News Room

The urgency of vaccinating nursing home residents is evident in the numbers. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 136,000 residents and employees of long-term care facilities in the U.S. alone, accounting for nearly 40% of all U.S. deaths linked to the disease. Echoing that urgency, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar declared in mid-December, “We can have every nursing home patient vaccinated in the United States by Christmas.” Yet, by Christmas, most states had barely begun. Other states were still far behind when West Virginia became the first state to finish round one of the two-dose vaccine series in nursing homes on December 30.

The effort to get Americans vaccinated has been "extremely poor" and hampered by avoidable setbacks, experts have told Newsweek. However, some states, like West Virginia and North Dakota, have emerged as relative outliers as the country struggles to hit targets. Thanks in part to Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's COVID vaccine and treatment funding program, vaccines have been developed in record time, and distribution has gone relatively well, according to academics. But the country has tripped up at arguably the most important hurdle: administering the shots that will protect people from COVID.

Even though we are slowly beginning to get the vaccine for Covid-19, we are encouraged to continue to wear our masks and stay in our bubble as often as possible  to help keep us safe and healthy. Dr. Julie Swann, professor with North Carolina State University, joined Wilson to talk about the latest on Covid-19 & why it’s time to upgrade your mask and stay in your bubble. Dr. Julie Swann is the department head and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State. Professor Swann has also served as the science advisor for pandemic response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Dr. Swann has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Vox, and USA Today.

After the initial excitement following the authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccines, a harsh reality set in. People who want a vaccine can’t get it, some counties have more than others and older people are camping out for it the way they once might have for tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert. All of this would seem to be an indication of supply chain problems or systems breakdowns. In fact, it’s more about a shortage of employees to support the supply chains and distributions. Some states are even considering calling up the National Guard.

One takeaway from the past year is that many people who think they can model coronavirus infections and deaths often cannot. There’s the Cornell professor who predicted 1,200 cases at the Ivy League university, but wound up off by 66%, since the total amount through December 31 came out closer to 400. Now meet Sheldon Jacobson, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In June, he predicted up to seven college football players would die from COVID. “I guarantee someone is going to die,” Jacobson said in June, according to CBS Sports. “The virus does not discriminate.” But no one died during the college football season that ended earlier this week.