March 3, 2021
Tonight will be partly cloudy with lows in the lower 20s to the lower 30s. Tomorrow it’ll be mostly sunny with highs in the 40s. Find the latest from Updraft. The first doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have arrived in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz visited the M Health Fairview hospital in Minneapolis Wednesday afternoon as the doses arrived there. The state is getting 45,000 doses this week — less than a quarter of the total weekly shipments of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
And Walz said there isn’t any more Johnson and Johnson vaccine on the way, at least through next week. But he also struck an optimistic tone, saying that some measure of normalcy is in sight, possibly in early summer. "It appears to me that the brass ring is pretty grabbable for State Fair, and those types of things as you start letting people plan for June weddings will be an entirely different place. I think the real question here is, what can we do over the next few weeks," The most immediate concern is the growing prevalence of COVID-19 variants, and how well the existing vaccines will block them.
In other COVID-19 news, deaths in Minnesota hit their highest level in nearly three weeks at 17 according to new data from the Minnesota Department of Health. That's well above the recent seven-day average. Deaths had dropped to as low as a single death a day in late February. The jump has not followed a sharp rise in hospitalizations, which preceded previous increases in COVID-19 deaths. New hospitalizations are averaging only about a third of what they were at the beginning of the year. Vaccinations continue to rise, with steady week-over-week increases, and a daily average now nearing 40,000 over the last week. The state is on track to surpass 1.5 million total doses administered by the end of the week, as the first Johnson and Johnson vaccines have now arrived.
You can get more of the latest news, in just a few minutes, via the Minnesota Today podcast. — Tim Nelson | MPR News | 
