US coronavirus: January has been the deadliest month for Covid-19 with nearly 80,000 lives lost so far in the US

With those additional doses, Biden said there would be enough to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans — nearly the entire US population — by the end of summer or early fall.

As of Wednesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 20 million have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, a benchmark the Trump administration had said would be reached by the end of 2020.

Supply of vaccines not meeting demand

Struggling after the stress of nearly a year of responding to the pandemic, states are eager to administer vaccines quickly and attempt a return to life as normal.

“We have to defeat it because Mississippians are done. We’re done burying loved ones who were lost to this virus. We’re done with stressed hospitals. We’re done with the fearful talk of lockdowns and shutdowns. We’re ready for community again,” said Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who announced that the state celebrated about 200,000 vaccines delivered.

The director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said he was “very encouraged” by the new presidential administration’s approach to vaccinations, but said the state is still struggling with the dearth of vaccines.

“We know that right now the number of individuals who want to be vaccinated greatly outstrips the supply of vaccine that we have available,” Dr. Nirav Shah said.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said his conversations with the Biden administration have made him feel hopeful about the future of vaccine distribution, but that “we cannot yet count on additional supply yet.”

Even if the administration delivers on the 16% increase in allocations promised, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it won’t be enough.

“We’re functionally out. We start to get a new allocation over the next few days,” Cuomo said.

Indiana will receive almost 13,000 more doses if it gets 16% more, Gov. Eric Holcomb said Wednesday.

“That will not go to waste,” said Holcomb. “Like Governor Polis and 48 other governors, we need more.”

Variants stoke demand and fears

Adding to public fears is the spread of variants of the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced that two cases of the variant first identified in the United Kingdom have been confirmed in the state.

It has been detected in more than 20 US states, and New York has 42 known cases, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said Wednesday.

The variant and others reported around the country are beginning to affect test results, Dr. Timothy Stenzel, director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health, said in a briefing Wednesday.

The agency is asking test developers to ensure their tests can detect the virus as it continues to mutate, Stenzel said.

“We are going to start beginning to ask developers how they think they can monitor for variants of concern,” he said.

The threat of variants has made reopening the state a greater concern in California, a recent epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said.

“This would not be the time to think just because we are reopening that things are looking rosy,” she said noting that asymptomatic spread is a problem. “We do need to move through the next few weeks with caution. At many other points where we’ve been reopening our sectors, we in fact have seen a bump up in our cases (and) we can’t really afford that.”

The good news is that the B.1.1.7 variant doesn’t seem to affect the efficacy of the vaccines now available at all, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert.

For his part, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tried to calm fears around the variants with assurances that the groundwork is already being laid to fight them.

“We should not be frightened, but I think we need to be prepared,” Bourla said at the Bloomberg The Year Ahead event Tuesday. “Once we discover something that it is not as effective, we will very, very quickly produce a booster dose that will be a small variation to the current one.”

School reopening safety

Meanwhile, there was a glimmer of good news Tuesday for parents who are hoping to return their kids to school.

A report from the CDC said that with the right mitigation strategies, it’s possible to open K-12 schools for in-person learning with minimal Covid-19 transmission.

Those mitigation strategies include wearing masks, social distancing and limiting time in shared indoor spaces, according to the study from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine said he aims to have anyone who works in a school receive their first vaccine dose in the month of February at the very least in hopes of sending all students back to school by March 1.

Currently, people older than 75 and those with certain medical conditions are able to receive vaccines. On February 1, those 70 and older and employees of K-12 schools will be eligible for the vaccine, he said in a news conference Tuesday.

School reopenings have been a priority for many officials as students across the country have spent months learning remotely. But local leaders have approached the return in various ways.

Of the 20 largest school districts in the country, nine are currently all online, eight offer a choice of either full in-person or all online, two have a hybrid plan and one in Hawaii varies plans based on infection rates among different islands.