Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 03January 2021

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

The news posted last week for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (aka SARS-CoV-2), which produces COVID-19 disease, has been surveyed and some important articles are summarized here. The articles are more or less organized with general virus news and anecdotes first, then stories from around the US, followed by an increased number of items from other countries around the globe. Data continues to be quite eratic this week because of the holiday and the same may continue one more week. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.

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Summary:

Idon’t know what to make of this week’s data, for the same holiday reporting issue reasons Italked about last week. It appears that new US Covid cases this past week were 7.6% higher than the week that included Christmas, but is that because reporting of some Christmas week cases were delayed till this week? New cases were also 7.2% lower than the week before Christmas week, but that could be because of underreporting on New Year’s eve and New Year’s day.

We have a similar situation with the numbers for deaths, although it’s probably pretty certain we have new records for those nonetheless. Reported US Covid deaths for the week ending January 2 were 17.1% higher than those reported during the week ending December 26th, but 0.4% below those reported during the week ending December 19th. Deaths were at a record high on Tuesday, almost 3% above the prior record, and beat that record by 4.4% on Wednesday, before falling back slightly on New Year’s eve. US Covid deaths averaged 3,724 over those three days; that compares to an average of 3,437 for deaths from heart diseases and cancer combined.

This is the largest “Part 1” batch I’ve put together yet, partly because of a dearth of other news over the holidays, but also because I eschew the usual retrospectives and forecasts that come out at this time of year. How did all those forecasts for 2020 work out, anyhow?

The chart below from WorldoMeter shows the daily number of new cases for the US, updated through 19 December.

New cases globally continued to increase. (See Johns Hopkins graph below.) The growth rate has visibly slowed since the rapid acceleration in October. Of course the unreliability of current data reporting due to the holiday season is a concern, as discussed earlier.

Also, Johns Hopkins has a graph for global deaths (below). Deaths globally were up about 5% week-over-week, but the holiday data noise makes that estimate tentative.. It appears that the death rate that had been accelerating since early November, corresponding to the accelerating pattern for new cases in October, has now decelerated from the previous 10% weekly growth.

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Calculated Risk tracks the daily testing rate and results. The 02 January graphic:

The count of testing has been quite eratic over the past several weeks, and the percent positive has again turned up. Calculated Risk offers the same caution about holiday numbers that we have above.

Of course, Steven Hansen summarizes and links the latest news related to the pandemic every day, 7 days a week, plus displays over a dozen important graphics updated at least daily. The most recent article at the time this is published: 02 January 2021 Coronavirus Charts and News: Do Partial Lockdowns Lead To An Explosion Of Coronavirus Cases As It Concentrates More People In Places?

This article leads the daily newsletter from Global Economic Intersection every day. Newsletter subscription is free.

Here are the rest of the articles for the past week reviewed and summarized:

New study shows coronavirus capable of entering the brain, has similarities to HIV – There have been many reports this year of recovering COVID-19 patients struggling with lingering, neurological issues like “brain fog” and overall mental fatigue. While it’s been discussed for some time that SARS-CoV-2 may haveadverse effects on the brain, the “how” and “why” of this relationship has remained a mystery – until now. Researchers from the University of Washington say the coronavirus’ spike protein is indeed capable of bridging the blood-brain barrier in mice. While mice obviously aren’t people, study authors say these findings all but confirm SARS-CoV-2 can do the same in humans. This spike protein, or S1 protein, is essentially what allows the coronavirus to enter and infect new human cells. Even by itself, S1 proteins can do serious damage by detaching from the the coronavirus and sparking harmful inflammation.“The S1 protein likely causes the brain to release cytokines and inflammatory products,” says professor of medicine and lead study author William A. Banks in a university release.This super intense immune response among COVID patients is called the “cytokine storm.” The immune system recognizes the virus as the major threat that it is, inciting an immune “overreaction” that appears to be causing brain fog, fatigue, and other cognitive problems in patients.This isn’t a unique phenomenon to COVID-19; many HIV patients deal with the same cognitive symptoms. These similarities led the research team to compare the S1 protein of SARS-CoV-2 to the gp120 protein present in HIV-1.Sure enough, the two proteins are very, very similar. Both are glycoproteins, or proteins covered in sugars. Glycoproteins typically function as the “hands” and “feet” of infectious viruses. Both S1 and gp120 can also cross the blood-brain barrier and do toxic harm to brain tissues. In summation, study authors speculate these findings may help explain a number of COVID-19’s more mysterious symptoms. “We know that when you have the COVID infection you have trouble breathing and that’s because there’s infection in your lung, but an additional explanation is that the virus enters the respiratory centers of the brain and causes problems there as well,” Banks explains.

Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms – NYT – The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them. The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children. At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking. “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’”Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus.In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described:A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window.A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed.A 55-year-old woman in Britain had hallucinations of monkeys and a lion and became convinced a family member had been replaced by an impostor. Beyond individual reports, a British study of neurological or psychiatric complications in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.” Another study identified 10 such patients in one hospital in Spain. And in Covid-related social media groups, medical professionals discuss seeing patients with similar symptoms in the Midwest, Great Plains and elsewhere.

Impact of Sex and Metabolic Comorbidities on COVID-19 Mortality Risk Across Age Groups: 66,646 Inpatients Across 613 U.S. Hospitals – The relationship between common patient characteristics, such as sex and metabolic comorbidities, and mortality from COVID-19 remains incompletely understood. Emerging evidence suggests that metabolic risk factors may also vary by age. This study aimed to determine the association between common patient characteristics and mortality across age-groups among COVID-19 inpatients.We performed a retrospective cohort study of patients discharged from hospitals in the Premier Healthcare Database between April – June 2020. Inpatients were identified using COVID-19 ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. A priori-defined exposures were sex and present-on-admission hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and interactions between age and these comorbidities. Controlling for additional confounders, we evaluated relationships between these variables and in-hospital mortality in a log-binomial model.Among 66,646 (6.5%) admissions with a COVID-19 diagnosis, across 613 U.S. hospitals, 12,388 (18.6%) died in-hospital. In multivariable analysis, male sex was independently associated with 30% higher mortality risk (aRR, 1.30, 95% CI: 1.26 – 1.34). Diabetes without chronic complications was not a risk factor at any age (aRR 1.01, 95% CI: 0.96 – 1.06), and hypertension without chronic complications was only a risk factor in 20-39 year-olds (aRR, 1.68, 95% CI: 1.17 – 2.40). Diabetes with chronic complications, hypertension with chronic complications, and obesity were risk factors in most age-groups, with highest relative risks among 20-39 year-olds (respective aRRs 1.79, 2.33, 1.92; p-values ≤ 0.002).Conclusions: Hospitalized men with COVID-19 are at increased risk of death across all ages. Hypertension, diabetes with chronic complications, and obesity demonstrated age-dependent effects, with the highest relative risks among adults aged 20-39.

‘Super Gonorrhea’ is spreading like wildfire thanks to COVID-19 2020 hasn’t been kind to anyone, but it’s almost over. Unfortunately, if you find yourself with a case of “Super Gonnorhea” you might feel the effects of this terrible year for an extended period of time. Doctors are now warning of the increasing spread of the antibiotic-resistant strain of STI, and they’re blaming the coronavirus pandemic for helping it gain momentum. According to a report from The Sun, the problem has gotten so bad that the World Health Organization has taken notice. The issue is that as the coronavirus pandemic was ongoing, many clinics and hospitals used antibiotics in the treatment of patients and to prevent the cross-infection of hospitalized individuals. That overuse of antibiotics has given a boost to antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, according to WHO. Antibiotics are great. They have saved countless lives and provided mankind with the incredible power to rid ourselves of problematic microbes. Unfortunately, as the decades began to pile up, the very microorganisms we fought using antibiotics began to find ways around them. Now, several types of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are known to exist, and these “superbugs” require more complex treatment that sometimes includes multiple antibiotics or newer versions of drugs that are not yet compromised. In the case of gonorrhea, the bacterium that causes the infection has, over time, adapted to common first-line treatments. In particular, the new “super” strain of the infection doesn’t respond to treatment with azithromycin, which has long been the go-to medication option. “Overuse of antibiotics in the community can fuel the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in gonorrhoea,” a WHO spokesperson told The Sun. “Azithromycin – a common antibiotic for treating respiratory infections – was used for Covid-19 treatment earlier in the epidemic.” “During the pandemic, STI services have also been disrupted. This means more STI cases are not diagnosed properly with more people self-medicating as a result. Such a situation can fuel emergence of resistance in gonorrhea including gonorrhea superbug (super gonorrhoea) or gonorrhoea with high level resistance to current antibiotics recommended to treat it.” The worst part is that the number of people reporting a new gonorrhea infection is growing year-over-year, to the tune of about 17%. That means more and more people are getting the infection, and the antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacteria has an even larger population of people to further its adaptation to medications and other treatments.

Common diabetes drug may trigger rare, life-threatening complications for COVID-19 patients – Even before the coronavirus pandemic, people living with diabetes were already at risk from life-threatening complications from their condition. One such problem is diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), which can prevent cells from receiving enough glucose to fuel their natural processes. Being sick or not having food can act as a trigger for DKA. Now, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital say a common diabetes drug may spark this serious condition in COVID-19 patients.People with diabetes are among the many groups at higher risk of severe coronavirus infections. Previous studies have revealed that a large number of patients who die from COVID turn out to have diabetes as well. The new report notes an uptick in cases of a rare form of diabetic ketoacidosis, called euDKA, diagnosed in COVID patients taking sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i).For diabetics with EuDKA, their cells can’t absorb enough glucose and compensate by metabolizing fats instead. This creates a build-up of acids called ketones. EuDKA is also harder to diagnose than DKA and is characterized by lower blood sugar levels.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been warning diabetes patients that taking SGLT2i, which work by releasing extra glucose in the urine, can increase a person’s risk of developing either form of diabetic ketoacidosis. Researchers say five euDKA cases appeared at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in just two months during spring 2020. This was the height of the pandemic in Boston. Three of the cases were diagnosed in one single week. The Brigham team says the hospital saw fewer than 10 EuDKA cases in the previous two years combined prior to the pandemic. All five of the patients had COVID-19 and all had been taking SGLT2i drugs for their diabetes. Three of the patients were eventually discharged to rehabilitation centers, one was sent home, and a 52-year-old man died of acute respiratory distress syndrome.

COVID Tied to Rare But Severe Eye Infection -A rare, sight-stealing infection might be triggered by COVID-19, a new study suggests.In the space of two months, three patients suffering from COVID-19 in one New York health system developed keratitis, an inflammation of the cornea, which then led to a sight-threatening infection of the tissues or fluids inside the eyeball called endophthalmitis.”I see things like this, but very rarely,” said researcher Dr. Amilia Schrier, a professor of ophthalmology at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.Having three cases of endophthalmitis in such a short time is exceedingly rare, and because they were all tied to COVID-19 infection it needed to be investigated, she said. “The whole point is to alert people of the association, but I cannot say specifically that COVID causes it.”Although Schrier can’t say for sure that COVID-19 caused the endophthalmitis, she can’t rule it out either.Of the three patients, one died from COVID-19, another had to have an eyeremoved “despite heroic efforts to save the eye,” and a third lost all sight, Schrier said.Endophthalmitis is very rare, but it can be caused by a virus, Schrier said. Since doing her research, Schrier has heard of other cases of endophthalmitis linked to COVID-19 patients — one in Boston and another in Australia.Symptoms of endophthalmitis can include pain, redness, discharge from theeye, lid swelling and reduced vision. All the patients were in their 60s and were treated at Northwell Health’s Ophthalmology Department.

Why is COVID-19 causing heart inflammation, or myocarditis, in athletes? – Researchers are learning more about the long-term effects of having COVID-19 with each passing day, and one aspect that keeps coming up is that athletes are struggling with a potentially serious heart condition after having had the virus. University of Florida star forward Keyontae Johnson, who collapsed on the basketball court during a game on Dec. 12, has reportedly been diagnosed with myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation that has repeatedly been linked to COVID-19, which he suffered from during the summer. University of Florida star forward Keyontae Johnson, seen here on Dec. 21, collapsed on the basketball court during a game earlier this month – reportedly the result of COVID-19-related myocarditis. And he’s not the only athlete to have experienced this medical issue. But Johnson is far from the only athlete to struggle with heart inflammation in the wake of the coronavirus. In August, Georgia State quarterback Mikele Colasurdo announced onTwitter that he was unable to play football this season after he was “diagnosed with a heart condition as a result of my COVID-19 infection.” Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez also struggled with myocarditis after having had the virus. So did University of Miami defensive back Al Blades. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle, known as the myocardium, according to the Mayo Clinic. The condition can affect your heart muscle and your heart’s electrical system, and reduce its ability to pump. As a result, “patients can struggle with fast or abnormal heart rhythms, called arrhythmias,” Dr. Thomas Russo, professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York, tells Yahoo Life.Myocarditis is usually caused by viral infections. “It happens more often with some viruses than others,” Dr. Richard Watkins, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, tells Yahoo Life. He lists the coxsackievirus (which can cause hand, foot and mouth disease) as being a more common culprit, while influenza and HIV less so.The symptoms of myocarditis include the following, says the Mayo Clinic: chest pain, fatigue, shortness of breath and rapid heart rate (arrhythmias).Myocarditis can be severe, Russo says, adding, “You can have a stroke or heart attack and die.” But the condition improves on its own in many cases and people can have a complete recovery – they’ll just often have to avoid competitive sports for up to six months, Russo says. In some situations, though, medications and even a mechanical heart pump may be needed, the Mayo Clinic says.

Study: Ultraviolet LED Lights Can Kill Coronavirus –In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have proven that coronaviruses can be quickly and efficiently killed using ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (UV-LEDs). The study, which was published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, analyzed the disinfection efficiency of UV-LED irradiation at different wavelengths or frequencies on a virus from the family of coronaviruses. The researchers found that the optimal wavelength for killing HCoV-OC43, a coronavirus strain used as a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2 because of their similarities, was 265 nanometers. However, a wavelength of 285 nanometers had a similar result, which matters because 285-nanometer bulbs are much less expensive than 265-nanometer bulbs. The wavelengths took less than 30 seconds to destroy more than 99.9% of the coronaviruses.“UV disinfection has been around for a while, but UV-LEDs are still very new, and so is their use,” lead study author Yoram Gerchman, PhD, a biochemist and professor at the University of Haifa and Oranim College in Isreal, tells Verywell. “Part of the problem is, the lower the wavelength, the more expensive and less efficient is the UV-LED, so there is much interest in the higher wavelength.” Ultraviolet light is a type of electromagnetic radiation. It’s mostly invisible to the human eye and travels in a wavelength pattern at the speed of light.2The numbers that are used to measure UV light describe the activity level, or how energetic the photons in the light are, as well as the size of the wavelength.The most common form of UV radiation is sunlight, which produces UVA, UVB, and UVC rays.2 UVA rays have the longest wavelengths, followed by UVB, and finally UVC rays.UVA and UVB rays are transmitted through the atmosphere. All UVC rays are absorbed by the Earth’s ozone layer, but the UVC rays are often used in commercial light disinfecting devices. UV-LEDs are a form of UVC lights.

At-Home Testing for Covid – Incidental Economist (video) Experts have long been calling for quicker, cheaper, and more accessible ways of testing for Covid-19. Though such tests would be less accurate than the predominant PCR test, speed matters more than accuracy when it comes to curbing a pandemic. The FDA just issued an Emergency Use Authorization for a fairly affordable, at-home Covid test that renders results in 15 minutes, providing a useful mitigation resource as vaccine distribution rolls out. At-Home Testing for Covid @ YouTube – Dr Aaron Carroll

Healthy teen dies after COVID-19 ‘ate through her’: family – A healthy high school senior from Chicago contracted COVID-19 just before Christmas – and was dead within days as the virus “ate her through,” her family says. “She called me up crying to say that, you know, ‘Mom, I’m going to miss Christmas.’ And I had to reassure her that it’s just a day on the calendar, and when she comes home, ‘We’ll do Christmas with you.’ … Unfortunately she didn’t [leave the hospital],” Sarah Simental’s grieving mother, Deborah Simental, told the local ABC-TV affiliate. “It literally just ate her through,” the mom said of the coronavirus. “And no parent should ever have to watch their child go through that.” Deborah said her 18-year-old daughter had no health problems when she got a headache and began suffering a sore throat and body aches Dec. 23. Sarah felt so poorly that her parents took her to a local hospital – where she only worsened and was airlifted to the University of Chicago Hospital, ABC said. The teen never recovered, dying the day after Christmas. “I have no words for it. I just can’t believe how fast that it progressed,” Sarah’s dad, Don Simental, told the outlet. Deborah said the only consolation for her and her husband was that they were able to be at their daughter’s bedside when she died. “She said, ‘I’m going to be OK, Mom.’ And that was the last thing,” the mother recalled.

