Still not enough, but getting better.
Texas this week expects to receive more than half a million first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from the federal government, state health officials announced Friday.
The 520,425 doses will be shipped to 344 providers, including 82 hubs, in 166 counties across the state, according to the Department of State Health Services.
Officials attributed the boost in available vaccine to a 30 percent increase in Moderna doses being sent to the state and a “one-time return” of 126,750 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that the state had been required set aside for a program that overestimated the number of needed doses.
Doses that had been set aside, for a long-term care facilities program, will specifically go to providers located in counties that have been allocated “significantly” fewer vaccines than their share of the population, including in the suburban Houston area, health officials said.
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As of Friday, providers across the state had administered about 2.2 million doses, according to DSHS. More than 1.75 million people had received at least one dose while more than 410,000 people were considered fully vaccinated.
Reread that last paragraph, please. When you see “the state had administered about 2.2 million doses” of the COVID vaccine, do you think “2.2 million people have been vaccinated for COVID”? Because if you do, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do, what do you then think when you read “1.75 million people had received at least one dose while more than 410,000 people were considered fully vaccinated”? It’s a very different reality, isn’t it? That’s the magnitude of the problem here.
For what it’s worth, the 520K doses is almost exactly what would be needed to meet the 75K per day goal that Greg Abbott has set. (We’ll put aside the second-shot question for the moment.) Again, though, this puts us in range of getting everyone vaccinated in a little more than a year. We don’t have that kind of time. We need to be aiming for something like one million vaccinations per week, or close to 150K per day, to get this done in a timely fashion, and that’s still a duration of more than six months. Federal help is coming – in fact, it’s already here – and I expect to see our daily and weekly totals rise soon, but we really need to appreciate how massive the scope of this project is, and how far behind we already are thanks to the criminal incompetence and negligence of the previous administration and its enablers. Be very, very upset about this.
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