The COVID Vaccination Rate Is Going Up

The COVID vaccination rate is going up.

Let me repeat: The COVID vaccination rate is going up!

I'll say it again: The COVID vaccination rate is going up!!

I re-iterate: The COVID vaccination rate is going up!! 

People in the United States have their knickers in a knot because so many Americans haven't been vaccinated yet even as a new and far more contagious variant of the original SARS CoV-2 virus has been circulating and is likely to become the dominant variant in the near future.  To hear people talk, you'd think that no one in America is getting the vaccinated anymore. 

Not true.  According to the data Web site Our World In Data, 47.5 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, with about 55 percent of them partially vaccinated, as of Thursday, July 1.   The number of adults partially vaccinated adults is about 67 percent, according to other sources.  While we're not exactly close to herd immunity just yet, the numbers have been steadily rising and continue to do so.  About 680,000 Americans get vaccinated every day, and as of July 1, the number of  fully vaccinated Americans rose by one million, while the number of partially vaccinated Americans rose by an even bigger number - 1,630,000, according to Our World In Data.  The increase in fully vaccinated people in this country is roughly at a rate between one-fifth of a percent and half of a percent - about three-tenths of a percent from Wednesday to Thursday of this past week.  

Okay, a fraction of a percentage point is not a big increase, and everyone would agree that a daily vaccination increase of three million people, like we had back in April, would be preferable.  And it's too bad that we haven't met President Biden's goal of getting 70 percent of all adult Americans partially vaccinated by Independence Day.  But my point - and I do have one - is that more and more people are getting vaccinated against SARS CoV-2 every day, and it's not like people suddenly stopped going to their clinics, their doctors, or their local pharmacies and are letting all of those Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccine to waste!  We're chipping away at the number of unvaccinated Americans toward herd immunity.

Does that mean we shouldn't worry about the Delta variant?  Certainly not.  Should we be vigilant against the Delta variant?  Absolutely.  Is the pandemic over in the United States? No.  But things are a whole lot better than before and they continue to get better every day.  The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines all work against what I call the delta corona, and Johnson & Johnson just confirmed that its single-dose shot is just as effective against the variant as the mRNA double-dose injections.  And whether the vaccination numbers go up by a little or a lot, every increase helps.

In fact, seeing as how the daily vaccination numbers of this past Thursday were higher than usual, I think I can say that one good thing has come out of the Delta variant - people who were reluctant to get a shot beforehand were scared to death into getting vaccinated after hearing about it.

Now let's all get vaccinated . . . and let's get the world get vaccinated, too.