Four-year-old boy dies from Covid-19 complications in upstate New York – A four-year-old from upstate New York died from Covid complications over the weekend, one of the youngest people in the country to perish from the virus, and a reminder that children are still at risk during the coronavirus pandemic.Xavier M. Harris of Utica, New York, died of heart complications from Covid-19 on Saturday, the day after Christmas, his family and friends confirmed to the New York Post.“He was an extremely healthy little boy,” Brandie Reid, a family friend, told the Post. “He had had no prior health problems at all, according to his mom.” Mr Harris was “a spunky 4 year old beautiful boy who’s smile and spunk lit up the room” according to a GoFundMe page Ms Reid set up, with the family’s permission, to help cover funeral costs. So far it has raised more than $31,000.“It’s absolutely awful,” Ms Reid added to the Post. “It’s [the virus] not just killing nursing home residents and elderly people. It’s obviously not a regular thing that happens, that a 4-year-old dies from this virus, but it does happen. And he was healthy.”The tragedy struck everyone from local officials to strangers online. “Obviously the news reports of a 4-year-old boy passing away are terribly brutal,” Oneida County executive Anthony Picente told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. “No parent should have to bury a child. Certainly we don’t want to see anyone lose a life to this. I’ve said since the day I stood up here months ago, these are not numbers. These are people. These are neighbors and friends and fathers and mothers and now children.”

He Was Hospitalized for Covid-19. Then Hospitalized Again. And Again. – The routine things in Chris Long’s life used to include biking 30 miles three times a week and taking courses toward a Ph.D. in eight-week sessions. But since getting sick with the coronavirus in March, Mr. Long, 54, has fallen into a distressing new cycle – one that so far has landed him in the hospital seven times. Periodically since his initial five-day hospitalization, his lungs begin filling again; he starts coughing uncontrollably and runs a low fever. Roughly 18 days later, he spews up greenish-yellow fluid, signaling yet another bout of pneumonia. Soon, his oxygen levels drop and his heart rate accelerates to compensate, sending him to a hospital near his home in Clarkston, Mich., for several days, sometimes in intensive care. “This will never go away,” he said, describing his worst fear. Nearly a year into the pandemic, it’s clear that recovering from Covid-19’s initial onslaught can be an arduous, uneven journey. Now, studies reveal that a significant subset of patients are having to return to hospitals, sometimes repeatedly, with complications triggered by the disease or by the body’s efforts to defeat the virus. Even as vaccines give hope for stopping the spread of the virus, the surge of new cases portends repeated hospitalizations for more patients, taxing medical resources and turning some people’s path to recovery into a Sisyphean odyssey that upends their lives. “It’s an urgent medical and public health question,”. Data on rehospitalizations of coronavirus patients are incomplete, but early studies suggest that in the United States alone, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands could ultimately return to the hospital. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of 106,543 coronavirus patients initially hospitalized between March and July found that one in 11 was readmitted within two months of being discharged, with 1.6 percent of patients readmitted more than once.In another study of 1,775 coronavirus patients discharged from 132 V.A. hospitals in the pandemic’s early months, nearly a fifth were rehospitalized within 60 days. More than 22 percent of them needed intensive care, and 7 percent required ventilators.And in a report on 1,250 patients discharged from 38 Michigan hospitals from mid-March to July, 15 percent were rehospitalized within 60 days. Recurring admissions don’t just involve patients who were severely ill the first time around…

Explanations for ‘long Covid’ remain elusive. For now, believing patients and treating symptoms is the best doctors can do -STAT – Nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, the perplexing problems of Covid-19 long-haulers seem no nearer resolution – or even explanation – than when they first puzzled doctors and patients in the spring. This much is known: Long haulers, recovering patients whose symptoms persist after their coronavirus infections disappear, are a mix of younger people who never needed hospital care and older people with chronic conditions that predate Covid. Their symptoms trail the infection’s path through their lungs, hearts, muscles, nerves, and brains. Deadening fatigue can dog them for weeks or months. Sometimes their problems wane, then resurface in a stuttering pattern that leaves them wondering if they’ll ever get over the malaise. With a growing sense of urgency as cases mount across the U.S., physicians have launched specialized clinics to treat and study these “long Covid” patients, creating registries to track their progress. But answers are elusive: Why does brain fog or muscle weakness or shortness of breath linger in some people and not others? What can help lift the fog or restore their vigor? Can these people ever resume normal life?“The vaccines and therapeutics, they were easy. With this post-acute Covid syndrome, we have no idea how to measure it. We have no prior experience in terms of defining it or treating it, so it’s kind of a wild, wild West right now.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about a third of Covid-19 patients still feel after-effects two to three weeks after their infections clear and they test negative for the virus. One in four of those people was 18 to 34 years old and had no chronic medical conditions before falling ill with Covid-19, according to CDC’s report, released in July. A survey conducted in the U.K. concluded in November that 1 in 5 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) suffered from symptoms lasting five weeks or longer; 1 in 10 said their problems lasted 12 weeks or longer. So far, there is little science beyond case reports and anecdotes to guide clinicians treating these patients, whose difficulties are distinct from the delirium and PTSD sometimes seen after a stay in a hospital intensive care unit. The clinical trial Deeks leads at UCSF is tracking a cohort of people with enduring post-Covid symptoms – some who did and some who didn’t become critically ill from the coronavirus – to build a bank of blood and saliva samples obtained early in their disease to understand virologic, immunologic, and host factors that might correlate with being a Covid-19 long-hauler.There is a consensus that the problem is more common in women than men, unlike the overall mortality rate, which is higher in men. The CDC survey did not find an association between race and return to full health after Covid-19, but the small number of respondents limits any conclusions to be drawn. How the problems play out in different people is unpredictable, doctors say, with some gradually getting better and others not. Multiple organs are involved, so multiple biological mechanisms might be at play.

U.S. Vaccinations at 200,000 a Day Run Far Short of ‘Warp Speed’ – The U.S. is vaccinating an average of only 200,000 people a day against Covid-19, and many states have used just a small percentage of the shipments sent to them this month. Data gathered from states and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that while Operation Warp Speed has distributed millions of doses, some states have been slow to get them into people’s arms. The nation almost certainly won’t hit the Trump administration’s goal of 20 million vaccinations by year-end, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. The CDC’s latest tally, as of Monday, showed that despite the distribution of 11.45 million doses from Moderna Inc., and from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, just 2.13 million people had gotten shots. That represents about 20% of early allocations. Oregon has used only 15.3% of its supply, Ohio 14.3% and Maryland 10.9%. Officials blame a delicate vaccine with complex storage requirements, uncertainty over the supply of doses and strain on local health agencies already facing historic challenges. “We would like to have better uptake,” said Steve Kelso, a spokesman for the Kent County Health Department in Michigan, where the state has used 18.5% of its doses. “We could be sticking more needles in arms.” More than 330,000 Americans have died from the pandemic and tens of thousands more are expected to succumb in coming months, making the vaccine’s rollout all the more critical. But Moncef Slaoui, chief science advisor to Operation Warp Speed, said last week that the goal of getting 20 million people vaccinated by year-end was unlikely to be met. In recent weeks, countries around the world have launched vaccination campaigns in a global race to end the pandemic. Some are far outstripping the U.S.: Israel, whose size and population is similar to New Jersey’s, gave shots to an average 60,000 people a day in its first week. If the U.S. were moving at the same speed, it would be doing 2.2 million daily inoculations – 10 times its current pace. A Health and Human Services Department spokesman said Tuesday that reported numbers don’t reflect the latest situation. “We are closely monitoring the data being reported from the jurisdictions about vaccine administration, and we are encouraged by the work they have done so far during the holidays,” said Michael Pratt. “There is an expected lag between shots going into arms and the data being reported.” President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening reiterated in a tweet that “it is up to the States to distribute the vaccines.” But President-elect Joe Biden said in an earlier speech that “the effort to distribute the vaccine is not progressing as it should” and that he would “move heaven and Earth to get us going in the right direction.” Biden said his administration would achieve 100 million shots in his first 100 days if Congress provides funding. “If it continues to move as it is now, it’s going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people,” he said.

Analysis: Some Said the Vaccine Rollout Would Be a ‘Nightmare.’ They Were Right. – – Even before there was a vaccine, some seasoned doctors and public health experts warned, Cassandra-like, that its distribution would be “a logistical nightmare.“After Week 1 of the rollout, “nightmare” sounds like an apt description.Dozens of states say they didn’t receive nearly the number of promised doses. Pfizer says millions of doses sat in its storerooms, because no one from President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed task force told them where to ship them. A number of states have few sites that can handle the ultra-cold storage required for the Pfizer product, so, for example, front-line workers in Georgia have had to travel 40 minutes to get a shot. At some hospitals, residents treating COVID patients protested that they had not received the vaccine while administrators did, even though they work from home and don’t treat patients.The potential for more chaos is high. Dr. Vivek Murthy, named as the next surgeon general under President-elect Joe Biden, said this week that the Trump administration’s prediction – that the general population would get the vaccine in April – was realistic only if everything went smoothly. He instead predicted wide distribution by summer or fall.The Trump administration had expressed confidence that the rollout would be smooth, because it was being overseen by a four-star general, Gustave Perna, an expert in logistics. But it turns out that getting fuel, tanks and tents into war-torn mountainous Afghanistan is in many ways simpler than passing out a vaccine in our privatized, profit-focused and highly fragmented medical system. Gen. Perna apologized this week, saying he wanted to “take personal responsibility.” It’s really mostly not his fault.Throughout the COVID pandemic, the U.S. health care system has shown that it is not built for a coordinated pandemic response (among many other things). States took wildly different COVID prevention measures; individual hospitals varied in their ability to face this kind of national disaster; and there were huge regional disparities in test availability – with a slow ramp-up in availability due, at least in some part, because no payment or billing mechanism was established.Why should vaccine distribution be any different? Instead of a central health-directed strategy, we have multiple companies competing to capture their financial piece of the pandemic health care pie, each with its patent-protected product as well as its own supply chain and shipping methods.

4 Burning Questions on the Global Vaccine Rollout – Lynn Parramore – Mounting delays, technical glitches, scheduling snafus. Companies, countries, and coalitions jockeying for position. The vaccine rollout we’ve all been waiting for is underway, featuring sky-high stakes and mind-bending complexities that seasoned experts struggle to comprehend. Economist and business historian William Lazonick, critical of the rise of a financialized pharmaceutical industry business model that puts profits ahead of human life, has warned that companies fixated on manipulating stock prices in order to funnel money to shareholders are no longer focused on making the drugs people need at prices they can afford. As he sees it, these firms have morphed from socially useful and innovative enterprises into predatory, scofflaw monopolies that restrict the output of medicines and push prices out of reach. Now, with the world’s attention riveted on the pandemic, Lazonick and co-researcher finer Tulum, who has delved into the tension between innovation and financialization in the pharmaceutical industry, turn to real-time analysis of the vaccine rollout. Together, they examine how businesses, governments, and various civil-society coalitions are working together – and competing – to inoculate the planet against Covid-19. The researchers focus on four key questions related to demand, capacity, scale, and control, each of which reveal the challenges to and pitfalls of an unprecedented mass-production effort that is critical to bringing the pandemic to an end:

• 1. How much vaccine do we need? By the researchers’ reckoning, there are 5.5 billion people in the world 18 years and older who need two shots of a Covid-19 vaccine (at least until a one-shot vaccine is approved), which means that 11 billion doses total would be required to vaccinate all of them. Together, China and India account for nearly 40% of that 11 billion total. But not everybody needs to get vaccinated in order to beat coronavirus, so it may only be necessary to have 75% of people receiving two shots, in which case, about 8.3 billion doses worldwide would do the job.
• 2. How much capacity is out there? Let’s say the world needs enough capacity to make just over 8 billion doses, plus all the stuff required to use them, ranging from new machinery for Covid-19 vaccine production, chemical ingredients, glass vials, and purified water – never mind the timeframes for constructing new manufacturing facilities. Lazonick and Tulum estimate that if we had three or four years to complete the entire global rollout, we could get all the production processes and supply chains in order and have those doses distributed, no problem. But we need it faster than that. A lot faster, because the coronavirus is extremely contagious, and potentially becoming more so as the virus mutates. Tulum observes that the capacity to produce vaccines is controlled by a few Big Pharma firms and about ten large contract manufacturers, which are companies that provide services to drug companies. He adds that there are really only four global companies with sufficient capacity for a pandemic-sized vaccination effort on their own: Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, and Merck. And the only reason the big guys have this capacity is because governments have incentivized them to build it.
• 3. What could go wrong, logistically? The rapid scaling up of production for Covid-19 vaccines is a tremendous challenge. Not only must the vaccine be produced, it must be made on a massive scale. Already, reports indicate a wide range of problems and glitches. Many issues involve the supply chain, in part because every company is competing with other companies all over the world for stuff needed for the manufacturing processes. Already, there are problems with firms getting access to the various types of machines and materials required. Pfizer, for example, slashed production projections for 2020 from 100 million to 50 million doses and then agreed to provide 100 million extra doses to the U.S. for 2021 in exchange for receiving priority from the government in the delivery of resources. Equipment is an especially tough hurdle. The messenger RNA vaccine that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have developed, for example, requires new types of machinery that have never previously been used for mass production. In the case of the Moderna vaccine, now approved for emergency use, the U.S government has been lining up contract manufacturers, one of which, Swiss-based Lonza, is doubling its manufacturing capacity at a facility in New Hampshire. Bottom line: a lot can go wrong, and things may be more complicated and chaotic than many realize.
• 4. Who controls the vaccine rollout? – The U.S. and the U.K. are the most aggressive countries when it comes to seeking control over manufacturing capacity, supply chains, and vaccine output. For its part, the European Union (EU) is acting as a bloc to procure for member countries. At the same time, various coalitions have entered the competition, the most prominent of which is COVAX, an initiative coordinated by GAVI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and World Health Organization (WHO). The U.S. has been the most aggressive of all in the procurement competition, with its Operation Warp Speed run out of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in collaboration with the Department of Defense. There’s been a lot of wheeling and dealing, and mind-blowing amounts of money poured into companies for bringing vaccines online extremely quickly. Lazonick notes that the U.S. infrastructure for healthcare delivery was underfunded even before Trump occupied the White House, with matters worsened by the incompetence and negligence of his administration in preparing for and responding to the pandemic. This is why the vaccine rollout faces problems in the U.S. even when vaccines are made available from the manufacturers. As he puts it, “Operation Warp Speed has been very active in paying billions of taxpayer money for procurement contracts and thus hoarding access to the very limited supply of vaccines that the whole world needs, but very inactive in making sure that the vaccines on which it puts its hands actually find their way into the arms of the American people.” Lazonick also warns that the lion’s share of the available Covid-19 vaccines in 2021 will end up going to the rich nations.

COVID Vaccines: At-Risk Prisons Excluded From US Plans – –Coronavirus outbreaks in prisons and jails in the United States have been widespread. But inmates of US prisons and jails have largely been left behind as the country rolls out its first set ofCOVID-19 vaccines. Public health experts and advocates have been pushing for states and the federal government to make this vulnerable population a priority. More than 1.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States. One tracking projectreported more than 270,000 cases and more than 1,700 deaths in the prison system since April. Inmates are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as the general population, and 19 of the top 20 hot spots in the US are inside prisons, according to the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. Poor living conditions and overpopulation have exacerbated the problem. “They have been the source of so many cases because they are a confined population, because they can’t do social separation,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University, told DW. “They are a high-risk circumstance.” Health experts warn that the consequences could be disastrous if nothing is done to mitigate infections among the incarcerated. The American Medical Association had recommended inmates and correctional workers “should be prioritized in receiving access” to the vaccines in the first phase of inoculations. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory committee in mid-December did not recommend prisoners be included in the initial phase. The federal government has largely left state governments on their own to determine how to distribute the vaccines. “The federal government has mismanaged this process, specifically developing logistics,” said Ryan King, director of research and policy at the Justice Policy Institute. “This was avoidable … there’s been a lack of real federal leadership.”

