admin administered yesterday alone. nearly 70 million americans have gotten at least one dose of a covid-19 vaccine, which means one out of five americans has received a shot. this as those $1400 stimulus checks are starting to hit bank accounts. despite the progress being made, thoupds of people are traveling and attending spring break events across the country. many not wearing masks. no protection. masks and social distancing don t seem to be priorities. health officials are warning of the potential consequences. saying the next few weeks will be critical in determining if we ll see another surge. even though the numbers have gone down, over the last couple of weeks, they ve plateaued and when you see a plateau at a level as high as 60,000 cases a day, that is a very vulnerable time to have a surge to go back up. we can avoid that, if we continue to vaccinate people, get more and more protection without all of a sudden pulling back on public health measures. all right.
we have a really high quality set of vaccines in the united states. we ve done a very good job vaccinating older people in a way that china has not. our situation is very, very different. so i m not worried about a china-like situation here. in terms of any further public health restrictions, you know, this is clearly something that will have to be done at a local level. i can imagine certain cities making certain conditions. that s a very different situation than what is happening in china. neil: philadelphia is reimposed indoor mask mandates and comes at a time, yes, there s a spike in cases but spikes in cases far more note worthy in scores of other states. you think that that is a mistake? you get a spike in cases without a spike in hospitalizations or any of the more severe type of things that we saw at the height of the pandemic that this is could be like a yo-yo. very good question. like, this is why cdc put out guidance at the local level.
what the health risk to the kids are. we keep hearing about relatively small numbers of deaths. well, first of all, they re not that small. in many cases, they re greater than what it is for influenza, but again, we don t hear about the fact that we don t want kid to get covid and potentially if it is really 1 in 7 for some variants, maybe not as much for omicron, what that means and diabetes is everything else. so, we don t give parents the information they need to make adequate risk assessments, and the urgency for getting kids vaccinated and the consequences of that are vary by region so we re about 75% of the teenagers in the north, half that in the south, so we re doing a terrible job vaccinating kids in the teenagers in the southern states and in texas, and then among the little kids, 5 to 11, we re looking at 15% vaccination rates, so there s a lot we can do to mitigate against this, and but this all has to be kind of laid out in a very
well, what happened was in the south where vaccination rates are so low, that s what allowed the epidemic to really flourish. and as we, if we look at what s going on in the north and the northeast, what happens is you re doing such a good job vaccinating all of the adults and adolescents, i think that can protect a lot of the kids. so, how the kids do in terms of in-person classes across the u.s. in the fall really depends on how you re doing with slowing community transmission. and that depends on how well you re doing vaccinating. so the more people you can vaccinate, the better protected our kids are. and that s not going to go well in a lot of the mountain west states, it may be a little better in illinois. so it s going to be quite variable depending on how well we re doing vaccinating. right. and i m sure you saw those images of those crowded football stadiums over the weekend dr. fauci tells cnn he thinks people should be vaccinated and wear a mask when attending large, cro
for being on with us. let s get to cnn s harry 50% of adults fully vaccinated by today, can you break down the numbers for us, harry? i can, and thanks for the tease, by the way. look, here s the situation, look at where we were last week compared to where we were this week, the rate that we ve been increasing and what we see is that, in fact, we ve been going up significantly. as of monday, 49.8%, up 2.7 points from last week, doing a good job vaccinating. looks we continue that pace we ll reach 50% plus, that s expected today. but here s the even better news as we look to the future, right, so july 4th there s that biden idea that we would get 70% plus of age 18 with at least one shot. right now we re at 61.5% but there s been a 1.81 increase in the last week. if that current rate holds by july 4th we will, in fact, reach that 70% plus. we ll be at 72%. and there s a little push to give there. even if we fall a little bit short and we don t increase as