With vaccines being administered, North Dakota sees a decrease in active Covid-19 cases

The new year has finally arrived and kicked 2020 out the door . . . well, maybe not completely. Covid-19 has been present for almost 10 long months and has now managed to carry itself into 2021.

Toward the end of 2020, the world kept its eye on North Dakota’s daily positivity rate for Covid-19 and the state’s lack of responsibility to clean up its mess. However, since the start of the new year, ND’s mask mandate has stayed in place and its positivity rates have seemed to slowly decrease.

On Nov. 15, 2020, the state’s daily positivity rate was at its highest at 16.02% according to health.nd.gov. This sent news stations across the nation into a frenzy with articles about how bad North Dakota’s condition was and how bad it will soon become as the temperatures continued to drop.

However, the predicted nationwide spike after Thanksgiving did not appear to happen for North Dakota and exactly two weeks after the holiday, the state’s daily positivity rate was at 8.97% and has since shown to decrease.

Families and friends getting together for the winter holidays and causing a spike in cases were also predicted. Again, daily cases have still remained decreasing.

North Dakota’s daily positivity rate at the time of writing this article had decreased to 4.59% and the total number of cases now adds up to 94,830 with total deaths at 1,352.

The state received 52,525 doses of the vaccine to be distributed to providers. Providers have administered 42,790 of those doses. 388 enrolled provider sites are available for citizens across the state.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that if 75-80% of the population of the United States receives the vaccine, then the country should reach herd immunity a couple of months later. He also said that if only 40-50% of the population receives the vaccine, it will increase the time it takes to reach that level of protection.

“Let’s say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated,” Fauci told The Harvard Gazette. “If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.”

If Fauci’s predictions are correct, 2021 is off to a hopeful start.