The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday about 79.4 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 43 million people who have been fully vaccinated by Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine or the two-dose series made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
The work to distribute the vaccine comes as more than 540,000 people in the United States have died after contracting the virus.
Providers are administering about 2.25 million doses per day on average. Figures show the date shots were reported, rather than the date shots were given.
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Some experts have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the population needs to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to reach herd immunity, when transmission of the virus substantially slows because enough people have been protected through infection or vaccination.
A number of factors will determine how quickly this threshold is met, especially the pace at which newly vaccinated people join those who are immune after past infections. But the presence of more transmissible virus variants could complicate that progress.
The projection below only shows the share of the total population with at least one shot based on the current rate of vaccination, but it provides a rough indication of when the virus’s spread could begin to stall. ....