Addicts in rehab next to get COVID-19 vaccine, Cuomo says – Recovering addicts in residential rehab facilities will be among those vaccinated against the coronavirus this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo obliquely revealed Monday. During a virtual news conference in Albany, Cuomo said the state was expecting to receive a combined 259,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. In addition to urgent care center employees and “individuals who are administering the COVID-19 vaccines, for obvious reasons,” Cuomo said that shots would be given to residents of “OASAS” – the state Office of Addiction Services and Supports. The agency runs 12 treatment centers across the state, with five located in or around New York City, and also certifies and monitors “hundreds” of private facilities, according to its website. “These are congregate facilities. Congregate facilities are problematic. That’s where you have a lot of people in concentration,” Cuomo said. “Nursing homes are obviously the most problematic because they’re congregate plus older, vulnerable people. OASAS facilities, what we call the O facilities, they’re congregate – not necessarily older – but congregate facilities.” Residents and staffers will be vaccinated at both the state-run and privately operated rehab centers, as well as at facilities run or licensed by the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities and the Office of Mental Health, according to the state Department of Health. Emergency medical services personnel, medical examiners and coroners and some funeral workers will also get shots, a DOH spokeswoman said.

Over half of U.S. adults ‘unlikely’ to get COVID vaccine under emergency use authorization – The coronavirus vaccine is finally a real thing and millions of people have already received it. While the rollout has the world cheering, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University finds many Americans aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to be the first in line for the vaccine under an emergency use authorization. Their survey reveals 53.1 percent are definitely, likely, or somewhat unwilling to get the shotunder emergency use conditions.The poll does find that 46.9 percent of the 788 U.S. adults surveyed are definitely, likely, or somewhat willing to receive the vaccine under such conditions. So what is keeping the majority of the United States from getting their first shot?If researchers remove the emergency use authorization stipulation, 59.9 percent of respondents are definitely or probably planning on being vaccinated in the future. Meanwhile, 18.8 percent are neutral on the entire matter and 21.3 percent are probably or definitely not getting the vaccine.“The biggest issue coming out of this study is that participants seemed worried about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine under emergency use authorization,” says lead author and VCU assistant professor Jeanine Guidry, Ph.D., in a university release.So why are Americans shying away from “emergency use” of the COVID vaccine? Concerns over potential side-effects appear to be the top answer to that question.“Such concerns are not unusual,” Guidry adds, “but we now also know that two of the vaccines – Pfizer and Moderna – may have some expected side effects … and that may make people hesitate to get the vaccine.”Researchers also discovered a number of differing opinions among people of different age groups and ethnicities. Younger Americans are more willing to get the coronavirus vaccine than older adults. Whites are also more likely to feel good about receiving a COVID shot in comparison to African Americans. Both of these differences stayed steady regardless of the inclusion of the emergency use authorization stipulation.

WHO Chief Scientist Warns “No Evidence COVID Vaccine Prevents Viral Transmission” – Once again, the WHO has stepped in to offer some confusing comments about the coronavirus vaccine, warning that there is “no evidence to be confident shots prevent transmission” and that people who receive the vaccine should continue wearing masks and following all social distancing and travel guidelines. The comments were made by WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan during what appears to have been a virtual press conference held Monday. A clip of the offending line has begun circulating on social media. “At the moment, I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines, to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from getting the infection and passing it on,” Of course, a close look at the research released by Pfizer and Moderna shows the studies haven’t actually tested whether the vaccines actually prevent transmission of the virus; the goal of the trials was to see whether vaccinated patients presented with COVID symptoms at a rate that was substantially less frequent than individuals who hadn’t been vaccinated. That’s pretty much it. Though the data might hint at lowering transmission rates, that’s still tbd, apparently.

Gottlieb: New coronavirus strain ‘probably here in the United States’ –Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday that a new strain of COVID-19 believed to have originated in the U.K. is “probably here” in the U.S. “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Gottlieb if he thought the measures that the federal government has taken to fight the new strain by requiring negative COVID-19 tests from all air passengers arriving from the U.K. would have an impact. “Well, I think it’s probably here in the United States, and it could be here in a reasonable number at this point,” Gottlieb responded. Gottlieb said the U.S. needs a better way to sequence and track the strains of the coronavirus that are currently circulating. “We don’t sequence a lot of samples in this country, and a lot of that sequencing that does get done gets done in private labs and doesn’t get aggregated into public databases. That needs to be fixed,” Gottlieb said. “In the U.K., they’re sequencing about 10 percent of all the samples. Here we’re doing a fraction of 1 percent.” In response to the newly detected strain, many countries have limited or banned travel to and from the U.K. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) last week put in place a 14-day quarantine requirement for travelers arriving to his state from the U.K., while many other lawmakers, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), have called for stricter restrictions. Brennan also asked Gottlieb for this thoughts on the rate at which vaccines have been distributed and administered. She noted that 9 million doses of the two approved vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been distributed and a little more than a million people have received a vaccine. “The pace is slower than what was stated. I think it’s probably realistic to think that the pace is going to be a little bit slower, especially as we try to move through hard-to-vaccinate populations next month,” said Gottlieb. “I suspect there’s more than a million who have been vaccinated. There’s a lag in reporting. But the idea that we’re going to get to 20 million vaccines, vaccinations, by the end of the year, that’s probably unrealistic at this point.”

White House testing czar: More infectious COVID strain is no more dangerous –Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House coronavirus testing czar, expressed confidence that a new, more infectious strain of the vaccine detected in the U.K. is no more deadly than the more common strain. “We don’t know if it’s here or not, there’s certainly a possibility that it’s here or not,” Giroir said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is not any more serious than the normal stains of COVID. You can still protect yourself by the mitigation measures … we have no evidence to suggest, nor do we believe that the vaccine would not be effective.” Giroir added that “we would certainly encourage states to have quarantine orders or to have testing once these travelers arrive” from the U.K., but noted existing protocols for travelers from the U.K. and continental Europe that are already in place. Asked if public health officials anticipated a surge in infection as a result of the holiday season, Giroir said, “it really depends on what the travelers do when they get where they’re going.” “We know the actual physical act of traveling in airplanes for example can be quite safe,” he added. “What we really worry about is the mingling of bubbles once you get to your destination.”

Fauci: Mutant coronavirus strain must be taken ‘very seriously’ — Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, on Sunday said people should take the more contagious strain of the coronavirus that has emerged in southeastern England “very seriously.” Fauci, who has discouraged outright barring flights from the United Kingdom, said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” that U.S. officials were right to require proof of negative coronavirus tests for anyone entering the country from Britain. Public health officials are examining the new strain “very intensively now,” including questions such as, “Does it make someone more ill? Is it more serious virus in the sense of virulence? And the answer is, it doesn’t appear to be that way.” Fauci added that while their British counterparts have expressed confidence that existing vaccines will be equally effective against the new strain, “we’re going to be doing the studies ourselves,” according to the AP. “We’re getting isolates of it, making combination of viruses, to be able to directly test, getting sera from people who we have vaccinated, and see if it still neutralizes this new strain, this mutant strain that’s coming from the U.K., as well as from South Africa,” he added. “There’s a similar, but not entirely the same type of mutation that we’re seeing in South Africa.” Fauci declined to answer whether it was a mistake not to require negative tests from British travelers earlier, telling CNN’s Dana Bash, “Obviously, I think the move to put some form of restriction on travel – and restriction could either be blocking out travel completely, which the decision was made not to do that.” “But I think it’s prudent and a good idea to do some form of testing, and not let somebody on the plane from the U.K. unless they have a documented negative COVID-19 test,” he added.

Faster-Spreading Covid Strain Affects Young the Most, Study Says – The new coronavirus variant that emerged in the U.K. is more transmissible and appears to affect a higher proportion of people under 20, according to a report from Imperial College London and other science groups.The mutation of concern has “a substantial transmission advantage” and is linked to “epidemic growth in nearly all areas,” the scientists wrote. It can raise the virus’s reproduction rate, which indicates how many people one patient infects, by as much as 0.7, the researchers found.“This will make control more difficult and further accentuates the urgency of rolling out vaccination as quickly as possible,” said Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial who has worked on modeling the outbreak. Social distancing measures that worked against earlier strains of the virus were insufficient to control the spread of the new variant, the study found. The government had previously said the new strain was as much as 70% more transmissible than other versions, without providing documentation.The researchers used statistical tools to evaluate the link between transmission and frequency of the new variant across the U.K. The data have informed the government’s pandemic planning in recent weeks, Ferguson said. It’s possible the new variant appears to infect the young the most because the research was conducted at a time when there were lockdowns but schools remained opened, the scientists said.

December deadliest month of COVID-19 pandemic –December is the deadliest month for the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.The U.S. has recorded more than 63,000 deaths so far this month. April was previously the deadliest month of the pandemic, with more than 55,000 deaths. According to the COVID Tracking Project, deaths surpassed that number just three weeks into December as temperatures dropped, people gathered for the holidays and cases surged. According to the most recent data from Johns Hopkins, the U.S. has seen more than 19 million coronavirus cases and more than 330,000 deaths due to COVID-19.President-elect Joe Biden warned last week that the pandemic will get worse before it gets better, even with the arrival of vaccines, and cautioned Americans to be vigilant.”I’m going to tell you the truth. And here’s the simple truth: Our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us,” Biden said during a press conference Tuesday.”As frustrating as it is to hear, it’s going to take patience, persistence and determination to beat this virus. There will be no time to waste in taking the steps we need to turn this crisis around,” he added.Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, on Sundayagreed with that assessment, warning the U.S. could see the worst of the pandemic in the weeks ahead.”As we have gone from the late fall to the early winter, the numbers really are quite troubling,” Fauci said. “With the hospitalizations over 120,000, we really are a critical stage,” he added.

One year into the pandemic, 65,000 deaths in the US in one month – One year after the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in China, December was the deadliest month of the pandemic both in the United States and throughout the world. More than 65,000 Americans lost their lives to the virus over the past 28 days. At the present rate, deaths in December will be double what they were in November, when nearly 37,000 people died. The United States accounts for about a third of the global death toll of 175,000 over the past month. Medical personnel work in the intensive care ward for Covid-19 patients at the MontLegia CHC hospital in Liege, Belgium, Friday, Nov. 6, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Francisco Seco] By the end of this week, total deaths in the US will surpass 350,000, and the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 will reach 20 million. Another 193,000 people could die in this country over the next two months, according to predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Experts have warned that even this scenario may be optimistic. “We very well might see a post-seasonal – in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s – surge,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday. “The projections are just nightmarish,” Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. In a warning to the rest of the world, the number of daily new cases hit an all-time record of 42,000 in the UK yesterday, driven by the emergence of a new strain of the disease that medical experts estimate is 56 percent more transmissible than the original. US Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir said Monday that the new and more dangerous strain of the virus is “likely” already present in the United States. He was left to speculate because, unlike the UK, the US does not have a genetic surveillance system in place to ascertain the presence of different strains of the disease. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 continues to surge throughout the country. “California is now the only place (state or country) in the world” with more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases per million people, noted physician Eric Topol. Southern California, the state’s most populous region, as well as San Joaquin Valley, in the state’s center, have 0 percent ICU bed capacity. On Sunday Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said that the hospital faced a “massive crisis.” Another hospital in the region has begun issuing guidelines for patients and families as to how the hospital will make decisions on who will live and who will die in the case that care has to be rationed.

One in 1,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 —Within 10 months since the onset of a public health crisis that has upended the lives of millions of Americans, the nation’s death toll has surpassed 330,000, during what has become the year’s deadliest month, with nearly 60,000 lives lost within the final weeks of 2020. The overwhelming scale of death means that one in 1,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Nearly 19 million confirmed infections have been reported in 2020, with an average number of daily new cases remaining above 200,000 within the year’s final days, according to Johns Hopkins University – more than three times higher than the outbreak’s summer peak in July. Within the final weeks of the year, Covid-19 has become the leading cause of death in the US. Health officials have forecast a death toll that could reach 400,000 early next year – eclipsing American lives lost during World War II, based on projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The arrival and promise of an effective vaccine, of which nearly 2 million doses have already been administered, will arrive too late for thousands of current patients. States reported a record-high 120,000 Covid-19 patients who were currently hospitalised on Christmas Eve, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That figure broke a record that was just one-day old, when more than 119,000 people were hospitalised. At Christmas, health systems reported nearly 119,000 hospitalised patients. The first reported coronavirus-linked death in the US was on 29 February in Washington state, though health officials later determined that two California residents died from Covid-19 earlier that month. Within the next few months, the nation’s death toll eclipsed 100,000 in May. Four months later, another 100,000 Americans had died from the disease. Eleven weeks later, as infections and hospitalisations surged, deaths followed, reaching 300,000 by mid-December.

Experts say experience convinced Midwest of virus dangers — As much of the country experiences spiking virus rates, a reprieve from a devastating surge of the coronavirus in the Upper Midwest has given cautious relief to health officials, though they worry that infections remain rampant and holiday gatherings could reignite the worst outbreaks of the pandemic. States in the northern stretches of the Midwest and Great Plains saw the nation’s worst rates of coronavirus infections in the weeks before Thanksgiving, stretching hospitals beyond capacity and leading to states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin reporting some of the nation’s highest deaths per capita during November. But over the last two weeks, those states have seen their average daily cases drop, with decreases ranging from 20% in Iowa to as much as 66% in North Dakota, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. Since the middle of November, the entire region has returned to levels similar to those seen in October. For a region that was a harbinger of the virus waves that now plague much of the country, the positive direction in the Midwest offers hope that people can rally to take virus precautions seriously as they await vaccines during what experts think will be the final months of the pandemic. Governors have used the declining numbers to justify their divergent approaches to fighting the pandemic, even jousting at times. In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has defended keeping some restrictions in place through early January, saying limits on bars and restaurants are working. In neighboring South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has argued the opposite, using the recent decline in numbers in her state to argue that mask mandates don’t make a difference. But some epidemiologists believe the most compelling factor for many who redoubled their efforts to prevent infections may be that they experienced the virus on a personal level. As the pandemic crept into communities across the Midwest, more people had loved ones, friends or acquaintances fall ill or die. “It’s fox hole religion – the whole thing gets a lot more real when the guy next to you gets shot,” said Dr. Christine Petersen, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa. “All of a sudden, your local hospital is full, and your sister, aunt, or grandmother is in the hospital.” Roughly one of out every 278 people across northern states spanning from Wisconsin to Montana required hospital care for COVID-19, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. In tight-knit communities, those experiences hit home. The virus outbreak was so widespread by early November that nearly everyone has known someone severely affected by COVID-19, said Dr. James Lawler with the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security.

Oregon Hospitals Didn’t Have Shortages. So Why Were Disabled People Denied Care? – At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a small group of disability rights advocates found itself in a race against time to save the life of a woman with an intellectual disability.The woman was taken to the hospital with COVID-19. But the hospital, in a small Oregon town, denied the ventilator she needed. Instead, a doctor, citing her “low quality of life,” wanted her to sign a legal form to allow the hospital to deny her care.In the hospital, a medical provider wrote do-not-resuscitate (DNR) and do-not-intubate orders for the woman. Those are medical instructions to health care providers to withhold potentially painful interventions, like a ventilator or CPR, if a patient stops breathing or the patient’s heart stops. The woman was alone in the hospital and did not understand what the doctor and medical staff wanted her to agree to. In addition, the hospital staff sent word to the woman’s group home: Fill out DNRs in advance for your other residents, in case one of them comes to the hospital.Out of that quiet fight in early spring, the advocates – staff at a disability rights legal group, a state lawmaker and a few others – discovered something disturbing: There were many cases in Oregon of health care being rationed to people with disabilities.At the same moment, across the United States, disability groups and even a civil rights office of the U.S. government were raising a similar warning: that behind closed doors, people with disabilities, as well as elderly people, were in danger of being denied health care.NPR was looking for cases, too, and heard about the woman in Pendleton while she was in the hospital.There’s no reason that these examples would occur more frequently in Oregon than in other states. But the fight for that anonymous woman with an intellectual disability peeled back the curtain on health care decision-making in Oregon in a way that did not happen in other states.That activism led to change in Oregon – including anti-discrimination legislation and new statewide policies.

