U.S. Hits Pandemic Milestone With More Vaccinated Than Cases

More Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine than have tested positive for the virus, an early but hopeful milestone in the race to end the pandemic.

As of Monday afternoon, 26.5 million Americans had received one or both doses of the current vaccines, according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. Since the first U.S. patient tested positive outside of Seattle a year ago, 26.3 million people in the country have tested positive for the disease, and 443,000 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. has been administering shots at a faster daily rate than any country in the world, giving about 1.34 million doses a day, according to data gathered by Bloomberg. While the rollout stumbled in its early days, in the six weeks since the first shots went into arms almost 7.8% of Americans have gotten one or more doses, and 1.8% are fully vaccinated.

“It’s worth noting that today, for the first time, the data said that more people were vaccinated than were reported as newly diagnosed cases,” said Paula Cannon, a professor of microbiology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “That’s worth celebrating. I’m all for that win.”

Only a few other countries have crossed that milestone: Israel, the U.K. and the U.A.E. beat the U.S. to the more-vaccinations-than-cases line days or weeks ago.

After a holiday surge in American cases, officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention are calling the top, though that’s likely because of behavioral changes, and still not widespread impact from the vaccine. New Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and emergency-department visits are starting to decline, said Jay Butler, the agency’s deputy director for infectious diseases.

“While these trends are encouraging, I want to stress that the numbers nationally are still high, and they’re as high as they’ve been at any point in the pandemic up to this point,” he said at a briefing Friday hosted by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “If this pandemic were a stock, we might be wanting to sell.”

It’s still possible for the virus to roar back, particularly if variants that are emerging in South Africa and elsewhere take hold. Studies suggest vaccines, particularly the newer shots from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Inc., are less potent against that strain and at least one other.

The goal is to eventually reach herd immunity, when so many Americans have protection thanks to a vaccine or natural infection that the virus struggles to spread and eventually dies out. Public health officials, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, estimate 70% to 85% of the 330 million Americans must be exposed to the pathogen through virus or vaccine to reach that level.

While past infection can create immunity, it’s not clear how long it lasts. And it comes at a cost -- not just deaths but hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and some who report lingering illness and a baffling array of symptoms, including fatigue, depression and respiratory issues.

“There’s a price to pay in suffering and in cost for the health system,” said Alessandro Sette, a professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “It’s protracted and severe.”

No deaths, meanwhile, have been conclusively linked to the receipt of a Covid-19 vaccine. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s voluntary system for tracking adverse events includes reports of about 290 deaths following the administration of a vaccine against coronavirus as of Jan. 22. Most were in elderly people with other health issues and none were determined to be tied to the immunizations.

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