According to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the US is seeing a 29% decline in new Covid-19 cases compared to this time last week, the steepest one-week decline the US has seen during the pandemic.

Several states impacted by winter storms are seeing large declines in new cases this week, per Johns Hopkins data, including Texas, where cases are down 56% compared to last week.

The COVID Tracking Project said Thursday it had been unable to update the daily number of tests performed in Texas for four days because of the winter weather.

"I think we're about to get hit very hard, so we have to race ahead of the variant."

New research out of Israel and Canada has found that only a single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine offers significant protection against the virus, but Slavitt stressed that does not mean people should skip the second dose.

"We don't know how long or how durable that benefit is without the booster," he said.

"For us, we lost about two days, but we'll catch up in the next two, three days," he said, adding, "It'll be a little slower than usual, but we'll catch up."

Black and Hispanic people are getting fewer vaccinations

The World Health Organization will launch a new declaration Friday, focusing on vaccine equity, the group's director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a news briefing Thursday.

While Tedros' declaration will focus on vulnerable groups and small island states with less bargaining power than larger countries, inequity has already been a factor in the US.

Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) researchers analyzed state-level data for the 34 states that collect demographic information on Covid-19 vaccinations as of February 16.

In most of those states, Black and Hispanic people have received a smaller share of vaccinations compared to their share of cases, deaths and percentage of the population, the researchers noted.

The opposite is true for White people in most states.

In Texas, for example, Hispanic people account for 42% of coronavirus cases, 47% of Covid-19 deaths and 40% of the state's population -- but they have gotten just 20% of vaccinations.

Among 27 states that report ethnicity data for those who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, White people have been vaccinated at a rate three times higher than Hispanic people and twice as high as Black people.

The KFF team noted that some states don't record the race or ethnicity of those vaccinated.

Researchers found higher rate of infection in pregnant women

Researchers of a study released Tuesday suggested that pregnant women should be prioritized for vaccination after they found that the Covid-19 infection rate among expectant women in Washington state was 70% higher than in adults of similar age in the state.

The infection rate in pregnant women in the study was 13.9 out of every 1,000 deliveries, compared to an overall rate of 7.3 out of 1,000 for 20 to 39-year-olds in the state.

The higher infection rates "may be due to the over-representation of women in many professions and industries considered essential during the COVID-19 pandemic — including healthcare, education, service sectors," lead author Dr.