From the blog of The COVID Tracking Project: A Vaccine Arrives as Deaths Rise and Southern California Cases Soar: This Week in COVID-19 Data, Dec 17 | The COVID Tracking Project. Click or tap through for many links and graphs. Excerpts:
This week, American healthcare workers started receiving their first doses of a new COVID-19 vaccine. Early data has shown that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is safe and highly effective, reaching 95 percent efficacy about a week after the second of two doses. The second COVID-19 vaccine under evaluation for use in the United States is expected to receive an FDA emergency use authorization as soon as tomorrow.
COVID-19 vaccine doses won’t arrive in many US nursing homes until next week or the week after that, but a few residents in West Virginia and Florida got their first shot this week. While staff and residents in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities wait for doses to arrive, 863 more US facilities reported outbreaks than in the previous week, and known cases of COVID-19 in long-term-care facilities are high and rising. Vaccinations in these facilities have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives over the next few months: In the past seven days, states reported more than 5,000 deaths linked to long-term-care facilities.
In the United States as a whole, cases rose only slightly this week (Thursday, December 10 through Wednesday, December 16) compared with the previous week’s numbers, which included Thanksgiving reporting backlogs. Hospitalizations continue to climb, and deaths are rising across the country, reflecting the high cases and hospitalizations we’ve seen since early November. For the second week in a row, more COVID-19 deaths were reported in the United States than at any other time in the pandemic. Yesterday alone, states and territories reported 3,448 COVID-19 deaths, 25 percent more than were reported on the worst day of the spring surge.
Our count of US COVID-19 deaths currently stands at 298,823, and will almost certainly reach 300,000 this week. It’s worth noting that from March through early November, when official COVID-19 deaths remained well under 250,000, at least 350,000 more people died than usual in the United States. A quarter of those “excess deaths” were officially attributed to causes other than COVID-19, but may actually have been due to the virus. The New York Times offers a close look at where deaths are above normal in the United States.
These COVID-19 deaths haven’t affected all Americans equally. As of this week, US states report that more than 50,000 Black people have died of COVID-19. As stark as this number is, it’s also an undercount, in part because for more than 20,000 US COVID-19 deaths reported to date, no racial or ethnic demographic data was reported.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the data has shown that Black people have been much more likely to die than white people in the same jurisdiction. In Washington, DC, where the known disparity is the most extreme, Black residents have been more than six times as likely to die from COVID-19 as white residents. Nationwide, if these disparities did not exist—if Black people were only as likely to die of COVID-19 as white people are—more than 22,000 Black Americans would still be alive.
