MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Minnesota officials are aiming to ramp up vaccination efforts as the pace of administering doses to health care workers and long-term care residents and staff moves slower than expected.

The Minnesota Department of Health reported on Monday that providers across the state have administered 78,402 doses of their nearly 300,000 doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which does not include doses allocated and administered at federal sites, such as the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Kris Ehresmann, the state's infectious disease director, said Minnesota is “on track,” citing the state's ranking of 16th among all states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for doses administered per 100,000 people. Ehresmann said the state's pace is consistent with other similarly-sized states. She said the fact that more 82,000 doses have been administered statewide when there were no vaccines approved for use less than a month ago is “really significant.”

“It's a tribute to the work of our partners in getting vaccines into arms, and I think it's time we celebrate how far we've come in a very short amount of time,” she said during a media briefing Monday.

Ehresmann said 85,200 of the state's allocated Moderna doses have gone to pharmacies involved in the federal partnership program to vaccinate residents and staff of skilled nursing facilities. The three pharmacy chains — Walgreens, CVS Health and Thrifty White — have partnered with 285 of the state's 369 skilled nursing facilities and expect to finish administering first shots in three to four weeks.

Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the state has received and distributed enough doses of the vaccine to providers to administer first shots to top-priority Minnesota health care workers. Last week, state officials directed nearly $40 million from the state's COVID-19 fund to the health department to support vaccination strategy and response efforts statewide.

Health officials on Monday reported 13 more Minnesotans have died due to the coronavirus, and 3,148 new infections, bringing the state's totals to 5,443 deaths and 423,688 cases since the start of the pandemic. Malcolm said 650 of the new cases are from a backlog in tests, and testing rates over the holidays make it difficult to draw conclusions from the data.

Hospitalizations continue to decline. Just over 800 patients were hospitalized with complications due to COVID-19 as of Sunday, including 156 in intensive care, compared with nearly 1,800 at the start of December.

Malcolm said that while case growth and hospitalizations have been trending downward since the end of November, health officials expect gatherings over the holidays to result in an upswing in the coming weeks. Malcolm urged Minnesotans to continue to follow public health guidelines even as numbers improve.

“Unfortunately, a year now into this global pandemic, we know that improvement is tenuous — we've seen it from our own experience and that from other states and even nations,” Malcolm said. "If we let our guard down, COVID-19 finds a way to surge back in terrifying ways.”

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Mohamed Ibrahim is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.