TSA screened 1.1M travelers the day after Christmas – The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened more than 1.1 million travelers on Saturday, the day after Christmas, despite pleas from public health officials for individuals not to travel amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. TSA confirmed that it screened 1,128,773 travelers on Dec. 26. The number falls short of the 1,191,123 travelers who passed through airport checkpoints on Dec. 23. Dec. 23 brought the most travelers through airport checkpoints since March 16, when 1,257,823 people were screened. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and top health officials called on Americans not to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday or around Christmas in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci earlier this month urged Americans to “Stay at home as much as you can, keep your interactions to the extent possible to members of the same household.” “This cannot be business as usual this Christmas because we’re already in a very difficult situation, and we’re going to make it worse, if we don’t do something about it,” Fauci told The Washington Post. The United States reported 225,930 coronavirus cases on Saturday and 1,646 fatalities. The country has reported over 19 million COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic.

Covid Variant in Colorado, Governor Says; First Reported US Case of New Strain – Colorado has confirmed the first reported U.S. case of the Covid-19 variant that emerged in the U.K. Colorado Governor Jared Polis said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been advised of the case by the state’s health department. Cases involving the new strain have been identified in more than a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Singapore and South Korea. Last week, the CDC said the variant was probably already in the U.S., noting that only about 51,000 of the 17 million U.S. cases had been sequenced in a way that would allow discovery of the new strain. Preliminary analysis has suggested the variant is 56% to 70% more transmissible than other strains and is contributing to a spike in cases in the U.K. It is not considered to be more deadly. The individual in Colorado is a male in his 20s, who is now in isolation and has no history of travel, the governor said in a statement released via Twitter. The new variant was responsible for 62% of Covid-19 infections in London in the week ending Dec. 9, up from 28% in early November, according to Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia’s Norwich School of Medicine. Vaccine developers have said they believe their shots will protect against the variant.

US reports its first known case of new UK Covid variant – A man in Colorado has become the first known US case of the newly identified strain of Covid-19 circulating in the UK – and authorities have found a second suspected case in this state.The new variant is thought to be more contagious than other, established variants and has prompted some countries to restrict travel from the UK. Public health experts believe that this variant is already spreading throughout the US. The Colorado man confirmed to have contracted the new variant, called B.1.1.7, is in his 20s, and had no travel history, according to the state’s health department. In a statement, Governor Jared Polis said that health officials are conducting an investigation into how the man might have contracted the virus, while he recovers in isolation. Although the new variant had not been found in the US until now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that it was probably already circulating through the country. The agency said while the new variant had not been identified through sequencing efforts “labs have only 51,000 of the 17m US cases” – and the variant might not have been picked up. According to Colorado Politics, public health officials said they have detected a second suspected case of this variant. Both the man who’s confirmed to have the variant and the suspected case have been working in the same Elbert county, Colorado assisted living facility, per CNN. They live outside Elbert county, but officials did not say where they reside. Detection of this new variant in the US comes as Covid-19 continues to spread seemingly unabated. There have been 19,516,147 confirmed cases in the US and 338,656 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.Among the recent deaths is Luke Letlow, Louisiana’s incoming Republican congressional representative. Letlow, who reportedly did not have pre-existing conditions, died from coronavirus-related complications at 41 years old, his spokesman said in a statement.The new variant has also recently been detected in at least 17 countries, including South Korea, Spain, Australia and Canada. On Christmas Day, the CDC issued new guidelines for travelers from the UK, requiring proof of a negative Covid-19 test.That the Colorado man who tested positive for the new variant has no travel history is significant in that it suggests the new variant is already spreading through US communities, said Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University, in a tweet. “There is a lot we don’t know about this new Covid-19 variant, but scientists in the United Kingdom are warning the world that it is significantly more contagious,” Polis said in a statement. “We are working to prevent spread and contain the virus at all levels.”

Los Angeles County reports nearly 30,000 coronavirus cases – The number of coronavirus cases and related deaths in Los Angeles County continued to surge over the first two days of the three-day holiday weekend, with health officials on Saturday reporting a combined tally of nearly 30,000 cases. Officials reported 29,423 new coronavirus cases over Christmas Day and Saturday combined. Officials said Friday’s case numbers were delayed a day because of an interruption of internet service in the L.A. area by Spectrum.Local health agencies also reported 136 deaths over the two-day period. The county has averaged about 14,000 new coronavirus cases a day and 88 COVID-19 deaths daily over the past week.Los Angeles County has now reported a total of more than 707,000 coronavirus cases and more than 9,440 deaths.Hospitals throughout the county are overwhelmed. Some are running dangerously low on their supplies of oxygen, critical to treating severely ill COVID-19 patients who have begun to suffocate on account of their virus-inflamed lungs. Emergency rooms are so overcrowded that ambulances have to wait as long as eight hours to drop off patients or are sometimes sent to hospitals farther away.“People mixing with others not in their household has driven the COVID-19 pandemic in L.A. County to the most dangerous levels that we have ever seen,” county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. “The overwhelmed hospitals are the saddest proof of this reality. To honor our health care workers and for the safety of your family and friends, please delay travel plans and gather only with members of our household. These actions will save lives.” In Los Angeles County, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose to 6,815, more than triple the figure from Thanksgiving, when 1,951 were in the hospital. ICUs across Los Angeles County are essentially full, and on Christmas, 1,368 people with COVID-19 were in the ICU, nearly triple the comparable figure from Thanksgiving, when 484 were in the ICU.

L.A. County health officials fear new COVID-19 surge in January due to holiday gatherings – Los Angeles County health officials are warning of a possible surge in COVID-19 cases following family gatherings and out-of-town trips during the holidays, despite pandemic guidelines that asked the public to stay home.Under one scenario, experts predict there could be a boost in new coronavirus cases by mid-January, a surge in hospitalizations by late January and early February, and another burst of deaths by early to mid-February.The quick succession of holidays in the fall and winter months typically allows people to celebrate and spend time with loved ones in a brief period. But that leaves little time for coronavirus cases to start falling before they spike again, creating surges on top of surges.People may be getting together in small groups to try to be safe because of the COVID-19 surge, but those interactions can still fuel the spread of the virus, said UCLA infectious disease specialist Dr. Tim Brewer.“I’m very concerned about the next two months,” Brewer said. Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, a medical epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said a person who is exposed to COVID-19 at a Christmas gathering could be infectious by New Year’s Eve. However, the individual may be asymptomatic, go to a New Year’s Eve party and unknowingly spread the disease, he said.Coupled with a high infection rate – about 1 in 95 in Los Angeles County are contagious with the virus, according to county estimates – the holidays are creating a “viral wildfire,” he said.In Los Angeles County, the pace of daily deaths is higher than ever – with a person dying of the coronavirus about every 10 minutes.

‘A viral tsunami:’ LA doctors, hospitals are ‘hanging on by a thread’ as COVID surges — The latest COVID-19 epicenter has shifted coasts, moving from New York to the Midwest and now moving to Los Angeles.The city reported more than 13,000 new cases on Dec. 27 alone, pushing the city to hit record highs in seven-day testing averages and positivity rates.The Los Angeles Times notes that with this wild uptick in cases comes dwindling hospitalization capacity. Intensive Care Unit bed numbers are falling, and health care providers may have to begin rationing care across county and state medical facilities. “Ambulances are circling hospitals for hours trying to find one that has a bed open so they can bring in their critically ill COVID patient gasping for air,” a doctor at an L.A. County public hospital told reporters last week. “We’re literally hanging on by a thread.” Epidemiologists and urban experts say that some of the city’s infrastructure and design characteristics made it easy for the virus to spread. Combined with lockdown-weary Angelenos and cooler winter weather, COVID-19 was able to gain ground despite the city’s prior strict lockdown measures. “There is no city as large and complex as L.A. The closest might be New York. And we saw what happened in New York,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco, told The Times. An early sign of the outbreak occurring was Thanksgiving. Sensors at the Transportation Security Administration stations located in airports recorded millions of travelers moving over the holiday period, adding to experts’ worries of a new rise in cases. “We realized, ‘Oh, my God. We’ve got everyone traveling, like hundreds of thousands of people are traveling,’” Bibbins-Domingo added. “We at that point got really scared, because we just sort of knew in our core that we were headed to a surge on top of a surge.” Now, Los Angeles is averaging 14,000 new COVID-19 infections daily. “We’ve moved from having waves to now having a viral tsunami occurring here in Los Angeles,” Robert Kim-Farley, a medical epidemiologist at UCLA, told The Guardian.The rampant and dense homelessness and poverty that characterizes millions of Los Angeles’s inhabitants also made it more challenging to isolate and socially distance. “Los Angeles has the combination of poverty and density that leads to a virus like this being able to spread much more quickly and be more devastating,”

A Los Angeles hospital is so overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases it’s been forced to treat some patients in the gift shop – A Los Angeles hospital is so overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases that it’s now forced to treat some patients in the gift shop and chapel, CNN reported. Dr. Elaine Batchlor, CEO of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital said if cases continue to rise, they may have to result to wartime techniques designed to ration care.“We may be forced to do something that, as health professionals, we all really just loathe having to even think about,” Batchlor told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin.The hospital serves poor communities in South Los Angeles,The New York Timesreported.Dr. Oscar Casillas, the medical director for the hospital’s emergency department, told The Times that while the emergency department could normally see about 30 people at a time, they have seen as much as 100 people a day amid the pandemic.The hospital’s waiting room is now a tent outside.“Everything is backed up all the way to the street,” Casillas said.The Times said COVID-19 patients accounted for 66% of the community hospital’s capacity.Similar situations are playing out in hospitals across Los Angeles County, especially in South LA. Earlier this month, California activated its “mass fatality” program after deaths surged in the state. The program is meant to ensure local agencies aren’t overburdened. Southern California, which spans more than 56,000 square miles and has a population of nearly 24 million people had a 0% ICU capacity at the time.

California hospitals overwhelmed as COVID-19 cases hit 2 million — California became the first state last week to reach 2 million recorded COVID-19 cases and is now the epicenter of the virus in the US. In Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous region, there are an estimated 6,500 people hospitalized, four times the number from last month. The number of people in intensive care units (ICUs) is approaching 1,300, double the number from a month ago. Every 10 minutes another patient in California dies from the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. Nearly every hospital in the state is operating beyond its capacity, putting in makeshift beds and rationing treatment for the most urgent cases. Many nurses and staff are complaining of fatigue and taking much needed leave, while hospitals scramble to make up for the losses in workers. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has predicted that hospitalizations could reach up to 100,000 in January under current scenarios. While California was the first state to impose a lockdown in spring, the government’s reopening policies have led to a horrific and preventable surge in cases. Last Thursday alone saw 351 new deaths in the state. Health officials have been begging the public to stay at home during the holiday season, but Governor Newsom has still not issued a statewide order for people to do so. As people travel for the holidays and spread the disease they will be blamed for the rise in infections. Meanwhile, workplaces, schools and other major congregate settings have been allowed to proceed with no systematic effort for contact tracing. Since the start of the pandemic, California has seen more than 2.1 million positive cases and more than 24,220 people die from COVID-19, according to the California Department of Public Health. In the past two weeks alone, there have been an additional 570,000 cases and 3,250 deaths, averaging to record highs of 41,000 new cases and 231 deaths every day. Last week, California reported the highest number of new cases per capita in the past week of any state, according to Johns Hopkins University. This week will see more than 19,750 patients hospitalized for the virus in California, including 4,228 in ICUs. Both totals are now double the peak recorded during the summer when there were around 7,200 hospitalized with 2,050 in intensive care.

California is at the breaking point: COVID-19 patients in ambulances are waiting EIGHT HOURS before entering ERs as ICUs run out of capacity – Hospitals in Southern California are so overrun by COVID-19 cases that doctors are running low on supplies of oxygen, infected patients are forced to wait eight hours in ambulances before they can enter an emergency room, and intensive care units are fully booked with no more beds available. The skyrocketing surge in COVID-19 cases is raising suspicions among public health officials in Los Angeles County that a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus is fueling the outbreak. California’s deadly Christmas was marked by pleas to avoid holiday gatherings outside the home and indoor church services in what could be a make-or-break effort to curb a coronavirus surge that already has filled some hospitals well beyond normal capacity. Doctors say California is currently experiencing a ‘viral tsunami’ with COVID-19cases surging by a staggering 68 percent in the past two weeks alone and ICU beds now at capacity in the southern part of the state. California surpassed 2 million recorded cases of the deadly virus earlier this week, but experts predict that number will rapidly rise as residents gather to celebrate New Year. Festive gatherings with friends and family might be tempting after a year that has seen the pandemic take nearly 24,000 lives and ravage the economy as much of the state remained under a stay-at-home order that has closed nonessential businesses.But officials repeated warnings that Thanksgiving gatherings where people didn’t wear masks or observe social distancing have resulted in a surge and begged people to forego Yule and New Year’s festivities.In Sonoma County in California’s wine country, a Native American casino announced it was canceling a planned private New Year’s Eve indoor event that could have drawn as many as 4,000 people. The Graton Resort and Casino is on sovereign native land that isn’t subject to state or county health orders, but it had come under scrutiny for the event.Governor Gavin Newsom said hospitals are under ‘unprecedented pressure’ and if current trends continue the number of those hospitalized because of the virus could double in 30 days.

Massive COVID-19 spike of 38,000 California prisoners sparks calls for early releases –More than 38,000 incarcerated people have tested positive for COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, following a recent spike predicted by the office of the inspector general in an independent oversight report last month. While the state has started vaccinating inmates with special medical needs, supply remains limited and advocates say more inmates need to be released. “In the last nine months the state had a chance to do the right thing, they didn’t and now people inside are terrified,” Hadar Aviram, a professor with UC Hastings Law, told the Guardian. More coronavirus cases are connected to 60 prisons in the state than more than 300 nursing homes, as well as colleges, universities and food processing facilities, according to the New York Times’ COVID-19 Tracker. Across the country, more than 433,000 people have been infected in jails and prisons, and at least 1,960 inmates and correctional officers have died. Six of the facilities with the highest case counts are located in California, according to the Times’ tally. “We have implemented robust response and mitigation efforts across the system, including mandating the use of procedural [surgical] masks by all staff in our institutions, anyone entering institutions grounds is screened both verbally and by temperature check, and conducting staff and inmate testing regularly,” said Vicky Waters, a special adviser at California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told CNN.As of November, California Gov. Gavin Newsom had granted four medical reprieves while in office along with 22 pardons and 13 commutations, allowing those classified as “high medical risk” by the CDCR to serve their sentences “in appropriate alternative placements in the community.” “I simply will not en masse release people without looking individual by individual,” he told The Guardian, saying that he reviewed individual cases on a weekly basis and continued to follow protocols. “I respect those who want to bypass protocols but we are moving in a different direction.”

US coronavirus cases surpass 19 million – The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 recorded in the U.S. since the pandemic began passed 19 million on Sunday, according to figures tabulated by Johns Hopkins University.The outbreak in the U.S. is growing rapidly, with a million cases added in the last five days and a million cases added in the six days before that. After recording more than 100,000 cases in one day for the first time in early November, the nation recorded 226,274 cases on Saturday, according to Johns Hopkins. The COVID Tracking Project says the U.S. averaged 185,000 cases a day between Dec. 19 and 26. The nation has recorded 332,502 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began. The latest grim milestone comes as health experts warn a surge in cases is likely in the next few weeks as a result of people traveling and gathering for the holidays. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, predicted hospital systems in many cities could reach a breaking point. “As we have gone from the late fall to the early winter, the numbers really are quite troubling,” Fauci, a member of the White House COVID-19 response team, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “With the hospitalizations over 120,000, we really are a critical stage,” he continued before adding of Christmas gatherings, “Even though we advise not to, it’s going to happen.” India, the country with the second-highest number of total cases, had recorded just more than 10 million coronavirus infections as of Sunday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Brazil has more than 7.4 million cases. A more infectious strain of the virus is also spreading primarily in the United Kingdom, even as both the U.S. and the U.K. begin rolling out distribution of two vaccines for COVID-19. Officials have moved to place heavy restrictions on travel from the U.K. but have warned that some people carrying the new strain may have already arrived in the U.S.

South Carolina reports record coronavirus cases –South Carolina saw a single-day high for new coronavirus cases on Sunday, with more than 4,000 reported. The state reported 4,370 new cases for Dec. 25, with the delay due to the state’s policy of not reporting on major holidays, according to state officials. On Christmas Eve, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control reported 2,550 new cases and 14 deaths. The department also reported a testing positivity rate of 23.5 percent on Sunday. The Palmetto State has seen a coronavirus surge in December and a total of 288,892 cases since the beginning of the pandemic. The state has reported a total of 5,124 deaths. Last week, Gov. Henry McMaster (R) announced he had tested positive shortly after his wife Peggy announced she had been diagnosed days earlier. “Peggy and I urge everyone to be extra careful during the Christmas holiday season,” the governor said in a statement last Tuesday. “This virus spreads very easily.” McMaster isolated himself after the first lady tested positive and did not have any close contacts in the 48-hour period before his own positive test, according to his office.

