Unless most of the population gets immunized, the pandemic will continue indefinitely, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins says

“If we’re going to get past this terrible pandemic, it’s going to take most of us being immunized. Otherwise, the virus can just keep going on and on,” Collins said.

And efforts — federal, state and local — are ongoing to push up those vaccination numbers.

“I think our effort shifts, and it shifts to younger people who just don’t think about Covid quite as much,” Andy Slavitt, the White House senior adviser for Covid-19 response, told CNN.

“We truly are close to that light at the end of the tunnel. Those of you who have not yet been vaccinated, please go get a vaccine as quickly as you can. Do it for yourself, do it for your family, do it for your friends, and do it so that all of us can put this global pandemic behind us,” Hogan said in a statement.

People receive their second dose of the vaccine at a mobile Covid-19 vaccination clinic in Bridgeport, Connecticut on April 20, 2021

Hundreds of Americans die every day

While many government leaders are highlighting the proximity to ending the pandemic, Covid-19 numbers in the US are still high.

In the past week, a daily average of more than 62,900 Covid-19 infections was reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

And hundreds of Americans continue to lose their lives every day. In the past week alone, the US reported more than 4,900 Covid-19 deaths.

In Washington state, Covid-19 cases are increasing in most counties and hospitalizations are up, with a sharp increase in the number of young adults who are hospitalized, said Dr. Umair Shah, the state’s secretary of health.

And most counties have also detected variants, Shah said.

A new study highlights the importance of vaccinations

Among 417 employees at Rockefeller University who were fully vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, only two of them had breakthrough infections later, according to the study.

The researchers found that variants with several differences from the original virus caused those breakthrough infections.

“We have characterized bona fide examples of vaccine breakthrough manifesting as clinical symptoms,” they wrote.”These observations in no way undermine the importance of the urgent efforts being taken at the federal and state levels to vaccinate the U.S. population. They also lend support to efforts to advance a new vaccine booster (as well as a pan-coronavirus vaccine) to provide increased protection against variants.”

Another study that looked at infections in nursing homes in Chicago found that most fully vaccinated residents were not infected with the virus even after someone in the same facility tested positive.

Of those breakthrough cases, two-thirds were asymptomatic. Two residents were hospitalized and one of those residents died, the CDC said. The person who died had three underlying conditions, the agency added.