New COVID-19 infections are down in the U.S. to the lowest level since March 2020.
For the past 56 weeks, COVID-19 infections have been tracked nationwide. Currently, the case counts are low and the virus infection rate has been effectively contained.
By the numbers: The U.S. averaged roughly 16,500 new cases per day over the past week, a 30% improvement over the week before. according to the CDC. New cases declined in 43 states and held steady in the other seven.
The official case counts haven’t been this low since Americans went into lockdown in March last year. Overall, roughly 33 million Americans — about 10% of the population — have tested positive for COVID-19 and about 595,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. since March 2020.
The virus is under control, nationwide and in every state, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines. Just over half of American adults are now fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
As of May 27, 2021, nearly 133 million people in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, and the national percentage of COVID-19 tests that came back positive over the last 7 days was less than 3%. This is one of the lowest rates the United States has seen since widespread testing began.
Effectively, the U.S. was never able to control the virus without vaccines. The risk is still high for unvaccinated people, as reported by the Washington Post. An average of about 500 Americans per day are still dying from COVID-19, almost all of them unvaccinated.
The U.S. has finally gotten the virus down to a level that just about every public health expert agrees is safe. Fewer than 20,000 cases per day, spread across the U.S. population of 331.5 million people, is a relatively low number of cases, and that number continues to improve every week.
Florida
Florida has more total cases per day — about 1,800, on average — than any other state. But again, that’s spread over a state with over 20 million people, and its numbers are improving just like the rest of the country’s. Florida’s daily case counts fell by 25% just this week.
The bottom line: Cases in the U.S. are low, and they’re likely to stay low. The FDA approved for emergency use vaccines work. They’ve brought COVID-19 infection cases to their lowest levels, and because that improvement is the result of vaccines, there’s no reason to believe the virus will start gaining significant ground again any time soon.
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