Arizona sets record for COVID-19 patients in ICU — Arizona is reporting a record number of patients in intensive care units (ICUs) who have or are suspected to have the coronavirus, announcing more than 10,000 new cases and 42 more deaths due to the virus on Sunday. The Arizona Republic reported on Monday that 4,390 hospitalized COVID-19 patients were confirmed the day before, significantly higher than the peak of 3,517 observed in the summer. Some 1,007 suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients were in ICUs, beating the previous record of 970 in July. According to Arizona’s coronavirus data dashboard, 91 percent of ICU beds in the state are occupied and more than half by COVID-19 patients. There are currently fewer than 200 ICU beds and 1,000 non-ICU beds available, reports the Republic. Along with record high ICU patients, the number of Arizona coronavirus patients on ventilators also reached a record high on Sunday: 715. The newspaper notes that the unusually high number of new cases reported, 10,086, is because the state added multiple days worth of cases at once after the recent holidays. The number of new cases has surpassed 2,000 for 31 out of the 33 past days, the Republic reports, and 27 of those days saw more than 4,000 cases reported. In the U.S., Arizona currently ranks third in terms of seven-day new-case averages, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data dashboard, surpassed only by California and Tennessee. NFL fines Baltimore Ravens over COVID-19 protocol violations: report London Ambulance Service receiving as many emergency calls now as… The impact from the recent holidays has yet to be seen, but experts have warned that a new surge could be imminent as thousands of families gathered despite warnings from government agencies against doing so. The state began its coronavirus vaccine plan on Dec. 14, the Republic reports. Front-line health care workers, early responders and those in vulnerable populations have been prioritized. The order in which the vaccines are deployed has been left to state governments to decide, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) has not yet announced who will be next in line, though the newspaper notes he has assured residents that the vaccine will be free for everyone once it is widely available.

Wisconsin Rep. Gwen Moore tests positive for COVID-19 –Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) announced Monday that she had tested positive for the coronavirus. “I tested positive for COVID-19. I am following guidance from my doctor and am isolating from others. I am thankful to be feeling well. And I do not foresee this disrupting my work for Wisconsin’s Fourth,” Moore tweeted. The Democratic congresswoman added, “I encourage every person to continue taking measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask, washing your hands, and practicing social distancing.” Moore, 69, has not attended any congressional proceedings in person since May 26, writing a proxy letter that designated Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) as her proxy. Due to her age, Moore is at a higher risk of experiencing more severe symptoms of the coronavirus though she reported she was feeling well. Moore joins Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen (Wash.), who shared last week that he had also tested positive for the coronavirus, and nearly 40 other House lawmakers who have tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began. Members of Congress were given access to the coronavirus vacine as part of a “continuity of governance” plan that seeks to ensure the government is able to continue functioning in a broad range of different situations. However, many government officials such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) have deferred receiving the vaccine, stating that they believe other groups of people should receive the vaccine before politicians do. It is unclear if Moore has received a dose of a coronavirus vaccine yet.

Covid Death Toll to Reach 400,000 Before Trump Departs, CDC Says – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now predicts the U.S. will see 400,000 coronavirus deaths by Jan. 20, when President Donald Trump is to leave office. The country surpassed 100,000 deaths in May, and 200,000 four months later. It passed 300,000 in three months, and 400,000 looks set to take just one month, the CDC determined using a collection of mathematical models. The U.S. has one of the highest mortality ratios of nations hit hardest by the virus, behind only Italy, Spain and the U.K., scaled for population. The predicted pace would mean an additional 65,000 deaths in coming weeks. The numbers are a reminder of the increasing speed with which the virus claims lives in the U.S., underscoring the urgency of vaccine distribution efforts. Weekly deaths are predicted to rise through Jan. 16, even though national case numbers have been falling for two weeks amid patchy holiday reporting. Only Washington state reported a seven-day average in cases that was substantially higher than it was a week ago, according to Covid Tracking Project data.Nationally, the U.S. posted 162,190 new Covid-19 cases Monday, Covid Tracking Project data show. There have been at least 335,051 deaths attributed to the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. According to Covid Tracking Project data:

• Connecticut, Kansas and Arizona had the highest new cases per million people.
• Connecticut also reported a single-day case record on Monday.

‘My Daughter’s Gone. My Mother’s Gone’: How One Family Is Coping With Loss – Cindy Bezzek and her husband built their home in Sanford, North Carolina, to be an oasis, with bonsai trees, tortoises and a waterfall-flanked koi pond. The place called Tranquility Ranch was Bezzek’s refuge after years of tumult. Her mantra when 2020 began: “Look for the beauty.”Then came spring, when Mark Bezzek, a physician, started treating patients so sick they died no matter what he did. When Mark’s mother contracted Covid-19 and died. When an assisted-living facility cut off Cindy’s visits with her own mother, Louise Hope. When the 92-year-old stopped eating and wasted away.When, as Cindy had long feared, her 33-year-old daughter, Marley, overdosed for the last time. The pandemic that began 8,000 miles away in a corner of a Chinese market overran the defenses of Tranquility Ranch. With her husband of four years plunged into the medical crisis and friends and family unable to visit freely, it left Bezzek, a 62-year-old retired mother of three, to grieve on her own. “My daughter’s gone. My mother’s gone. And I’m still here.” Across the globe, 2020 has been a year of loss: of education, jobs, health and lives. The U.S., whose federal government refused aggressive measures to confront the pandemic, has seen more than 19 million Covid-19 cases and 333,000 deaths, largely among the elderly and people of color. As many as 130,500 more Americans are expected to die this year from other causes, above historical averages. At least one factor: With people cut off from relatives and support systems, drug overdoses and mental-health crises have soared. Yet for all that families like the Bezzeks have endured, 2021 is set to begin much like the year that preceded it. By April, 209,000 more in the U.S. could be dead from Covid-19, according to one model. While calculating the impact of lost lives, productivity and health, economists and academics predict long-term effects on the mental health of those who have lived through the pandemic. Families across the U.S. are already grappling with that toll.

December 29 COVID-19 Test Results; Record Hospitalizations – The week-over-week growth in positive cases has slowed. Hopefully that continues after the holidays. The US is now averaging close to 2 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US has far too many daily cases – and percent positive – to do effective test-and-trace. There were 1,236,471 test results reported over the last 24 hours. There were 194,512 positive tests. Almost 70,000 US deaths have been reported so far in December, far surpassing April as the deadliest month. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here. This data is from the COVID Tracking Project. The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 15.7% (red line is 7 day average). The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by total tests (including pending). And check out COVID Act Now to see how each state is doing. (updated link to new site). The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.

Coronavirus dashboard for December 29: a final look back at the pandemic disaster in 2020 – Total US confirmed cases: 19,132,726* *Because many asymptomatic people probably never get tests, actual cases are probably more like 26 million, or about 8% of the US population

Average cases last 7 days: 184,005

Total US deaths: 333,118

Average deaths last 7 days: 2,207

Total vaccinated: 2,127,143 (per CDC via Bloomberg)

The good news is, we finally have started the process of vaccination, and 1% of the population should be vaccinated by the end of this week. The bad news is, at the current rate, it would take over 4 years to vaccinate everyone in the US. I do expect this to ramp up, both as more States get more efficient at administering the vaccine, and because the Biden Administration will be much more activist and competent at ramping up production and improving the supply chain. As we end 2020, let’s take a look at total infections and deaths per capita so far. Here are infections and deaths for the US as a whole (note separate scales): Roughly 1 in 16 Americans has had a *confirmed* infection; 1 in 1000 Americans has died from COVID this year. Here are total infections by State: 12% of North Dakotans and 11% of South Dakotans have had *confirmed* infections. Between 8% and 9% of the total population of Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and Tennessee have also had *confirmed* infections. At the other end of the distribution, only about 1% to 2% of the populations of Maine, Hawaii, and Vermont have been infected. That is a success story. Here are total deaths by State: New Jersey and New York, which had horrible outbreaks early, still lead the pack, with about 1 in every 500 residents having died of the disease this year. About one in 600-700 of the entire populations of Massachusetts, North and South Dakota, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Louisiana, and Mississippi have also died of the disease. Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii have the best record, with only 2 deaths per 10,000 population. Looking at the 7 day average rate of infections shows that the wave that began in early November utterly dwarfs the two prior waves, with North Dakota having the worst result of any State: Note that North Dakotans were apparently sufficiently terrified that their infection rate is now one of the 10 lowest in the entire country! The 7 day average of deaths shows that the initial outbreak in the NYC metro area remains the most lethal: Although Iowa and South Dakota’s recent spikes are in the same ballpark. I expect the recent horrific rates of infections and deaths to continue throughout the winter, although there will be alternating waves of panic and complacency, depending on the recent experience of each State. Between vaccinations, warmer weather, and a competent new Administration in Washington I expect a real subsidence to finally begin by about late March or early April.

Texas Logs 26,990 New Virus Cases, Shattering Previous Record – Texas posted a record 26,990 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, shattering the previous all-time high established less than a week ago. The tally was 41% higher than the previous record reached on Dec. 23, state health department figures showed. The figure may include some cases that local health authorities failed to report over the holidays, the state said. Hospitalizations, meanwhile, climbed to 11,775, breaking the record set a day earlier, according to the state’s online dashboard. Virus patients occupy more than 15% of hospital capacity in almost two-thirds of Texas’s 22 trauma service areas. In hot spots such as Laredo, the figure is as high as 36%. Governor Greg Abbott set 15% as the threshold at which economic and social restrictions may be reimposed to control outbreaks.

US hits new daily high with 3,725 coronavirus deaths – The United States on Tuesday broke its record for the most number of coronavirus-related deaths in a single day with 3,725 reported, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Tuesday surpassed the country’s previous single-day death toll high of 3,656 set on Dec. 16. As of Wednesday morning, the U.S. has now recorded a total of 338,656 deaths due to COVID-19. This comes as more than 82 million people worldwide have been infected with the virus, with the U.S. continuing to have the highest number of infections with approximately 19.5 million. The record numbers come as about 2 million Americans have already received their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine, according to data from the CDC, though this is far from the Trump administration’s goal of 20 million vaccinated by the end of the year. Globally, nearly 1.8 million people have died from COVID-19 this year, according to the university’s data. These numbers come as experts predict the pandemic will get worse as more infections are reported in the coming weeks following travel and gatherings over the holidays. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said on Tuesday during an interview on CNN that America has to assume that the coronavirus pandemic is “going to get worse.” He noted that the U.S. is seeing between 100,000 and 200,000 new infections each day and added that once cases begin to rise, increases in hospitalizations and deaths follow.

California sets new coronavirus daily death record with 442 – California on Tuesday set a new coronavirus daily death record, logging 442 fatalities, according to a tally kept by the Los Angeles Times.The number is the equivalent of one person dying from the virus every three minutes, according to the Times. The record comes as the U.S. broke its record for single-day coronavirus deaths, reporting 3,725 fatalities.Over half of California’s reported deaths were recorded in Los Angeles County, setting a record for a single day in the county, according to the Times.The newspaper predicted that the state will likely exceed 25,000 total deaths on Wednesday and that L.A. County will reach 10,000 by New Year’s Day.The record comes as California deals with a surge in coronavirus infections that continues to impact the state and its hospital capacity. The Golden State was the first to pass 2 million confirmed coronavirus cases last week and was forced to activate its “mass fatality” program earlier this month. The state also ordered 5,000 body bags and 60 refrigerated units.California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) extended stay-at-home orders for San Joaquin Valley and Southern California on Tuesday as they both reached 0 percent ICU capacity.California has recorded 2,230,934 cases since the pandemic began, according to the Times, and there have been 24,987 fatalities. L.A. County alone has logged 9,806 total deaths.

Los Angeles County coronavirus deaths reach 10,000 total – = Los Angeles County reached 100,000 coronavirus deaths total on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, called it a “terrible milestone” and said more could have been done to prevent it from being reached. “Most heartbreaking is that if we had done a better job of reducing transmission of the virus, many of these deaths would not have happened,” she said. The typical daily death rate for all combined causes countywide is typically about 170 people. Now, about 150 are dying per day in LA county of the coronavirus alone, according to the AP. The news comes as The Golden State recorded a record high of 442 coronavirus-related fatalities on Tuesday. Los Angeles’s COVID-19 struggle has significantly worsened in recent months, after leveling out and remaining relatively low August through October. As cases began to rise around the country, the county experienced skyrocketing infections. Restriction efforts to try to combat further spread have been extended, with the Southern California stay-at-home order now in effect for at least another three weeks. Medical personnel have reported extremely limited hospital capacity throughout the county, resorting to treating patients in hospital gift shops and conference rooms and turning away ambulances. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that the first case of a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus had been detected in California. So far, no deaths from the new variant have been recorded in the U.S.

Nurses call for help as California hospitals pushed to the brink – California hospitals continue to buckle under the strain of a flood of COVID-19 patients in critical care requiring hospitalization. The state remains the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. Only last week it the milestone of 2 million cases, is quickly approaching 2.25 million cases. Deaths have surpassed 25,000 in the richest and most populous state in the country. Every day deaths continue to break one-day records, with 440 deaths on Tuesday, more than half of which are from Los Angeles County. On Wednesday evening California Governor Gavin Newsom confirmed that the UK variant of the virus has been found in a 30-year-old man with no history of travel in the state’s southern San Diego county, implying wide community spread. According to Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s hospitals have begun diverting ambulances and making decisions about rationing care. On Tuesday, he reported that more than 95% of Los Angeles hospitals have diverted ambulances in the last 24 hours. Throughout the regions of Southern California and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, ICU capacity remains at zero percent. Meanwhile healthcare staff are pleading for help. A video by Gayana Chuklansev, an intensive care nurse in Los Angeles, went viral on Tiktok and has been viewed 1.5 million times as of Wednesday. Chuklansev explains through tears, “We have no ventilators for patients. We have no sedating medications. Patients are dying like flies… We’re full. We’re at max capacity. We have no resources. We have no staff. Our doctors can’t even intubate because they have like 40 patients each.” “Physically I am exhausted,” an Anaheim nurse told the World Socialist Web Site.” Last Monday we had a Code Blue and two intubations. I have six ICU patients in my unit because our ICU is full. Some days, I’m so busy I’m completely numb to hunger, thirst, bathroom. I don’t realize until the end, 14-16 hours later, that I haven’t stopped to take care of any of that. I don’t feel anything. “Emotionally, it’s so taxing. We lost a 43-year-old two weeks ago with five kids and a pregnant wife. Then we found out that the wife had miscarried and also contracted COVID-19. We intubated her, while her husband of 20+ years sat in the bed next to her crying. I held his hand and promised we’d do everything we could to help her. My last memory of him was me rolling her past him to ICU. She died a couple days later. “Every single day, I’m calling family to tell them their loved one has died or just got intubated. Saturday I had a Code Blue and intubation at the same time. ICU was too busy to show up so we were completely on our own. We came out of those, and an hour or two later, I had two more patients crashing. “We have also lost people at our hospital, one of our housekeepers just last Wednesday. He was the happiest guy. He’d sing and dance randomly. One of the last things he said before we intubated him was, ‘I really don’t want to die. I’m not ready.’ It just breaks my heart.

Hundreds attend evangelist singer’s NYE concert in LA despite skyrocketing COVID-19 cases – Christian singer and activist Sean Feucht held a New Year’s Eve concert in Los Angeles County on Thursday that drew around 2,500 guests despite the area’s surging number of coronavirus cases. The Los Angeles Times reports that Feucht held the event in the parking lot of Higher Vision Church in Valencia, with many of the hundreds of guests attending without wearing face coverings. It was one of many such events held by Feucht in recent days. He has been holding similar concerts across the country as well as a worship protest on the National Mall last October. According to the Times, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said there were no reported incidents related to the event. Video of Thursday’s event showed crowds jumping, singing and shouting while packed shoulder to shoulder. Feucht captioned the video citing a 99 percent survival rate for COVID-19 as a reason his worship services won’t be stopped. Public health officials have warned that while a 99 percent survival rate sounds rosy, it would amount to somewhere between 700,000 and 1.5 million dead without measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci previously noted that a 1 percent mortality rate “means it is 10-times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” The event in Los Angeles County, where more such concerts are being planned, comes as the state faces skyrocketing cases of COVID-19, and after it has detected the more rapidly spreading strain of the virus that was first detected in the United Kingdom last month.

