Washington (dpa-AFX) – Tuesday, the United States reached a major milestone in its vaccination efforts as 50 per cent of the adults in the country have been fully vaccinated.
Across the country, 25 states and the District of Columbia have fully vaccinated at least 50 per cent of their adult population, and nine states have recently crossed the threshold of 70 per cent of adults with at least one shot, White House Senior Advisor for COVID Response Andy Slavitt said at a routine briefing to provide pandemic update.
Slavitt said that in the days after Ohio Governor Mike DeWine introduced the 1-million-dollar Vax-A-Million lottery campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated, the state saw a 55-per-cent increase in its vaccination rate among younger Americans in the 20 to 49 age group.
In several counties, the rate of vaccination doubled compared to before the announcement.
Following Ohio, more states, including Maryland, New York, and Oregon have announced similar programmes.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky said that the country continues to see fall in Covid-19 cases nationwide. The seven-day national average is 22,877 cases per day. This represents yet another decrease of about 25 per cent from the prior seven-day average.
With 22,738 new infections reporting in the last 24 hours, the total number of cases in the country has risen to 33,947,189, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
This is the eighth consecutive day that the United States has reported fewer than 30,000 cases a day.
The 669 Covid-related deaths reported on Tuesday took the national total to 605,208.
The seven-day average of daily deaths has declined to 501 per day. A total of 27,606,442 people have so far recovered from coronavirus infection in the country.
The seven-day average of hospital admissions is 3,080, a decrease of nearly 17 per cent from the prior seven-day period.
«We are on a good downward path … with blue skies and better days ahead,» Walensky told reporters.
Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci said, «The case fatality rate of the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically diminished over a period of about a year, such that we’re down to around 2 per cent.»
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a 14-per-cent fall in global Covid-19 cases. As India’s Covid-19 cases continue to fall, the country’s total confirmed caseload crossed 27 million Tuesday.
