spring weather sets in (knock wood!), and the J&J vaccine starts rolling out, things should start looking even better!
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Yes. I live in Texas, and the winter storm that crippled the state for a full week completely shut down vaccinations in the state and they still have not yet quite recovered.
This is super nit-picky, but CDC now has data on vaccinations by date of jab and it clearly does not peak on the weekend. The peak is W-Th-Fr, there is a distinct drop off on Saturday, and Sundays are the worst.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-trends
I think the apparent peak on the weekend is due to reporting delays.
Thank you. I was also really wondering why vaccination rates would peak on the weekends. Ideally the day of week would have no impact. Having an appointment to get your Covid vaccine is a drop everything kind of appointment if you ask me.
Currently, more than 50 million people have received two doses of vaccine, and another 25 million have received one. Those numbers double and that'll be about half the US population (all ages), and that could happen before the end of March.
Even before we get to true herd immunity, at some point (and I'd certainly think by 50%) I would think we should see vaccinations start to bring down R0 everywhere. There are going to be fewer pathways for the virus to spread, though there is a chance that the effect of vaccinations could get cancelled out by people engaging in riskier behavior. But I still think we're going to see a much lighter viral load this summer.