Much of the COVID-19 news this week has been good: The vaccine supply, while still lacking, is growing, with about 10% of Pennsylvania adults having received the two shots needed for full protection. Moreover, the levels of new cases, deaths, hospitalizations, nursing home infections and nursing home deaths in Pennsylvania have dropped significantly from their peaks.
Also, as the result of a newly-approved vaccine — three are now available — and expanded manufacturing, President Joe Biden this week predicted there will be enough vaccine for all Americans by the end of May.
It feels like a convergence of positive forces, with enough people now vaccinated to start to make a difference, combined with factors such as the prospect of warmer weather soon contributing to a drop in cases as happened last year in Pennsylvania.
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But if there’s one wild card that could reverse progress, it’s the presence of COVID-19 mutations, called variants. At least three have arisen, and they have a tendency to spread more easily. There’s a possibility that at least one makes people sicker. It’s also unclear how well the available vaccines protect against the variants. All those things are presently being studied.
In a worst-case scenario, the variants will prove more dangerous and become the dominant strain, potentially reversing some of the recent progress toward eliminating COVID-19 as a major threat.
So far, variants have been relatively scarce in Pennsylvania, with the state reporting 39 cases as of Friday morning. All the Pennsylvania cases involve the same variant, with the state so far reporting no cases of the other two that have turned up elsewhere in the United States.
All told, about 2,800 variant cases have been detected in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida has the most, about 650, followed by Michigan, with 421.
In other COVID-19 news, Pennsylvania on Friday registered 2,757 new infections and 43 deaths, bringing the toll to 24,262 since the state’s first death about a year ago. The number hospitalized, 1,587, is far below the peak of more than 6,000 reached in late December.
As of Friday morning, Pennsylvania had received about 4.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine. It had given out about 3 million shots, with about 950,000 people receiving the two shots needed for full protection.