Austin, Texas – Texas will receive more than 520,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine this week, more than state officials said they originally expected.
In El Paso, the University Medical Center’s vaccination hub will receive 8,775 of those doses, while the hub operated by the city of El Paso will receive 5,000.
Texas Department of State Health Services officials said the increase in the dose assigned to the state is due to two factors: a 30% increase in the Moderna vaccine provided by the federal government and a one-time return of 126,750 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Texas had to set aside for a federal program that vaccinates residents and staff in long-term care facilities.
The state health service said these returned doses will be given to counties where allocations are significantly lower than their share of the population, which is not the case in El Paso, where allocations are higher than the population percentage.
According to the Covid Tracking Project, the state has received nearly 2.9 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine.
According to the state health department, suppliers in Texas have administered nearly 2.3 million doses of vaccine. More than 1.8 million people have received at least one dose and more than 448,000 have been fully vaccinated.
On Sunday, health officials in Texas reported 11,155 new and probable cases of coronavirus and 171 more deaths from the disease caused by the virus.
According to the Texas Health Department, there have been nearly 2.1 million virus cases and 36,491 deaths from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
Hospital admissions to the state continued to decline, with 11,220 patients reported Sunday. That’s down from a maximum of 14,218 on January 11.
In the past two weeks, the seven-day moving average of Covid deaths in Texas has increased from 305.71 per day to 325.86, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and Texas is ranked eighth in the country in the number of new cases per capita with 882.41 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
The moving average of new cases in the state has dropped from 22,520.29 per day to 16,962.71, according to Johns Hopkins data.