As of this writing, about 10% of of New Hampshire’s 1.1 million adults have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
That includes the 106,000 people who have received both doses of the Modern or Pfizer vaccines and the estimated 11,000 who got the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine at the Motor Speedway this weekend.
It’s an incredible accomplishment that we should be proud of, despite all the drawbacks and confusion, but we have a long, long way to go. Containing COVID-19 will take at least seven times as many New Hampshire adults getting all their necessary shots and even then, the new variants might undo some of the benefits.
Still, we are entering a new, more hopeful phase of the pandemic. The question for the Monitor’s COVID tracker is how best to keep an eye on it.
This weekly article started out concentrating mostly on the number of new cases discovered each day because we didn’t have a good sense of how contagious the virus would be. Over the past nine months we’ve added and removed other measures, but the daily new-case count is still the metric that resonates with people.
In an increasingly vaccinated world, however, it may no longer be the metric that matters most.
The great accomplishment of vaccines will almost certainly not be stamping out COVID-19. It is probably here to stay, like the flu. The value of vaccines will be to reduce the carnage.
Some public officials say that it will be more important in the post-pandemic world to keep track of deaths and hospitalizations than new cases, because their resurgence would be the signal that the virus is undergoing a disturbing change.
With that in mind, the tracker is adding trend lines in the number of COVID-related deaths to our weekly count and we’re dropping the positivity rate of PCR tests, because it seems to have currently stabilized at a nice, low number.
You can see our daily updated charts and other information on the Monitor’s COVID-19 page at www.concordmonitor.com/Special-Sections/Covid-19.
Number of new cases – what’s the trend? Still going down.
The two-week average for new cases has fallen for 15 days in a row. If it keeps declining at this rate, we’ll be down to almost no new cases by the start of April.
That seems unlikely but it shows how well we’ve been doing since the winter peak in late January.
Number of hospitalizations and deaths – what’s the trend? Improving.
At the start of February, an average of nine people were dying every day from COVID-19; by the start of March that figure was down to fewer than three people.
At the start of February there were 191 people in the hospital with COVID019; as of Sunday there are 88 of them, the smallest number in four months.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