“I’m Choosing The Risk Of Getting COVID”: Over Half Of Health Care Workers At California Hospitals Refuse Vaccinations – California’s health workers are refusing to take the new COVID-19 vaccines – with over half of frontline workers at one hospital unwilling to take it, and between 20% and 50% of workers at other facilities who feel the same, according to the Los Angeles Times. At St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, fewer than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot. Roughly20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials. So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine – an estimated 50% – that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses, Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari said. -LA Times Yet, as the Times notes, vaccine doubts among healthcare workers have come as a surprise to researchers, ‘who assumed hospital staff would be among those most in tune with the scientific data backing the vaccines.’ Perhaps they were spooked by a viral video of a Tennessee nurse passing out on camera roughly 10 minutes after receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine – which she says was due to an ‘over-reactive vagal response’ and not related to the jab. “I’m choosing the risk – the risk of having COVID, or the risk of the unknown of the vaccine,” said 31-year-old nurse April Lu of the Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, who added that she refused to take the vaccine because she wasn’t convinced of its safety for pregnant woman. Lu is six months pregnant. “I think I’m choosing the risk of COVID. I can control that and prevent it a little by wearing masks, although not 100% for sure,” she added. Lu isn’t alone, with several of her co-workers similarly refusing to take the vaccine. “I feel people think, ‘I can still make it until this ends without getting the vaccine,’” she said.

Doctor gets COVID-19 after vaccination, but that’s not a sign the vaccine didn’t work. – Josh Mugele, an emergency-room doctor in Georgia, tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Tuesday.Mugele received his first dose of Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine nine days earlier.Mugele’s COVID-19 infection isn’t a sign the shot didn’t work.The vaccine requires two shots to be fully effective. It can also take up to a few weeks for vaccinated people to develop immunity, so it’s important to continue to wear masks and maintain social distancing after getting the shots.”This was just dumb luck,” Mugele said. “I happened to be exposed within a few days of getting the vaccine, but this still is the best tool we have for fighting the virus.” Josh Mugele worked the night shift on Christmas. Though he had been tending to coronavirus patients since the start of the pandemic, his Georgia hospital was stretched to capacity like never before. There was one small comfort, though: Mugele had received the first dose of Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine on December 20. “I had three shifts in a row right up to the vaccine date,” Mugele, an emergency-room doctor at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Georgia, told Business Insider. “I was just really nervous I was going to get exposed before that. I honestly felt really a sense of relief when, on the 20th, I actually was able to get the vaccine, and I thought I’d kind of crossed the finish line.” Then on Monday, he came down with a headache and a cough. The following day, he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I was scared at first, but more than anything I think I was angry,” Mugele said. “I’ve had maximum exposure, as much as any ER doc in the country, and I’ve been spared for 10 months, and then to get it right after I got the vaccine is just stupid and frustrating.”

Most Ohio nursing home workers not taking COVID-19 vaccine – About 60 percent of Ohio nursing home workers have so far opted against taking the COVID-19 vaccine as deaths linked to coronavirus have soared in the state.“We aren’t going to make them but we wish they had a higher compliance,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said of the nursing home staff at a Wednesday press briefing, The Columbus Dispatch reported.“Everyone makes their own choice about this but we want to make it clear that opportunity may not come back for a while,” the governor said.The high number of nursing home workers electing not to take the vaccine comes as the state experienced its deadliest month of the pandemic. Ohio reported 2,426 deaths from COVID-19 in December, the report said. Overall, since the onset of the pandemic, over 8,800 people in the state have died from the illness.

42 People In West Virginia Mistakenly Given Regeneron Antibodies Instead Of Vaccines -In keeping with the news of our flawless national roll-out of various Covid vaccines (which you will now potentially need to do such mundane things such as attend the movies), it was reported yesterday that 42 people in West Virginia actually wound up receiving Regeneron’s Antibody Treatment instead of the Moderna vaccine they were supposed to get. “The 42 individuals received the antibody product at a vaccination clinic hosted by staff at the Boone County Health Department,” a statement from the West Virginia National Guard said. The release said that the Joint Interagency Task Force did not believe there is any risk of harm to these 42 individuals. The PR was also happy to report that aside from the 42 massive screw-ups, there were no additional screw-ups to report. The press releases actually says, under “KEY POINTS”: “No other individuals were administered the antibody instead of the vaccine at any point in time in West Virginia.” Aside from the error, there was no error… The West Virginia National Guard then went on to note that “all vaccine related protocols have been reviewed and strengthened” and that “7,855 West Virginians were vaccinated yesterday across the state”. An administrator for the Boone County Health Department, Julie Miller, told CNBC: “It has been determined that this was an isolated incident.” Yeah, the kind of isolated incident that affects 42 people…

Wisconsin hospital says employee intentionally discarded coronavirus vaccine vials – The Wisconsin medical center where 57 vials of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine were discarded earlier this week said in a statement Wednesday that the employee who removed the vaccines from the freezer did so “intentionally” and was no longer employed by the hospital. On Monday, hospital officials said that around 50 vials of the vaccine had to be thrown away after an employee at Advocate Aurora Health medical center in Grafton, Wis., “inadvertently” removed them from the pharmacy refrigerator, where the vaccines are required to be housed at low temperatures. At the time, the incident was attributed to “human error,” but in a statement Wednesday, the medical center said the vials had been removed intentionally. According to the statement, the 57 vials that had been discarded overnight had led to 500 doses of the vaccine being thrown out. “We immediately launched an internal review and were led to believe this was caused by inadvertent human error. The individual in question today acknowledged that they intentionally removed the vaccine from refrigeration,” the hospital said in the statement Wednesday. “We are more than disappointed that this individual’s actions will result in a delay of more than 500 people receiving their vaccine. This was a violation of our core values, and the individual is no longer employed by us,” the hospital added. The hospital stated that the “appropriate authorities” had been notified for investigation into the incident.

Wisconsin pharmacist arrested for deliberately spoiling COVID-19 vaccine, police say– Authorities arrested a suburban Milwaukee pharmacist Thursday suspected of deliberately ruining hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine by removing it from refrigeration for two nights. The Grafton Police Department said the former Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist was arrested on suspicion of reckless endangerment, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property. The department said in a news release that he was in jail. Police did not identify the pharmacist, saying he has not yet been formally charged. His motive remains unclear. Police said that detectives believe he knew the spoiled doses would be useless and people who received them would mistakenly think they’d been vaccinated when they hadn’t. Advocate Aurora Health Care Chief Medical Group Officer Jeff Bahr told reporters during a teleconference Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist deliberately removed 57 vials that held hundreds of doses of the Moderna vaccine from refrigeration at a Grafton medical center overnight on Dec. 24 into Dec. 25, returned them, then left them out again on the night of Dec. 25 into Saturday. The vials contained enough doses to inoculate 570 people. A pharmacy technician discovered the vials outside the refrigerator on Saturday morning. Bahr said the pharmacist initially said that he had removed the vaccine to access other items in the refrigerator and had inadvertently failed to replace it. The Moderna vaccine is still viable for 12 hours outside refrigeration, so workers used the vaccine to inoculate 57 people before discarding the rest. Police said the discarded doses were worth between $8,000 and $11,000. Bahr said health system officials grew more suspicious of the pharmacist as they reviewed the incident. After multiple interviews the pharmacist acknowledged Wednesday that he removed the vaccine deliberately and left it out overnight Dec. 24 into Dec. 25, returned it to the refrigerator at some point and then removed it again overnight Dec. 25 to Dec. 26. Bahr said that means that the doses people received Saturday are all but useless. Moderna has told Aurora that there’s no safety concerns but the system is monitoring them closely, he said.

COVID-19: US reports single-day record of 3,903 deaths – This week saw the deadliest day in the United States since the coronavirus pandemic began, with a record-breaking number of hospitalizations foreshadowing potentially darker days still to come. States across the US reported more than 3,900 deaths on Wednesday and over 125,000 hospitalizations, according to data from The Covid Tracking Project. The figures may not reflect the actual tallies due to delays in reporting over the holidays, the group said. At least 341,505 Americans have now died from the virus, per Johns Hopkins University, the highest total for any country in the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the death toll could be as high as 424,000 by January 23, based on a review of modeling forecasts. States are also finding evidence that a potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus first detected in the UK, B117, is now spreading among their populations.

“It’s just utter chaos”: California becomes third state to surpass 25,000 COVID-19 deaths – California on Thursday became the third state to surpass 25,000 COVID deaths, following New York and Texas. In Los Angeles County, many funeral homes are filled to capacity, and health care professionals feel as if they’re under siege.Hospitals in Southern California are at the breaking point with 1 in 5 COVID-19 tests coming back positive. “It’s just utter chaos,” said nurse Tavonia Ekwegh, who runs the ER at Anaheim Global Medical Center. Tents outside the medical center are filling up. “It is a war zone, we have ambulance run after ambulance run,” Ekwegh said. Hospitalizations are on track to double in January. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti put it in blunt terms: The “simple answer” is that L.A. hospitals can’t handle twice as many patients. “People will die in the hallways of our hospitals,” Garcetti said. “Our behavior will dictate whether people live or die as much as any action the hospital takes.” He is sending out extra patrols to shut down New Year’s Eve parties. He estimated that “probably over 1,000” officers will be out on the streets. His message to city residents is to be “lifesavers, don’t be killers.” “When 95% of people are doing the right thing, it’s still dangerous, let alone when 80% of people are doing the right thing, and it’s disastrous,” Garcetti said. And for Garcetti, the pandemic is now personal. “Our own daughter. went on a fast food run and one shopping round,” Garcetti said. “She got a positive COVID-19 test. We did everything right and still it came to our house.”

‘Like a bathtub filling up’: Alabama is slammed by the virus (AP) – With its dozen intensive care beds already full, Cullman Regional Medical Center began looking desperately for options as more and more COVID-19 patients showed up. Ten beds normally used for less severe cases were transformed into intensive care rooms, with extra IV machines brought in. Video monitors were set up to enable the staff to keep watch over patients whenever a nurse had to scurry away to care for someone else. The patch did the job – for the time being, at least. “We’re kind of like a bathtub that’s filling up with water and the drain is blocked,” the hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. William Smith, said last week. Alabama, long one of the unhealthiest and most impoverished states in America, has emerged as one of the nation’s most alarming coronavirus hot spots. Its hospitals are in crisis as the virus rages out of control in a region with high rates of obesity, high blood pressure and other conditions that can make COVID-19 even more dangerous, where access to health care was limited even before the outbreak, and where public resistance to masks and other precautions is stubborn. In all, the coronavirus has killed more than 335,000 people across the U.S., including over 4,700 in Alabama.. At Cullman Regional, a midsize hospital that serves an agricultural area 55 miles north of Birmingham, the intensive care unit as of last week was at 180% of capacity, the highest in the state. Other hospitals are also struggling to keep up with the crush of people sickened by the virus. While a typical patient might need ICU treatment for two or three days, Smith said, COVID-19 patients often stay two or three weeks, causing the caseload to build up.

Twelfth worker at California poultry company dies of COVID-19 – Another worker for American poultry company Foster Farms died from complications due to COVID-19 over the weekend, making him the 12th employee of the California-based corporation to die after contracting the coronavirus. According to the Los Angeles Times, the worker’s family said the employee, who was of Punjabi descent and in his 50s, worked at Foster Farms’ Cherry Avenue plant in Fresno, Calif. After being diagnosed with COVID-19, the man spent the past three weeks in a local hospital’s intensive care unit before passing away, according to Deep Singh, executive director of the Jakara Movement, a Central Valley youth and family nonprofit that works with the Punjabi Sikh community. Singh told the Times that the worker’s family believes he contracted the virus at work, as he avoided going outside his home other than to go to the plant or for other essential reasons. The man is the third worker of the Fresno plant to die of COVID-19, with nine additional coronavirus fatalities tied to Foster Farms’ Livingston, Calif., plant. According to Foster Farms, at least 193 people at the Fresno plant have tested positive for COVID-19, roughly 20 percent of its workers. Singh said that the poultry company should have done more to protect its staff, accusing the business of a “callous lack of concern and protections that prioritize worker safety and their families.” The company has also received criticism for poorly communicating with its workers, giving directions in English, even though many in the company’s workforce have limited proficiency in the language. Foster Farms had previously come under scrutiny for its handling of the pandemic, with community leaders telling the Times that the company has asked its employees to work overtime amid the pandemic.

N.Y. and California End Year Shattering Records: Virus Update –The U.S. ended the year with records and milestones: New York state and Florida, each hit hard as the coronavirus ravaged across the nation, broke their previous daily records for cases. Texas reported a new high for hospitalizations. California became the third state to pass 25,000 fatalities, after New York and Texas. Virginia reported record infections as total fatalities surpassed 5,000.New York City plans to speed up the slow start to vaccinations and inoculate 1 million residents in January, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.Governments across the globe urged people to celebrate the New Year at home. The new, highly transmissible virus strain was found in California, China, Brazil and Singapore. Four nurses in the Netherlands were also diagnosed with the variant. Key Developments:

• Global Tracker: Cases pass 83.1 million; deaths exceed 1.8 million
• Vaccine Tracker: More than 10 million shots given worldwide
• Covid joins war, cancer as historic blight on Americans’ lives
• Millions of Americans are calling in sick, stunting the recovery
• Why the U.K.’s mutated coronavirus is fanning worries: QuickTake

The World Health Organization issued its first emergency-use designation for a Covid-19 vaccine, making the Pfizer/BioNtech the first immunization to receive a green light from the Geneva-based body. The move could allow more countries to import and distribute the vaccine, which has already been cleared for use in the U.S., U.K. and Europe. Virus hospitalizations in Texas hospitals set a record for a fourth consecutive day as outbreaks proliferated in the second-most populous U.S. state.Hospitalizations rose 2.3% in the past 24 hours to 12,268, state health department figures showed. Covid-19 patients account for at least 15% of hospital capacity in almost three-fourths of Texas’s trauma service areas, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to shutter taverns and order restaurants and some other businesses to operate at reduced capacity in those areas. New York state reached a new high of more than 16,800 coronavirus cases, as hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Thursday.Of the over 216,500 tests reported on Wednesday, 7.76% were positive including hotspot areas, according to state data. Hospitalizations reached 7,935, the highest since May 7.There were 136 virus-related fatalities, bringing the state’s Covid-19 death total to over 30,000. Florida posted 17,192 new cases on Thursday, the highest single-day total ever except for a Nov. 27 report, which isn’t technically comparable because it included two days of data. The state also increased the number of dead by 133, including both residents and non residents, according to a report from the state health department Thursday. Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health began posting memories about people who died of Covid-19 every 10 minutes on Twitter.com Thursday. The remembrances included “the Dodgers fan who loved Kershaw” and “a recent retiree who dreamt of finally traveling the world.” Health officials in the nation’s most-populous county said Wednesday the region has been averaging 150 deaths per day due to the disease, a rate that works out to about one every 10 minutes. The daily toll almost exceeds the 170 a day who die of all other causes. California recorded 428 daily deaths from Covid-19 — second only to the 432 reported Wednesday for the most since the pandemic began — to push its total toll to 25,386. Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous, has been the worst-hit, with 274 deaths yesterday and more than 10,000 total, according to county health data. Virginia reported 5,239 new cases, a record since the start of the pandemic. Another 48 people died as the state surpassed 5,000 total fatalities.

