Minnesota to get 45,000 J&J COVID vaccine doses this week

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State health officials offered more detail on the rollout of the new Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine today, as the doses are distributed around the country.

Minnesota is expecting 45,200 doses of the vaccine this week — which is only about a day and a half of shots at the current overall vaccination rate — not a major boost to the supply.

State's infectious disease director Kris Ehresmann says it isn’t clear how many more will show up and when. “Future allocations of Johnson and Johnson are uncertain.”

Vaccinations continue to inch up in Minnesota. The daily average of shots administered in the state is up by about 20 percent in the last month, as the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines slowly builds, including a record high last weekend.

That's likely to pick up with the imminent arrival of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine. In the meantime, COVID-19 cases have been stable, with new daily cases down below 500 for only the second time in 2021 in the latest data.

Hospitalizations for COVID have now also fallen by more than two-thirds since the beginning of the year. There were four additional deaths reported in the latest data, about half the recent average.