When Alaska opened vaccine availability to all residents back on March 9th, it kicked off the next stage of COVID vaccinations in the United States. As of the end of March, 17 states had moved to general availability for adults, and a further 20 have taken or will that step in the first week of April. Only four states and the District of Columbia will not have opened general access by the 3rd week in April, and there’s a decent chance those states move their dates up as well.
(Note: After this post was written, CNN reported that the Biden administration would move the nationwide general availability date from May 1st to April 19th)
It’s no surprise that these progressions combined with increased vaccine distribution means that the United States is vaccinating more citizens a day than ever before. The U.S. gave out 15 million vaccination shots in the first four days of April. At that rate, the country could hit close to 100 million shots just this month. New Mexico is leading the way with 52% of adults having received at least one shot and in 28 other states more than 40% of the adult population have received at least one shot. All states have hit at least 32% of the adult population vaccinated.
Much like the COVID testing process last year, the American health care system can be slow and rickety, but once it gets going it can hit some impressive highs. While there are still millions of Americans waiting to get their first shot, particularly in coastal states where there is greater demand for the vaccine, there’s a good chance every American who wants a vaccine appointment will have one by the end of May.
So what comes next? For the Biden administration, it’s a focus on convincing the segment of Americans who aren’t actively trying to get vaccinated but aren’t actively opposed to it either. The administration has launched a $10 million ad campaign with one of the four ads in Spanish and another focused on Black Americans. They will also look to approve the Pfizer vaccine for 12-15 year-olds after a positive study was released. Both Pfizer and Moderna have started studies looking at children as young as 6 months old and the most likely outcome is that all children will be eligible for vaccinations by the end of the summer.
For states and localities, reopenings have begun a few weeks too soon. Some states such as West Virginia and Texas have dropped basically all restrictions, and even the states who have maintained disciplined restrictions have started to lift them in recent weeks. Increased activity will probably keep the virus going for a few more months, but vaccinations and natural immunity will converge to run it down to very low levels.
For the rest of us, it will be a slow reintegration into the lives and rhythms we left behind in February 2020. It won’t happen all at once they way that the pandemic washed over us last March, but normality will arrive sooner than you think. Mask requirements and other distancing rules that are easy to integrate will remain in many places for longer, but otherwise life will return to what it was surprisingly quickly.
Pandemics (like the one in 1918) don’t tend to leave a major mark on history the way that wars or recessions and depressions do. The changes that society is forced to make are mostly temporary, a detour of history more than a significant turn. Obviously, some changes will remain, such as an increase in working from home, but that was a change that had already begun. The pandemic will remain a major event in the minds of those who lived it for years to come, but soon enough it will become a footnote of history.
Even More Hispanic Voting Research
We’ve now extensively covered the debate over the Hispanic vote shift in 2020, but just as I thought we were finished, a new report on the issue came out. Equis Research released their 2020 post-mortem, which matches a lot of our previous conclusions but also added a few interesting new observations.
Analyzing Latino areas in seven different states, the vote shift ranged from a three point GOP shift in Maricopa County, AZ to a 20 point shift in majority South American ancestry precincts of Miami-Dade. That was notably a larger shift than even Cuban areas of Miami-Dade.
In polling from 2019 up to the election, the largest shifts within the Hispanic population were among conservatives, younger women, and non-college voters. Remember that Hispanic women are still more Democratic than Hispanic men and that this is looking at vote shifts over the course of the campaign.
Conservative Latinos became significantly more motivated to vote during the the campaign compared to liberal and moderate Latinos. This was particularly true among conservative Latinas, who went from 68% motivated to vote to 77% motivated to vote, a much larger increase than any other measured group.
If you’re interested in this topic, I’d encourage you to read through the whole slide deck, there’s a wealth of interesting information.
Amazon Unionization Election
The union election at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama concluded last Monday, but results have not yet been released. It could be anywhere from days to weeks until we know the outcome as both Amazon and the union are able to challenge individual ballots before the NLRB counts the votes.
While we wait for the results, there are a couple good articles worth reading. The first from Huffington Post runs down how messy and drawn out the legal fight could get even after we get the results. There’s a good chance that there are months of legal wrangling ahead regardless of the results.
The second article from Brandon Magner at Labor Law Lite looks at how the union election would have been conducted differently had the PRO Act already become law. The PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act is the union-backed reforms to labor law that has passed the House and is pending in the Senate. The legislation changes labor law in a lot of different ways and Magner’s rundown provides a helpful real-world example of how the PRO Act would work.