California funeral homes run out of space as COVID-19 rages (AP) – As communities across the country feel the pain of a surge in coronavirus cases, funeral homes in the hot spot of Southern California say they must turn away grieving families as they run out of space for the bodies piling up. The head of the state funeral directors association says mortuaries are being inundated as the United States nears a grim tally of 350,000 COVID-19 deaths. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. “I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think that this could happen, that I’d have to tell a family, ‘No, we can’t take your family member,’” said Magda Maldonado, owner of Continental Funeral Home in Los Angeles. Continental is averaging about 30 body removals a day – six times its normal rate. Mortuary owners are calling one another to see whether anyone can handle overflow, and the answer is always the same: They’re full, too. In order to keep up with the flood of bodies, Maldonado has rented extra 50-foot (15-meter) refrigerators for two of the four facilities she runs in LA and surrounding counties. Continental has also been delaying pickups at hospitals for a day or two while they deal with residential clients. Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association, said that the whole process of burying and cremating bodies has slowed down, including embalming bodies and obtaining death certificates. During normal times, cremation might happen within a day or two; now it takes at least a week or longer. Achermann said that in the southern part of the state, “every funeral home I talk to says, ‘We’re paddling as fast as we can.’” “The volume is just incredible and they fear that they won’t be able to keep up,” he said. “And the worst of the surge could still be ahead of us.” Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the crisis in California, has surpassed 10,000 COVID-19 deaths alone. Hospitals in the area are overwhelmed, and are struggling to keep up with basics such as oxygen as they treat an unprecedented number of patients with respiratory issues. On Saturday, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews arrived to update some hospital’s oxygen delivery systems.Nationally, an average of just over 2,500 people have died of COVID-19 over the past seven days, according to Johns Hopkins data. The number of daily newly reported cases in that period has averaged close to 195,000, a decline from two weeks earlier. It’s feared that holiday gatherings could fuel yet another rise in cases.

December 31 COVID-19 Test Results; Record Hospitalizations – Note: Expect a dip in the data over the holidays. The week-over-week growth in positive cases slowed prior to the holidays. Hopefully that continues after the holidays. The US is now averaging close to 2 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US has far too many daily cases – and percent positive – to do effective test-and-trace.There were 1,719,181 test results reported over the last 24 hours.There were 221,444 positive tests.Over 77,000 US deaths were reported in December, far surpassing April as the deadliest month. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here. This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 12.9% (red line is 7 day average). The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by total tests (including pending). And check out COVID Act Now to see how each state is doing. (updated link to new site) The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.

Deluged Atlanta hospitals warn of rationing care – Patients who don’t get bathed each day or don’t get meals on time, because there’s not enough staff. Patients just out of surgery who need a nurse dedicated to watch only them, but instead have to share. Patients in pain from a broken bone who wait hours for sedation because there are no ER beds, while ER patients wait for the ICU beds their lives may depend on. These things are happening now. COVID-19 cases are swamping more Georgia hospitals, testing them in ways that were previously unimaginable. Hospitals say that they are not rationing the most important care – yet. But, caregivers are already making decisions about who gets which scarce resources. The only question is how grave those decisions will become, with projections showing that hospitalizations will continue to surge in the weeks ahead. “We are treating patients in the hallways, in triage areas, in waiting rooms,” said Deborah Matthews, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Tanner Health System in west Georgia. “Every day we huddle as a team and look at our options. We are having to do things we have never had to do before.” Grady Memorial Hospital is full. Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center is full. The intensive care units or emergency departments of Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, Northside Atlanta Hospital, Emory University Hospital, Wellstar North Fulton Hospital, Wellstar Kennestone Hospital and others in the Atlanta metro area are full, as of data reported Wednesday afternoon. So were ERs in Covington, Chatsworth, Eatonton, Statesboro and other towns throughout Georgia at points on Wednesday, and ICUs in most parts of Georgia. “If it were just one area of the state that was disproportionately hit, you can shift resources,” It’s not just COVID-19 patients who are affected. Hospitals are running out of beds, and, most crucially, staff, for all patients.

Virginia state senator dies at age 60 after contracting Covid-19 – Virginia state Sen. Ben Chafin Jr. has died after contracting Covid-19, according to a statement from his office. He was 60 years old. “State Senator Augustus Benton (Ben) Chafin, Jr., a native son of Russell County located in Southwest Virginia, passed away on January 1, 2021 from Covid-19 complications,” the statement said. The Republican lawmaker’s family thanked the VCU Medical Center in Richmond for “its vigorous care and heartfelt support during his two weeks of medical services there.” Chafin, a cattle farmer and attorney, served Virginia’s 38th District. He was elected to the state’s House of Delegates in 2013 before moving to the Senate in 2014. His office remembered him Friday as “a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, economic development and health care coverage for hundreds of thousands of low-income Virginians.” “He advocated jobs in his district, particularly in the coalfields where the decline of coal has devastated local economies,” the statement said.

Florida reports first case of new, contagious coronavirus strain Health officials in Florida announced Thursday that they have detected the new, more infectious strain of the coronavirus, making it the third U.S. state to report an instance of the virus variant. The new strain was first found in the United Kingdom. “Florida has evidence of the first identified case of the UK COVID-19 variant in Martin County. The individual is a male in his 20s with no history of travel. The Department is working with the CDC on this investigation. We encourage all to continue practicing COVID-19 mitigation,” the Florida Department of Health said on Twitter Thursday. Colorado and California both detected cases of the strain this week. The new strain, called B.1.1.7, was first detected in Colorado on Tuesday and found in a man in his 20s who had not travelled. On Wednesday, a California health official announced that the patient infected with the new strain was a 30-year-old man, and he did not have any history of travel, according to Politico. The Florida health department added, “At this time, experts anticipate little to no impact on the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine.” Health experts and pharmaceutical companies have stated that the current vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna are believed to be effective against the new strain, though more testing is being conducted to confirm its efficacy. Though it is more infectious, it is not believed to cause more severe symptoms or be more deadly.

January 1 COVID-19 Test Results –Note: It will take a week or so for the data to adjust for the holidays. The week-over-week growth in positive cases slowed prior to the holidays. Hopefully that continues after the holidays. The US is now averaging close to 2 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US has far too many daily cases – and percent positive – to do effective test-and-trace.There were 1,239,502 test results reported over the last 24 hours.There were 173,255 positive tests.Over 2,500 US deaths have been reported so far in January. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here.This data is from the COVID Tracking Project. The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 14.0% (red line is 7 day average). The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by total tests (including pending). And check out COVID Act Now to see how each state is doing. (updated link to new site) The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.

US COVID Cases Top 20MM As California Deaths Hit New Record – Several US states have been plagued by reporting delays over the holiday, but with California expanding lockdowns around the state, and more cases of B.1.1.7, the mutant strain first discovered in the UK, Dr. Fauci and others are stepping up their warnings about the worst of the outbreak lying ahead. With hospitalizations – supposedly the most reliable indicator of the outbreak’s trajectory, according to the COVID Tracking Project – still close to record levels, hospitals in LA County and elsewhere have struggled to accept new patients. One year after Beijing first notified the WHO about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the central city of Wuhan, the US has just seen its total number of confirmed cases top 20MM. The 20MM number is almost 2x the 10.3MM tally from India, the second-worst-hit country. New York state’s infections remained high, with 16.5K new cases recorded over the last 24 hours, just below the record set Wednesday, as the positivity rate for NYC climbed toward 10%. California, meanwhile, saw its fatalities reach a new record. In a single day, the Golden State added 585 new deaths, bringing the total to just under 26K. The state also reported 47.2K new cases, pushing its total to 2.3MM. The pandemic entered 2021 with no signs of slowing down. Global daily deaths reached record highs this week. Countries from Germany to Japan to South Africa ended 2020 with record daily cases. Turkey, China and Brazil became the latest to report infections of the new, highly transmissible virus strain. Offering hope that the global pace of vaccinations might pick up in the new year, the WHO announced Friday tthat it has issued its first emergency-use designation for a Covid-19 vaccine, making the Pfizer/BioNtech the first immunization to receive a green light from the Geneva-based body. Here’s a rundown of more COVID-19 news from overnight:

• Italy registered 22,211 virus cases on Friday, from 23,477 the day before. Daily deaths declined too, with 462 fatalities reported, compared with 555 on Thursday.
• Portugal reported 6,951 new confirmed cases, below the record of 7,627 announced the previous day, taking the total to 420,629. The number of hospitalized cases fell by 34 to 2,806.
• Russia recorded 27,039 new cases of Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, taking the total number to 3.186 million, according to the country’s task force for combating the pandemic.

Study shows Wuhan coronavirus cases may have been 10 times higher than reported – As many as half a million residents of the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated may have been infected with the virus, about 10 times more than the initially recorded number of confirmed cases. According to a study released late Monday by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that surveyed more than 34,000 people in April, roughly 4.4 percent of those tested were found to be carrying the antibodies that fight off the virus causing COVID-19. The presence of antibodies means the people had the virus at some point in the past and, given the ratio, nearly 500,000 residents of Wuhan, which has a total population of 11 million, could have been infected. This is nearly 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed cases reported by Chinese health authorities in mid-April. As of Sunday, Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. This week’s study indicated that the infection rate in Wuhan was significantly higher than in other Chinese cities. For example, the survey found that only 0.44 percent of Hubei residents surveyed were found to be carrying the antibodies. According to CNN, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the initial underreporting in Wuhan could be partially attributed to the chaos of the pandemic’s early months, as well as the failure to count asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. Huang pointed out that underreporting is not a problem exclusive to Wuhan, as testing capabilities were limited and hospitals overwhelmed with a sudden surge in patients as little was known about the virus in the early months. However, the Chinese government has also faced scrutiny and criticism over a suspected lack of transparency on the severity of the virus. On Monday, a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in Chinawas sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” according to multiple reports. The charge is regularly used by the Chinese government against human rights activists and other dissidents. Zhang Zhan, 37, traveled to Wuhan in February and filmed hospitals, neighborhoods and more as the city locked down during its initial outbreak of COVID-19. Her reporting accused the government of failing to inform citizens about the pandemic’s reality.

French testing system missed 9 of 10 COVID-19 cases after first lock-down – On December 21, Nature published a peer-reviewed accelerated article titled, “Under-detection of cases of COVID-19 in France threatens epidemic control.” In the paper, epidemiologists and data scientists led by Giulia Pullano use mathematical modelling to chart the estimated spread of the virus in France over seven weeks – from the end of lock-down measures, on May 11, to June 28. They compare this estimated spread of the virus to the recorded cases to measure the effectiveness of France’s test and trace system in this period. During this period, Santé publique France (the public health system) recorded a few hundred cases a day. However, the authors estimate that France’s testing system missed around 90,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections. This amounts to 86 percent of symptomatic cases. As many cases are asymptomatic, however, the true rate of detection in this period was likely well under 10 percent. This massive under-detection of the virus, due to a lack of testing, removed the real possibility of stamping out the virus in France after the first wave and of preventing the devastating second wave currently engulfing the country and claiming hundreds of lives every day. Since the end of the first lock-down on May 11, 36,621 people have died from the virus – taking the total number of COVID-19 deaths in France to nearly 63,000. In a comment published by Nature alongside the paper, Columbia University virologist Jeffrey Shaman stated: “The findings suggest that the overall testing and control system in place was inadequate to contain the virus successfully in this country of around 65 million people.” He added that “many countries, as a result of leadership failures, cultural or institutional barriers, or simple fatigue, have failed in their efforts to achieve or maintain control of the virus.” The paper found that in this seven-week period, only 31 percent of those with COVID-19-like symptoms consulted a doctor. For the majority of the French population, during this period it was necessary to contact a doctor for a prescription before receiving a test. Shaman concluded that this byzantine process “might have disadvantaged communities that have more limited access to health care, and reduced testing rates.” This suggests that having only 1 percent of tests turn out positive by itself does not guarantee that the pandemic is controlled. Throughout the seven-week period, the proportion of positive tests never exceeded 1 percent. That the virus kept spreading anyway shows that a massive increase in testing – along with a shutdown of non-essential production, services and educational facilities – is critical to control and eradicate the virus. Even with the production of a vaccine, such measures are needed to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the coming year.

Excess deaths in Russia spike – While Russia’s official death toll from coronavirus stands at just over 55,000, recently released data from the country’s statistical agency Rosstat reveal a sharp uptick in excess deaths since the start of this year. The real number of COVID-19 victims is likely at least double or triple that officially reported, if not more. October and November each posted record death rates. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said on Monday that mortality in Russia increased by 13.8 percent during the first eleven months of 2020 as compared to the previous year. Of that increase, 81 percent “relates to COVID-19 and the consequences of COVID-19,” she stated, adding that the figures still remain to be fully analyzed. An examination of the Rosstat data conducted by Reuters found more than 240,000 excess deaths between April and November alone. The news agency writes, “Rosstat data, tallied by Reuters, showed that less than half the total number of such excess deaths – at 116,030 since the start of the pandemic in Russia in April – can be attributed directly to the coronavirus. This is still more than double the preliminary death toll figure reported on a daily, cumulative basis by the Russian government coronavirus crisis centre.” A woman wearing a face mask to protect against coronavirus walks past a graffiti dedicated to the victory of the Soviet Union in the World War II, in St.Petersburg, Russia earlier this year. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky) Other news outlets, such as the Guardian, maintain that Russia’s COVID-19 deaths are closer to 186,000. Whatever the precise number contained in the Rosstat data, Golikova’s remarks make clear that the Kremlin has been grossly understating the coronavirus death toll. More than three million Russians have contracted COVID-19 since the outbreak started, with infection rates hovering between 25,000 and 29,000 a day for the past few weeks. On this basis, the government is insisting that the situation in the country has stabilized in most regions. Nonetheless, infections continue to climb in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as cities in western and central Siberia, which have been particularly hard hit by the virus.

Russia acknowledges COVID-19 death toll is three times what was previously reported -Russian officials acknowledged on Monday that the nation’s COVID-19 death toll is in fact more than three times what had been previously reported, after months of President Vladimir Putin holding up the supposedly low fatality rate as a marker of the country’s success in battling the pandemic. As The Guardian reported, the state-run statistics agency Rosstat said the total number of deaths between January and November from all causes had jumped by 229,700 when compared with the previous year. “More than 81 percent of this increase in mortality over this period is due to COVID,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova, which would indicated a death toll of more than 186,000 Russians, The Guardian reported. The update means Russia has the third-highest number of fatalities in the world, surpassed only by the U.S. and Brazil. Russian officials have so far confirmed more than 3 million cases and only 55,265 deaths, The Guardian noted, a number far lower than other large impacted countries. The newspaper reported that despite rising coronavirus numbers, the Russian government is reluctant to order another national lockdown. In his end-of-year conference, Putin said, “If we follow the rules and demands of health regulators, then we do not need any lockdowns.” Moscow reportedly hopes to contain the virus through its vaccination program launched this month. Russia was the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine. The Russian-made vaccine, dubbed Sputnik V, showed promising results but was criticized by medical journals for having short clinical trials. Earlier in December, Putin, 68, said he would delay taking the vaccine due to the lack of research done on people over 60. However the vaccine was approved for people over 60 this past weekend, The Guardian reported.

Why new coronavirus variants ‘suddenly arose’ in the U.K. and South Africa – IN EARLY DECEMBER, cases of COVID-19 soared in Kent, England – and scientists wanted to know why. For clues, Nick Loman, who is part of the COVID-19 Genomics Consortium U.K., and his colleagues examined how the coronavirus was mutating. By looking at this zoo of slightly different viruses, they could roughly track the outbreak’s spread through the community.For SARS-CoV-2, these mutations – the small errors made naturally when genomes are copied – develop at a steady pace of one or two each month, saysLoman, a professor of microbial genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham. Yet among the Kent cases, scientists found a large cluster that was remarkably different, with a total of 23 mutations arising without prior notice and faster than anyone expected.”That’s how many mutations you have to go back to get to anything we’d seen before,” he says. “That’s a very striking and unusual finding.” This discovery is part of what led British officials to sound the alarm last week. A follow-up investigation by Public Health England showed that the variant, known as B.1.1.7 or 501Y.V1, began to thrive at a time when cases were spiking in Kent and other parts of southeastern England. Retroactive tracing through a database of samples tied B.1.1.7 to patients as early as September 20. But by mid-November, the variant made up between 20 and 30 percent of cases in London and a region east of the city. Three weeks later, it was roughly 60 percent. And on December 23, U.K. scientists announced aseparate SARS-CoV-2 variant reported last week in South Africa had now been spotted in two people in England. Scientists are still uncertain about how the cluster of mutations arose or what they mean long-term for the virus’s transmission. One possible hypothesis for their origin involves chronically ill patients treated with experimental therapies like convalescent plasma donated by recovered COVID-19 patients. In such lengthy illnesses, the virus has more opportunities to replicate, increasing the odds for mutations. While mutations edit genetic code, they don’t always lead to outward changes in a germ or organism. That’s why these newfound variants have garnered so much concern. It’s as if the virus entered a dressing room and came out with a new outfit, rather than the normal circumstances where it would only change its hat. Of the 23 mutations in the United Kingdom’s variant, 17 are at positions in the genome that alter the building blocks that make up the virus’s proteins, as described in a recent COVID-19 Genomics Consortium report from Loman and his colleagues. The consortium stated such a large shift is so far “unprecedented” for the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight of those changes lie in the region that encodes for the spike protein – the key that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter cells. While there is no direct evidence that this collection of mutations influences the severity of disease, modeling and prior laboratory work hints at the possibility that it could make the virus more contagious. A greater abundance of cases could mean more hospitalizations and deaths. For example, lab experiments suggest that one of the observed deletions that eliminates two building blocks in the spike – dubbed H69 and V70 – may double the viral infectiousness, according to a recent preprint. Other research hints that another mutation – N501Y – increases the spike protein’s binding capability. This one also independently arose in the South African variant (501Y.V2), which was first detected in October. But more work is necessary to determine if and how these changes might translate to differences in human transmission, Cevik says.

