Texas getting more vaccine doses than expected this week as virus cases decline but deaths rise

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas is scheduled to get more than 520,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine this week, more than state officials said they had originally expected to receive.

In El Paso, the vaccination hub run by University Medical Center will get 8,775 of those doses, while the hub operated by the City of El Paso will receive 5,000.

Texas Department of State Health Services officials said the boost in dose allotment to the state is due to two factors: a 30% increase in the Moderna vaccine that’s being provided by the federal government and a one-time return of 126,750 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Texas had been required to set aside for a federal program that is vaccinating residents and staff at long-term care facilities.

The state health department said these returned doses will be given to counties where allocations have been significantly less than their share of the population, which is not the case in El Paso where allotments have been running above its population percentage.

The state has received nearly 2.9 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Texas providers have administered nearly 2.3 million doses of vaccine, according to the state health department. More than 1.8 million people have received at least one dose, and more than 448,000 have been fully vaccinated.

On Sunday, Texas health officials reported 11,155 new and probable coronavirus cases and 171 more deaths due to the illness caused by the virus.

There have been nearly 2.1 million virus cases and 36,491 deaths as a result of Covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to the Texas health department.

Hospitalizations in the state continued to fall, with 11,220 patients reported Sunday. That's down from a high of 14,218 on Jan. 11.

During the past two weeks, the seven-day rolling average of Covid deaths in Texas has increased from 305.71 per day to 325.86, according to data from Johns Hopkins University and Texas ranked eighth in the nation in the number of new cases per capita with 882.41 cases per 100,000 population.

The rolling average of new cases in the state has declined from 22,520.29 per day to 16,962.71, according to the Johns Hopkins data.