After witnessing a sharp decline in new cases since early January, the drop dissipated on Monday and Tuesday. Does this reflect a pause? The impact of the emerging variants? Or, is it merely an artifact of last week's winter storms, which may have depressed reported new cases temporarily? Time will tell...
Vaccinations plunged yesterday to nearly the lowest level in a month. As last week's weather hampered distribution and the states exhausted available supplies, supply chain issues drove this decline. The good news - the U.S. distributed an astonishing 6.9 million new doses yesterday; expect to see high vaccination rates in the coming days.
Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are plunging faster than most experts anticipated, forcing another round of downward revisions to experts' forecast models. Further, shrinking test-positivity reconciles the falling infections to stable new cases - we are better now at detecting infections rather than seeing a change in the infection rate.
The big news this week, of course, is Friday's FDA advisory committee meeting to evaluate the Emergency Use Authorization request from Johnson & Johnson for its Covid-19 vaccine. In a release this morning, the FDA reported that the vaccine exceeded its safety and efficacy targets. If approved as expected, the vaccine could be in use early next week.
Separately, Pfizer, Modera, and J&J representatives expressed confidence in having 220 million combined doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and 20 million of the J&J vaccine ready for shipment by the end of March. This supply would vaccinate 130 million people in the U.S. - more than 60% of the adult population. It also represents 3.76 million doses per day, compared to the 1.27 million administered per day recently.
