"I called last week for an appointment, was scheduled within the week to receive my first dose and when I arrived, there were only six of us in line," an older friend in her later sixties reported to me yesterday. While she may have simply been lucky, there have been increasing accounts of people able to more easily register for their first dose.
In spite of some slowdowns in the delivery of vaccinations due to the snowstorm last week, the number of people receiving their first or second dose in North Carolina continues to climb. According to the
CDC Vaccine Tracker, as of February 22, the state has administered 2,068,505 doses. With a population of roughly 10,500,000, 13 percent of North Carolina has received at least one dose of the vaccine. 691,447, or seven percent of the state, have received two doses. While this might, on the surface, sound slow, it's important to recognize that each week, due to efficiencies gained, the number of vaccinations administered noticeably increases. (In the last seven days alone, hospitals, clinics and vaccination events have administered 451,070 vaccines.)
While we are not out of the woods, it is encouraging to simultaneously see the positivity test rates decreasing each week, too. On February 1, the positivity test rate was 9.7%, on February 8, 8.3%, February 15, 6.5% and today, 5.9%.
What is not as easy to parse out is how many residents have immunity due to having had COVID. Of course, questions linger around how long immunity lasts. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that only one in 4.6 cases of non-hospitalized COVID was a documented case. In other words, for every person who tested positive, 3.6 additional people had the disease. In a study published in November 2020 in
Clinical Infectious Diseases, authors estimated that that number was much higher, or one in eight, between February and September 2020. Nature, in an
article published September 9, 2020, estimated 3 to 20 times higher during the February to April 2020 time period. It's important to remember that both of those studies were conducted earlier in the pandemic when testing availability (and accuracy) was a real limitation. In an interview last month
on the New York Times Daily, science reporter Donald McNeil said most epidemiological models now multiply the number of documented cases by about four to get the actual number of cases. If that's the case, roughly 32 percent of North Carolinians have had COVID-19, since the first documented case in the state March 3, 2020.
In a recent
study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in Science last month, initial findings stated that the "immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection." There are certainly more questions to answer, such as how this varies according to the strength of the case and immune response, but this is promising. The NIH states that these results "provide hope that people receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will develop similar lasting immune memories after vaccination."
If you have not received or made an appointment to receive your vaccine, visit
here to find the most convenient locations. You can also call the State-wide COVID-19 Vaccine Help Center here: 1-888-675-4567. You can also contact Wake County through their
website or call their hotline at 919-250-1515. People age 65+ can put their names on the County’s waiting list to receive a vaccine at one of their sites/events. Starting February 24, in accordance with newly-updated state guidelines for Group 3, educators and school personnel (K-12), as well as childcare providers, will be eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccine.
