In a milestone that hopefully foretells a turning point in the fight against coronavirus, more Americans have now received at least one dose of an available vaccine than were infected with the coronavirus, Bloomberg reports.

As of Monday afternoon, official numbers have 26.5 million Americans having received at least one dose of the approved vaccines, versus 26.3 million who have been infected, as tallied by the Johns Hopkins University COVID tracker.

Since the vaccine rollout, 1.3 million people have been vaccinated on average daily, accounting for 7.8% of the US population, with the majority of those happening in the last ten days.  Just 1.8% have received the required two-dose regimen. 

“It’s worth noting that today, for the first time, the data said that more people were vaccinated than were reported as newly diagnosed cases,” said Paula Cannon, a professor of microbiology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “That’s worth celebrating. I’m all for that win.”

The US hit its all-time high in daily coronavirus cases in the weeks after the Christmas holiday, with the top one-day fatalities occurring January 20, 2021.  Since then, the number of fatalities and new cases have seen a steady daily decrease.  Scientists believe that the decrease was due to a change in behavior, not the vaccines, because of the timeframe.

“While these trends are encouraging, I want to stress that the numbers nationally are still high, and they’re as high as they’ve been at any point in the pandemic up to this point,” Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, said at a briefing Friday hosted by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “If this pandemic were a stock, we might be wanting to sell.”