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 Today in Health it, the story is Vaccine Progress by the numbers. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. VMware was one of the first sponsors of this week in Health it, and they are one of the first sponsors of Today in Health.

it. They've committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start, and they recently completed an executive study with MIT on the top Healthcare trends, shaping it, resilience, covering how the pandemic drove unique. Transformation in healthcare. This is just one of many resources they have for healthcare professionals.

For this and several other great content pieces, check out vmware.com/go/healthcare. Alright, let's go back and take a look at the vaccine. I have a bunch of headlines here. I have a bunch of data insights. Most of the data is directly from the cdc. I have a couple maps, heat maps and those kind of things, so let's just get right to it.

The US surpassed a hundred million doses administered on March 12th. Equating 13.5% of the adult population, about 35 million people have been fully vaccinated. And let's see, over 32% of seniors, 65 years or older have been fully vaccinated. 61% have received at least one dose. But how are we doing? We are doing quite well.

Actually a hundred plus million doses have been administered and, but that's since the start. And we always knew this was gonna be the case. Once supply was there, we had the mechanism. We didn't have to stand up anything other than the health systems. And the, the partners for healthcare in the community that were already there and get them the vaccine, if we did that, they were gonna be pretty effective in getting it out there.

How are we doing towards the a hundred million in first a hundred days of this administration? So that's, uh, January 20th, first day of the administration. We're roughly 50 days in and we're at 89 million doses administered. So clearly we were sandbagging a fair amount. I understandably so. We didn't know how the production was gonna.

Come and we didn't, we also could not have anticipated the j and j vaccine being ready and the, uh, Merck deal being done. Actually, we could anticipate that since that was being talked about in January. Regardless, this is good progress. It's the direction we want it to be going, and if we can get to 89,000,050 days, I, I don't see any reason why we can't get to 160 million.

In 100 days, which would be phenomenal. Hopefully we'll keep the, uh, pedal to the metal. But again, I just wanna reiterate, I think the health system, the, uh, pharmacies, the, the Walmarts, the players in the community have the ability to get this vaccine out. We don't need to be rolling out any additional resources to make this happen.

We just need to get them the vaccine. I'm talking to health systems. I'm talking to hospitals who essentially have very good programs. They have mass vaccination programs. They have partnered in the community. They have great communication mechanisms. They have the clinical staff. They're ready to go. They just need more vaccine.

So if we are producing it, no reason to get all fancy. Just get it in their hands. I can name five cities right now that if you just gave it to those health systems, we would increase the numbers pretty significantly. Alright, let's take a look at some of the other headlines here. Multiple states, including Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Maryland have announced plans to reopen schools for in-person learning in the coming weeks.

And that is welcome, I'm sure, to many parents and way past overdue. I'm looking at these reports, I'm looking at the numbers, and quite frankly, there's an awful lot here that would indicate that there's very little risk of children getting the, of getting CVID, and there's very little risk of them being a carrier.

Alright, so that kind of information is coming out. Those kinds of studies are happening. I think it's, we are past the time when school should open. There's an awful lot of things that we don't see . That are happening, negative things that are happening to our children who aren't going to school. They are falling behind, they are suffering from, uh, depression and other things that you potentially don't see.

But we need to, to address those ailments just as much. Alright. So, CVS began scheduling vaccination appointments in 12 new states and two new cities on March 13th. And that's as it should be. They should be, uh, really hitting high gear at this point. Michigan will expand it. It's, uh, vaccine eligibility to all residents, 16 plus years of age.

On April 5th, and I think that's gonna happen across the board in April. I think we're gonna see that number drop very rapidly in my state right now it's 65 or over and that should drop very quickly as the vaccine starts to get out there. And we will see these numbers go up pretty significantly and we'll see the, the transmission go down.

Alright, so let's take a look at the numbers. Seven day daily average of reported cases decreased by 11% for the week of March 12th. There's been an eight week downward trend in reported cases, which have declined by 78%. We're not out of the woods completely. There's some states that are, are still struggling.

Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Delaware, as specifically New York City is still has a uh, a high rate. Miami still has a high rate. San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Austin, although all the numbers are, are down considerably, they're still high. There's still a, an absence of ICU beds in, uh, a couple of those locations, so we're not out of the woods yet.

All right, so I talked about some key metrics down 11% in terms of cases, hospitalizations, down 8%. I'm looking at these, just these trends and these maps by region. And it's down across the board. There's really no region that it's not down. It's down significantly in the south and the southeast, obviously, because spring has sprung.

If winter ever did arrive, you have a, a few, no, actually it's down in every region. So that is, uh, that's really positive. You have, uh, death rates are down, test positivity rates are mostly in green across the country. This is actually looking like we are, we're getting . Close to a point where we really can see the, the end in sight.

So I, I just wanted to give you some of these numbers. These are CD, C numbers. This is what they're reporting, a number of doses out there in the wild. If you wanna know that number, it's close to 200 million. So there's 200 million doses floating around out there right now. And as we said, over 105 million have been administered.

Which means that there's the pipeline's starting to build up and that we're starting to get some, some good quantities out there. Now, I know that's gonna vary by hospital and by location, and there's an awful lot of, uh, inefficiencies in the state reporting and whatnot. But again, these are all positive trends that are happening.

The, you know, I. Just wanted to give you the update. The update is positive on all fronts, and I think not only this, the information and the headlines and the CDC numbers that I'm looking at, but also the, the conversations I'm having with health systems and just in general. I just had a conversation with a health system in Texas, in, uh, downtown Dallas, and their numbers are way down.

Again, it's, we're not out of the woods. The count is lower than it's been at any point during this pandemic. But still, the length of stay on some of those beds is high, which puts them at risk if there's ever another spike. Again, we're not out of the woods, but things are looking good. I just thought I'd give you that update.

It's uh, pretty interesting, pretty positive, and I thought you could use some good news. So there you go. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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