Despite a two-week delay on appointments for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Bucks County’s vaccination totals continued to climb steadily last week.
Through Saturday, 349,390 doses of vaccine had been administered by all Bucks County providers. That was enough to fully vaccinate 136,566 people in the county and partially vaccinate 88,992.
A number of people equivalent to 45 percent of Bucks County’s adult population of 501,350 has now been at least partially vaccinated, exceeding the statewide rate of 43 percent. Pennsylvania now ranks 10th in the nation in the percentage of its population that has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Throughout Pennsylvania, more than 7.1 million doses of vaccine have been administered, with almost 2.8 million fully vaccinated and 1.9 million partially vaccinated. Those numbers do not include Philadelphia, which reports separately from the rest of the state.
Anticipated vaccine numbers throughout the nation took an unexpected hit last week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration jointly recommended a pause on administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Shortly thereafter, Pennsylvania officials ordered suspension of the vaccine’s use for a temporary period that now extends to at least this Friday.
The pause was ordered as a cautionary measure after six women developed blood clotting issues after receiving the J&J vaccine. The number was a miniscule percentage of those vaccinated with J&J, but authorities wanted time to study the cases.
More than 7,000 appointments for one-shot J&J vaccinations were postponed for two weeks at the new county-operated Warwick Square site in Jamison. More than 3,500 more appointments are likewise being postponed from this week to the first week of May.
The county’s four other mass vaccination sites set a record pace in administering Pfizer vaccine, giving more than 14,000 shots last week. Only Warwick Square is being used at this time for the J&J vaccine.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases were again on the increase in Bucks last week, with 1,977 new infections reported. That was a 7 percent increase over the previous week, bringing the county’s pandemic total to 55,980 and raising the seven-day average to 286 cases per day.
The county’s test positivity rate dropped slightly to 10.6 percent, but is still above the state average of 9.6 percent.
Twenty COVID deaths were also reported in Bucks last week, the most in the county since February. A total of 1,212 Bucks deaths have been blamed on COVID. Hospitalizations remained largely unchanged, with 116 COVID patients in Bucks County hospitals at the end of the week, 24 of them in intensive care and 11 on ventilators.
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