COVID-19: A Year In
posted by Tyjahn Stokes | March 5, 2021 | In News2020 will always burn in people’s minds not just because of the celebrities and entertainers we lost, but also because of the monumental disease COVID-19. Now it has been nearly a year since people’s lives changed, possibly forever.
COVID cases, especially in North Carolina, have dropped significantly since last year. According to the CDC, the 7-day average of new cases declined for 43 days consecutively since January 11. However, even with these declines, the number of new cases still exceeds the first peak of the disease on April 20, 2020.
In North Carolina, according to Our World in Data, 2.66 million doses of COVID vaccines have been given out, with 944, 000 people fully vaccinated, of that only nine percent of the North Carolina population is vaccinated. There have been 80.5 million doses given out in the United States, 27 million people vaccinated, and 8.21% of the total population vaccinated.
The vaccination numbers in terms of the U.S. are pretty low, especially in the African American and Hispanic communities, who are very skeptical of the disease, due to America’s history of mistreating Black people and misleading Black people. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans die of COVID-19 at three times the white Americans rate.
According to Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who is a voting member on the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee who believes the number of vaccinations for Asian-Americans and white people are higher proportionally than Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans because of the resources. She told Los Angeles ABC affiliate KGO: “The distribution of vaccine so far by race and ethnicity is about right for white and Asian populations. But, lower proportionately for Latino, Black, Native American, and Alaskan native populations.”
Nonetheless, according to CNN, more than 41 million people in the U.S. received one dose of the vaccination, and 17 million people received two doses of the COVID vaccine. The CDC data shows that this is only 4.9% of the overall population of the United States.
While Covid has been rapidly going down not only in the state of N.C. and the United States as a whole, health experts believe that the disease could jump up by springtime because of the weather. This prediction is not precisely totally ridiculous, seeing as though, during the summertime of 2020, according to NPR, cases reached about 78,000 per day.
Overall, it is up to Americans to decide if they want this disease to go down even more so everyone can enjoy the world again or if we are going to deal with this another year.
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