Day 368: Groundhog Year

So the groundhog saw its shadow, which means we'll be having six more months of COVID. PlagueBlog regretfully welcomes you to Year 2, Day 2 of COVID in Massachusetts.

In other annual news, the WHO has finally gone to Wuhan, more than a year after the outbreak began.

Despite the abysmal failure of the CDC's vaccine scheduling software, the new COVID year brings us more vaccinations than victims:

As of Monday afternoon, 26.5 million Americans had received one or both doses of the current vaccines, according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. Since the first U.S. patient tested positive outside of Seattle a year ago, 26.3 million people in the country have tested positive for the disease, and 443,000 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

For reasons related to different software and general wariness, Massachusetts is behind in administering the vaccine:

The rollout in Massachusetts fell behind from the start. Other states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut began vaccinating nursing home residents and staff a week before Massachusetts started on Dec. 28. Since then, both of the required rounds of doses have been given at nursing homes in other New England states. In Massachusetts, which has one of the nation’s highest virus death rates in long-term care, most nursing homes have just completed their first round.

On the variant front, a travel ban against the South African variant strain continues to expand.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up four ninths of a percentage point today.