More in U.S. Now Vaccinated Than Infected

More Americans have taken at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine than have tested positive for the coronavirus, an early but still hopeful milestone in the race to end the pandemic.

As of yesterday evening, 26.5 million Americans had received one or both doses of the current vaccines, data gathered by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker show. Since the first patient tested positive in the U.S. nearby Seattle a year ago, 26.2 million people in the country have tested positive for the disease, which has killed nearly 450,000 people, Johns Hopkins University data showed.

The U.S. has been administering vaccines at a faster daily rate than any country in the world, giving about 1.35 million doses per day, according to data gathered by Bloomberg News. While the rollout stumbled in its early days, in the six weeks since the first shots went into arms almost 7.8% of Americans have gotten one or more doses, and 1.8% are fully vaccinated.

“It’s worth noting that today—for the first time—the data said more people were vaccinated than were reported as newly diagnosed cases,” Paula Cannon, a professor of microbiology at the University of Southern California, said. “That’s worth celebrating. I’m all for that win.”

Only a few other countries have surpassed the milestone: Israel, the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates beat the U.S. to the more-vaccinations-than-cases level days or weeks ago. After the holiday surge in U.S. cases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials are calling the top, though that’s likely due to behavioral changes and not a major impact from the vaccines.

New infections, hospitalizations, and emergency-department visits are beginning to fall, said Jay Butler, the agency’s deputy infectious disease chief. “While these trends are encouraging, I want to stress that the numbers nationally are still high, and they’re as high as they’ve been at any point in the pandemic up to this point,” he said Friday. “If this pandemic were a stock, we might be wanting to sell.” Michelle Fay Cortez and Emma Court have more.

• Covid-19 deaths have also begun to decline in all parts of the U.S. New counts had already been receding in the U.S. for about three weeks, but reported deaths, a lagging indicator that’s the ultimate measure of Covid-19’s impact, had remained near record levels. Now, the seven-day average has shown signs of having peaked in all four U.S. Census Bureau regions. Read more from Jonathan Levin.