Half of Americans have now received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and with children ages 12 to 15 now eligible for immunizations, the United States appears to be getting the coronavirus pandemic under control. But despite the tremendous progress, it’s still not clear that the nation will ever truly reach the herd immunity threshold — the point at which enough people in a population are immune to a pathogen to limit its spread.
More important, we may not need to achieve that goal in order to escape the pandemic.
More than 260,000 coronavirus cases have been linked to American colleges and universities since Jan. 1, and more than 700,000 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times survey of cases on campus.
Two new studies reveal that although COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has declined in the United States, 35.2% of adults 18 to 39 years and 8.7% of those 65 and older still said they would not partake as of March 2021 and November 2020, respectively.
Over and over, the pandemic has reinforced the reality of racial disparities in the U.S. health system. But that story remains difficult to see in the data, which is still inconsistently collected and reported across the country.
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