HARTFORD, Conn. — For a time, the U.S. was close to leading the world in vaccination rates, because so many of the vaccines were manufactured in the U.S. While the U.S. is still well above average in a world where only one-third of the people are fully vaccinated, the nation is starting to fall behind more and more countries.
As of September 30, the U.S. is the 41st-ranked country in the world in terms of percentage of the population fully vaccinated, at just under 56%. Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and Malta currently lead the world at 84%.
While those percentages are going up slowly, they’re no longer going up steadily. After the delta wave of the coronavirus led to a surge in vaccinations over the summer, which got the 14-day rolling average up to 920,000 shots per day by Labor Day, the country had since slumped to just under 700,000.
Connecticut continues to do much better than the U.S. as a whole, and while our rate of new vaccinations started declining after Labor Day as well, it seems to have stabilized at about 6,000 to 7,000 per day. That means the state’s percentage of both partially and fully vaccinated people is going up by about one-tenth of a percentage point each day, or one full percentage point every ten to eleven days.
Connecticut has just under 69% of its total population fully vaccinated as of September 30, so if the state can keep up the pace, that would put the percentage by Halloween at around 72%, which is right around the time the cold weather could fuel another surge in cases. Keeping that pace would put the percentage at around 75% by Thanksgiving and 78% by New Year’s Eve.
Those projections may be overly optimistic, but it also doesn’t factor in one huge possibility. If children aged 5 through 11 get authorized to get the Pfizer vaccine in November, that would mean another (estimated) 8 percent of the state population immediately becomes eligible.
If that happens, some of that group could also be fully vaccinated by year’s end, which means hitting 80% by New Year’s Day isn’t out of the question. Getting there, or even getting close, would make it harder for the delta variant to cause a huge surge over the winter.
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