More and more Americans are coming to terms with the idea of being vaccinated for the Covid-19 coronavirus, but fewer expect life to get back to normal any time soon.
Although the number of U.S. cases, and deaths, continue to climb, some experts say the worst may soon be over.
“We’re going to see a lot of deaths in the next two months but there is a ray of sunshine,” says Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a George Washington University medical professor and CNN medical analyst.
“Over the last four days for the first time in months, we’ve seen a steady decline … a thousand per day fewer hospitalizations in the United States,” Reiner said. “We’ve seen the same trend in new cases.”
At least part of the reason is that people are more willing to be vaccinated, like President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
According to a new USA Today and Suffolk University poll, “56% of those surveyed say they will get the vaccine as soon it was available to them, a jump of 10 percentage points since … December and up 30 points since October.”
“Most of the shift has come from those who were reluctant to get the vaccine until others had taken it first,” says USA Today. “Those who expressed that view made up 47% in October, 32% in December and just 22% now.”
On the other hand, the number of those who previously declared they would not be vaccinated has “barely budged” from 20% of those surveyed in October and December to 18% now.
The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Tracker showed on Monday that U.S. Covid cases now exceed 24 million (24,018,793), while nearly 400,000 (398,307) have died.
In addition, a growing number of states report cases of the mutated coronavirus that was first identified in Britain. This Covid-19 variant is likely to become the most common in the U.S. over the next few weeks.
USA Today cautions that optimism about “returning to normal” is declining — with fewer than half of those polled now predicting it will happen by the end of this year and 1 in 5 saying it will never happen.