Today is February 2, 2021. “Groundhog Day” in the United States.

The movie Groundhog Day was released in 1993. In the movie, Bill Murray wakes up to the same situation (on Groundhog Day) over and over again, until he learns an important lesson. Sort of like us. We keep waking up to a pandemic that worsens every day.

I have been tracking U.S. cases and fatalities since last March. Last week we reached the eighth doubling for both cases (26,800,000 in the U.S.) and fatalities (439,552).

The good news is that there have been two vaccines approved in the U.S. (One manufactured by Pfizer, and the other by Moderna). The bad news is that we cannot manufacture and administer those vaccines quickly enough. As of yesterday, almost 50 million doses have been distributed, and 32 million doses administered. The first dose was administered on December 14, about 45 days ago. Our vaccine rate is increasing (that’s good), and yesterday I read that we achieved a 1.3 million doses/day rate.

At 1.3 million doses/day, it will take us 384 days (more than a year) to administer 2 doses to 250 million people (the U.S. population is 330 million). So that rate has to increase, to 2 million or even 3 million doses a day to decrease the case and fatality rate.

Otherwise, we are going to keep waking up to this pandemic, every day, just like the movie Groundhog Day.