Toronto-After lagging behind other developed countries in the first few months of launching COVID-19 vaccination, Canada officially surpassed the United States in terms of the proportion of fully vaccinated residents.

According to the data from Vaccine Tracker for CTV NewsAs of Sunday, 48.8% of Canada’s population has been fully vaccinated, compared with 48.1% of Americans.

Despite this milestone, vaccination rates do seem to be slowing down, which has led to the launch of vaccine lotteries in several provinces.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that if the country’s vaccine work continues to make progress, his government may consider reopening the border to American travelers who have been vaccinated.

In the United States, lawmakers often lobbied to relax border measures, vaccination rates have slowed, and unvaccinated infection rates are rising.

US President Joe Biden previously set a goal of fully vaccinating 160 million Americans and ensuring that 70% of adults receive at least one shot before July 4.

CTV News data shows that 15 days have passed since the target date, and currently only 55.5% of Americans have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Driven by the proliferation of COVID-19 variants, the infection rate continues to rise, and it has become more urgent to push everyone to be vaccinated.

Infectious disease expert Dr. Issac Bogoch told the CTV News Channel on Sunday: “When many restrictions are lifted, you will see cases actually increase rapidly.” “This shouldn’t surprise anyone.”

“This is a very easy to spread virus. It will prey on unvaccinated people. Although a large proportion of our population received the first dose of the vaccine, and the proportion of the second dose of vaccine is rising rapidly, there are still hundreds of people. Ten thousand people (including children) are not vaccinated,” he added.