More than half of American adults have now had at least their first dose of coronavirus vaccine, and there are promising signs that the shots are working: Average daily mortality has dropped in the past week.
The seven-day moving average of fatalities has dropped by a quarter to 737 from seven days ago, when 987 people died a day. According to DailyMail.com analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, 477 people were killed on Monday.
Average daily deaths, however, are up slightly this week, 0.4 percent higher than last week according to data from Johns Hopkins and two percent higher according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data as of Monday.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday there were six consecutive days with an increase in the number of fatalities.
According to DataUSA.io tracking, things have risen in at least 17 US states in the past two weeks.
States such as Michigan, where more than 50 percent of cases are caused by the British variant, are seeing the number of cases rising, while completely reopened Texas, with only 42 percent of cases caused by the variant, is still showing declines.
Texas has seen a continued decline in the number of daily Covid-19 cases, despite the full reopening. Cases are down about 12% in the past two weeks
Meanwhile, the number of cases in Michigan has nearly tripled this month (although they are now declining) despite restaurant capacity remaining limited. One expert says the British variant, which accounts for more than 55% of the state’s cases, is to blame
States such as Michigan, where more than 50 percent of cases are caused by the UK variant, see the number of cases rising, while the fully reopened Texas with only 42 percent of cases caused by the variant is still showing declines
Daily hospital admissions for COVID-19 are also on the decline, with the seven-day moving average dropping by nearly three percent compared to last week, data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.
Still, the numbers of new daily infections have risen nationwide, up about six percent from last week to more than 68,000 a day, including 67,933 yesterday.
‘I want to recognize that we remain in a complicated phase [of the pandemic]said Dr. Walensky at a press conference of the White House Covid Response Team on Monday.
‘On the one hand, more people are being vaccinated at an accelerated rate every day in the United States. On the other hand, cases and hospital admissions are on the rise in some parts of the country, and the number of cases among younger people, who have not yet been vaccinated, is also increasing. ‘
Indeed, the divergent trends are driven by the now dominant British variety, which is most common in Tennessee, Michigan and Minnesota – all of which have seen a daily increase in infections over the past 14 days.
Meanwhile, Texas has seen its average daily cases decline by 12 percent over the same time span.
That exceeds the expectations of public health experts, if it were only reopenings driving upward trends in cases.
Both Michigan and Texas lifted Covid restrictions last month. In fact, Texas has lifted more of its restrictions and did so earlier than Michigan, which still has a statewide mask mandate and a 50 percent capacity limit for indoor dining.
But Texas “is doing much better than you might expect in that circumstance,” Dr. Barry Bloom, a professor of public health and immunology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told the Wall Street Journal.
“I suspect it would be more of the fast-spreading Michigan kind.”
Michigan has one of the nation’s tallest varieties, after Tennessee.
According to data from the CDC, an estimated 58 percent of Covid cases are caused by the more contagious (and probably more deadly) B117 variant that showed up in the UK.
In Tennessee, about 61 percent of cases are caused by the variant.
And Minnesota is a close third, with B117 driving about 56 percent of infections.
Texas isn’t much further down the list, coming in sixth with 43 percent of infections caused by the variant.
But that’s a difference of about 26 percent compared to the prevalence of the variant in Michigan, and that may be enough to steer case trends in the two states in opposite directions.
Encouragingly, the tide may also turn in Michigan, despite the federal government rejecting requests from Governor Gretchen Whitmer and public health experts to increase the supply of vaccines to the state.
Governor Whitmer, for her part, also refused to introduce more restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 in her state, despite calls from Dr. Anthony Fauci to do so.
After nearly tripling in a month to the last peak of 7,870 daily mean cases on April 10, daily infections are now down 18 percent to 6,458 a day in Michigan.
Other states with high prevalences of the B117 variant don’t fare as well.
In Tennessee, which has the highest number of cases due to the UK variant in the country, the average number of new daily infections has increased by nearly 40 percent to 1,682 per day.
Nevertheless, the race between vaccines and variants continues.
States like Michigan and Tennessee will need to start vaccinating sooner if they want to surpass variants that hinder their progress to herd immunity and encourage accelerated spread of the virus.