There are now 1,530,080 people in Massachusetts who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus that has infected 609,533 Bay State residents and killed 17,337.
Soon after announcing that the state had officially surpassed 1.5 million full vaccinations on Tuesday, the Department of Public Health confirmed 1,566 new cases of COVID-19 and announced the recent deaths of 12 people from the virus that has been spreading through the state for more than a year.
The state’s average positive test rate and the number of people with COVID-19 being treated in Massachusetts hospitals both increased in the latest report from DPH. The seven-day average of the positive test rate rose from 2.37 percent in Monday’s report to 2.50 percent as of Tuesday.
There were 725 people hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Monday, DPH said Tuesday, which represents a net increase of 17 patients in 24 hours.
After getting his first COVID-19 vaccine dose at the Hynes Convention Center on Tuesday, Gov. Charlie Baker said his administration will watch the numbers closely over the next week to 10 days to look for signs of a spike driven by recent Easter or Passover gatherings.
“Frankly, our data has been relatively flat for the past few days but obviously we’re gonna pay a lot of attention to that,” he said. “I do take some comfort from the fact that when I look at the national data, I draw two conclusions from it. The first is we continue to test a lot more than many other parts of the country, which means we are catching positive cases … But the second thing is even among states that have case counts on a per capita basis that are similar to ours or even in many cases significantly below ours, our hospitalization rates per capita are actually lower than many of those states, which says that we are catching cases and we are keeping people out of the hospital as a result.”
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