[ad_1]
MADISON, Wisconsin (AP) – About 2 million additional residents of Wisconsin, including those with certain pre-existing conditions, will be eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in the next cycle to be announced later this week, the deputy secretary said on Monday. to State Health.
It would be the biggest expansion of people eligible for the vaccine in Wisconsin since the first doses began entering the state in mid-December. These targeted frontline healthcare workers, then extended to people over 65 and this month to a group of 700,000 people. including all teachers, were made eligible.
Health officials have been under pressure to expand the number of eligible people to those with underlying health conditions that could put them at greater risk of serious illness in the event of COVID-19. State health officials have been working to determine what pre-existing conditions would make a person eligible and are expected to announce the next group on Thursday, around 2 million people, said Julie Willems Van Dijk, deputy secretary of the health services department of the Wisconsin. .
It didn’t make sense to allow such a large group of people to become eligible earlier when the vaccine supply was limited to just 70,000 doses per week, Willems Van Dijk said in an interview. But now that the state is receiving more than double that number of doses per week, not counting 48,000 one-dose vaccines from Johnson & Johnson this week, the time has come to expand eligibility, she said.
Expanding too quickly and creating hope that the vaccine is available even though supply already cannot meet demand remains a concern, said Willems Van Dyke.
“It keeps me awake at night, that we’ll go too fast,” she said.
Wisconsin’s vaccine supply is expected to increase at the end of March through April, in line with President Joe Biden’s pledge that there will be enough vaccines nationwide for all those who wish it by the end of May. State health officials say anyone who wants to get the shot will be able to get it by the end of June or early July.
Progress in vaccinating those who are already eligible has also been taken into account, said Willems Van Dyke.
More than 60% of people over 65 have received at least one dose. They are among nearly 1.1 million people who received at least one dose and nearly 604,000 had been fully vaccinated in Wisconsin, based on state health data.
In total, 19.7% of the state’s population had received at least one dose, ranking it 18th nationally, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national average is 18.1%.
It is difficult to estimate the number of people in the next eligibility group, known as 1c, as many of them may already be eligible such as teachers, healthcare workers, transport workers in common, grocery store workers and people over 65, said Willems Van Dyke.
“It is increasingly difficult to know exactly how many people will be in an age group, but it will be a significant size group,” she said, estimating it would be around 2 million.
The state is rushing to expand vaccinations to get ahead of more contagious variants of the virus. Two variants have now been detected in Wisconsin even as new cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to decline. As of Monday, nearly 567,000 people had tested positive since the start of the pandemic and 6,481 have died. No new deaths were reported on Monday and there were only 178 new positive cases, but the numbers are still lower on Monday.
Over the past two weeks, the sliding average number of new daily cases has declined 14.7% in Wisconsin, according to Johns Hopkins University. Wisconsin ranked 46th nationally for new cases per capita over the past two weeks.
As the number of cases has slowed, businesses that had been closed are starting to reopen.
The Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Public Museum, and Harley Davidson Museum all opened this weekend for the first time this year. Discovery World plans to open later this month.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the museums were opened after careful planning and coordination with the city’s health department.
COPYRIGHT 2021 BY CHANNEL 3000. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE POSTED, BROADCAST, REWRITED OR REDISTRIBUTED.
[ad_2]
Source link