Africa CDC: New virus variant appears to emerge in Nigeria (AP) – Another new variant of the coronavirus appears to have emerged in Nigeria, Africa’s top public health official said Thursday, but he added that further investigation was needed. The discovery could add to new alarm in the pandemic after similar variants were announced in Britain and South Africa, leading to the swift return of international travel restrictions and other measures during a major holiday season. “It’s a separate lineage from the U.K. and South Africa,” the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told reporters. He said the Nigeria CDC and the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases would analyze more samples. “Give us some time…it’s still very early,” he said. The identification of the apparent new variant was based on two or three genetic sequences, Nkengasong said, but that and South Africa’s alert last week were enough to prompt an emergency meeting of the Africa CDC this week. The variant in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, was found in two patient samples collected on Aug. 3 and on Oct. 9 in Osun state, according to a working research paper seen by The Associated Press. Unlike the variant seen in the U.K., “we haven’t observed such rapid rise of the lineage in Nigeria and do not have evidence to indicate that the P681H variant is contributing to increased transmission of the virus in Nigeria. However, the relative difference in scale of genomic surveillance in Nigeria vs. the U.K. may imply a reduced power to detect such changes,” the paper says. The news comes as infections surge again in parts of the African continent. The new virus variant in South Africa is now the predominant one there, Nkengasong said, as confirmed infections in the country approach 1 million. While the variant transmits quickly and viral loads are higher, it is not yet clear whether it leads to a more severe disease, he said.

South Africa: COVID-19 cases soar with little prospect of widespread vaccination – On Sunday, South Africa reported that its total number of COVID-19 infections had reached one million, just nine days after reporting 900,000 cases. The death rate has nearly doubled, with the seven-day rolling average of daily deaths rising from 0.25 per 100,000 people to 0.48 per 100,000 people in two weeks. The virus has now killed more than 27,000 people in the continent’s most industrialised nation. This is nearly one quarter of all the deaths from the coronavirus in Africa. The situation in South Africa is replicated in a second wave of the pandemic that is sweeping across much of the continent, which has seen a steady rise in infections since November. Dr Zweli Mkhize, South Africa’s health minister, told the South African Broadcasting Corporation, “This wave has come up quite unpredictably.” This is a flat out lie. Most of the casualties occurred after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) government organised a return to work in a bid to stem the fall in corporate profits and the country’s pending insolvency, calling off one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, enforced with extreme police brutality. In the second quarter of the year, when restrictions were in force, output fell 16.4 percent, while unemployment has risen and is expected to reach 35 to 40 percent as companies cut back or close for good. Cyril Ramaphosa [credit: Tasnim News Agency] The country is now facing a new and more virulent form of COVID-19, referred to as 501.V2, which has become dominant in many parts of the country. Crucially and most alarmingly, the new infections are spreading among young people between 15 to 19 years, with the four provinces of the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the most populous parts of the country, the hardest hit. The relatively low mortality rate in African countries thus far has been attributed in part to their predominantly youthful populations.

Belgian retirement home records 26 COVID-19 deaths after visiting Santa tests positive – Twenty-six residents in a Belgian retirement home died from coronavirus following a visit from a volunteer Saint Nicholas who tested positive for the virus.The visitor made his trip to the Hemelrijck home in Mol, Belgium, earlier this month. Within a few days of the visit, several residents began to show COVID-19 symptoms.Eighty-five total residents and 40 staff members tested positive for the virus, and 26 died from the disease, The Guardian reported.Local community members criticized those who planned the event, calling them “completely irresponsible,” according to the news outlet.The municipality of Mols initially said the volunteer only entered common areas within the facility and wore a mask, keeping his distance from residents.However photos later circulated revealing that many residents did not wear face masks to protect themselves, the Guardian reported.“We have received wrong information from the management,” local officials said in a statement, according to the news source. “We deeply regret that. After looking at several photos, we have to conclude that this goes much further than an error. Rather, it is a completely irresponsible event. We would never have approved this.”The nursing home has now implemented a crisis manager to help those in the facility further cope during this time. A total of 169 lived in the residence prior to the outbreak, according to the Guardian.Belgium has suffered one of Europe’s highest rates of coronavirus infection. The country has seen more than 644,200 cases and reported a total of 19,441 deaths since the pandemic began, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 11,066 retirement home residents in the country have died from the virus, The Guardian reported.

More than 2,500 attend illegal New Year’s rave in France – Authorities in the French region of Breton said more than 2,000 people participated in an illegal New Year’s Eve rave in defiance of coronavirus restrictions on gatherings. “In the early evening of December 31, several hundred vehicles began to converge on an industrial area in the town of Lieuron to set up a rave party,” local officials said, according to CNN. Authorities said they “faced violent hostility” when they tried to shut down the gathering, saying “a police vehicle was set on fire, three other vehicles were damaged, and soldiers were sprayed with bottles and stones, causing minor injuries.” .. Attendees are “estimated at 2,500, coming from different French departments and from abroad,” officials reportedly said, noting that the public prosecutor’s office has opened a probe of the incident. France imposed a national 8 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew beginning Dec. 15, during which residents are only allowed outside to commute to and from their jobs or schools, medical appointments that cannot take place remotely, judicial summons or essential family tasks. France has seen more than 2.6 million cases of the virus and about 65,000 deaths. After a newer, more infectious strain was detected in southeastern England, French officials briefly barred freight from the U.K.

Under cover of darkness, hundreds of skiers secretly escaped from COVID-19 quarantine at a resort in the Swiss Alps – More than 400 British tourists have “escaped’ from the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Verbier, after being ordered to quarantine there.The visitors were ordered by Swiss authorities to isolate for 10 days in their accommodations after the U.K. announced it had detected a highly transmissible new mutation of the coronavirus.The discovery of the mutation, which has swept through the U.K., causing COVID-19 infection rates to surge, led many countries, including Switzerland, to close their borders to British visitors.From midnight on Dec. 20, Switzerland banned flights from the U.K., but also put in place a retroactive quarantine.This meant that some 420 Britons who had already arrived in the village of Verbier – one of Europe’s premier ski resorts, and a popular destination with British royals – were told they would have to return immediately to their accommodations and avoid all contact with the outside world.The well-heeled visitors had other ideas. By Sunday morning, hoteliers were informing officials that breakfast trays were being left untouched outside guests’ rooms, and calls to rooms were going unanswered, the Daily Telegraph reports. The paper claims that of the 420 Britons identified by authorities as being in the luxury resort when the quarantine was hastily enforced, fewer than a dozen remained by Sunday. Laws implemented would mean breaking the quarantine could result in a fine of as much as 10,000 Swiss francs ($11,220). Some of the affected British tourists in Verbier left immediately, while others stuck it out for a short time before giving up and fleeing, according to a local newspaper.“Many of them stayed in quarantine for a day before they set off unnoticed under the cover of darkness,” Jean-Marc Sandoz, a spokesman for the wider municipality, told the SonntagsZeitung. He called the whole situation “the worst week our community has ever experienced.”

Coronavirus accelerates as new strain detected across Europe – As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across Europe, several governments announced over the holidays that they had detected cases of the new, even more infectious strain of the virus, currently believed to have originated in England. Yesterday, Britain reported more than 40,000 cases – a record since the beginning of the pandemic. Most new cases in at least southern England are believed to be due to the new strain of the virus. The seven-day average is also at an all-time high of more than 36,000, equivalent to almost 180,000 daily cases in a country the size of the United States. The strain has now been detected on every continent. Its spread is intersecting with the criminal policy of European governments, refusing essential measures to stop the pandemic’s spread that would threaten corporate profits, including the closure of non-essential workplaces and schools and provision of a decent income to the population. On December 26, the French health ministry published a notice announcing the first confirmed case involving the new strain in France. The patient was a French national residing in England who returned from the UK on December 19. It was only detected because the patient, who was asymptomatic, went to the hospital to be treated for a different illness on December 21, and was tested according to standard procedures. Also on Saturday, Spain announced four confirmed cases of the new strain, all among people recently arrived from the UK. Madrid deputy health chief Antonio Zapatero reported that three other suspected cases could not be confirmed until Tuesday or Wednesday. Italy registered its second confirmed case of the new strain on December 21. In Europe it has also been detected in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Yesterday, Canada announced that it had detected two cases, and on Friday Japan announced that it had found five cases, all in people recently arrived from the UK. Finland reported yesterday that two people arriving from abroad had tested positive for the new strain, and another for a variant recently detected for the first time in South Africa. It has also been detected in South Korea, Lebanon and Australia. There is currently no indication that the more recent strain is more deadly, or resistant to recently developed vaccines. However, it is significantly more contagious, threatening to flood hospitals more rapidly with critically-ill patients, and cause a large increase in deaths.

EU to purchase extra 100 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – The European Union (EU) will purchase an additional 100 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, officials said Tuesday, as the bloc of 27 nations has launched its effort to vaccinate its 450 million-person population. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the new purchase on Twitter on Tuesday, which brings the EU’s total of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses to 300 million. “We decided to take an additional 100 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, which is already being used to vaccinate people across the EU,” she said. The EU’s purchase comes as some vaccine candidates that the bloc has invested in have experienced delays during its trials, leading it to rely on the 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that it originally purchased. Over the weekend, EU countries first began receiving the vaccine that drug regulators approved last week. In the first contract with the EU, Pfizer and BioNTech agreed to provide 200 million doses for $18.80 per dose, officials told Reuters last month. The deal for 100 million more doses had the same price per dose although a timeline is yet to be agreed upon, officials said.

Major Covid Vaccine Glitch Emerges: Most Europeans, Including Hospital Staff, Refuse To Take It -All is not going according to plan in the biggest global rollout of what is arguably the most important vaccine in a century, and it is not just growing US mistrust in the covid injection effort that was rolled out in record time: an unexpected spike in allergic reactions to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (and now, Moderna too) may prove catastrophic to widespread acceptance unless scientists can figure out what is causing it after the FDA’s rushed approval, and is also why as we reported yesterday, scientists are scrambling to identify the potential culprit causing the allergic reactions.Making matters worse, Europe rolled out a huge COVID-19 vaccination drive on Sunday to try to rein in the coronavirus pandemic but even more Europeans than American are sceptical about the speed at which the vaccines have been tested and approved and reluctant to have the shot. While the European Union has secured contracts drugmakers including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, for a total of more than two billion doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated next year, this is looking increasingly like a pipe dream: according to recent surveys, the local population has expressed “high levels of hesitancy” towards inoculation in countries from France to Poland, with many used to vaccines taking decades to develop, not just months.“I don’t think there’s a vaccine in history that has been tested so quickly,” Ireneusz Sikorski, 41, said as he stepped out of a church in central Warsaw with his two children.“I am not saying vaccination shouldn’t be taking place. But I am not going to test an unverified vaccine on my children, or on myself.” Smart: why take the risk of getting vaccinated when others will do it, resulting in the same outcome. Surveys in Poland, where distrust in public institutions runs deep, show that fewer than 40% of people planning to get vaccinated. Worse, according to Reuters on Sunday, only half the medical staff in a Warsaw hospital where the country’s first shot was administered had signed up. And if the doctors don’t trust the vaccine, one can be certain that the broader population will refuse to take it. The situation is similar in Spain, one of Europe’s hardest-hit countries, where 28-year-old singer and music composer German summarizes the skepticism of a broad range of the population, and plans to wait for now. A Christian Orthodox bishop in Bulgaria, where 45% of people have said they would not get a shot and 40% plan to wait to see if any negative side effects appear – meaning only 15% of the population will actually volunteer for a vaccine in the near future – is in the tiny minority when it comes to taking the vaccine.

Coronavirus deaths reach record high in Germany as hospitals teeter on brink of collapse – The death toll from the coronavirus continues to grow relentlessly. Approximately 1.8 million people have died worldwide and more than 81.5 million have been infected. On Monday, the death toll since the beginning of the pandemic in Germany surpassed the 30,000 mark. Since December 10, more than 10,000 people have died, which equates to an average of over 500 per day, or one death every three minutes. More than 1.66 million people have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 in Germany, although the number of undetected cases is much higher. Over the holiday period, significantly fewer cases have been recorded and transmitted to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s national agency for infectious diseases. On Tuesday, the RKI reported almost 13,000 infections and 852 deaths for the previous 24 hours. On Wednesday morning, the RKI reported 22,459 infections and 1,129 deaths, the first time the daily death toll has surpassed 1,000. The fact that the situation is worsening by the day is shown above all by conditions in hospitals. For months, health care staff have been struggling in hospitals to save lives, but the conditions are increasingly catastrophic due to high infection rates. Nurses in Hamburg went public to speak about working conditions shortly before Christmas. The private management of Asklepios Clinics (AK) threatened a nurse with the loss of her job as a result. Romana Knezevic spoke openly on public broadcaster NDR’s Hamburg Journal show about the conditions at AK St. Georg. “The situation is extremely serious,” she said on December 17. “The intensive care capacity is totally used up.” For some time, they had been short-staffed, especially in intensive care, she continued. Then, the coronavirus pandemic came along and “a flood of coronavirus patients we have to care for in addition, that breaks all structures,” added Knezevic. “The intensive care colleagues are working with staff-to-patient ratios of one to five; normally it would be one to two or one to one,” she continued. In addition, “we have to take over tasks from the cleaning personnel and service staff. Just like us, they have also been cut back to the bone.” The situation is a tremendous burden for health care staff, especially because it is no longer even possible to provide patients with dignified end-of-life care. “The patients die alone in their rooms,” she said. The response of the hospital’s management was swift. Instead of seriously investigating the terrible conditions and working rapidly to improve them, they threatened to fire the courageous nurse. A spokesman of the Asklepios Clinics told the Hamburger Morgenpost that it is “unacceptable for employees to deliberately spread false information to media outlets or portray emergency situations as the norm for ideological or political motivations.” This would shake the confidence of Hamburg’s population, they added.

German health care workers sent to hospital after coronavirus vaccine overdoses -Four northern German health care workers were sent to the hospital on Sunday after being accidentally given five times the recommended dose of coronavirus vaccine.Officials from the Vorpommern-Ruegen district reported that eight workers in an elderly care facility had received an overdose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with four developing flu-like symptoms and being monitored as a precautionary measure. When the mistake was discovered, the workers, who are between the ages 37 and 54, were informed and sent home. “I deeply regret the incident,” district chief Stefan Kerth said in a statement obtained The Hill. “This individual case is due to individual errors. I hope that all those affected do not experience any serious side-effects.” District authorities cited previous statements from BioNTech that indicated that larger doses were used in the first phase of trials and did not lead to serious consequences. Pfizer and BioNTech pointed out that for those who receive an overdose of the vaccine, “monitoring of vital functions and possible symptomatic treatment is recommended.” The incident occurred days into Germany and the European Union’s rollout of the vaccine, approved by the EU’s drug regulator last week. The U.S. and U.K. had approved the vaccine earlier this month and began giving out the first doses in recent weeks. Along with Pfizer, the EU has contracts with AstraZeneca and Moderna for its vaccination campaign and plans to vaccinate 6.25 million people by the end of the year. Some German districts refused to use vaccine doses received over the weekend out of concern that the required cold conditions for the vaccine were interrupted during the delivery, Reuters reported on Monday. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be shipped at a temperature between -112 degrees and -76 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

South Korea to accelerate virus vaccine efforts as first U.K. variant detected (Reuters) – South Korean officials are vowing to speed up efforts to launch a public coronavirus vaccination programme as the country on Monday announced it had detected its first cases of the virus variant linked to the rapid rise in infections in Britain. The new variant, thought to be more transmissible than others currently circulating, was found in three people who had entered South Korea from London on Dec. 22, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said on Monday. Overall the KDCA reported 808 new cases as of midnight Sunday, the lowest since a record 1,241 infections were logged on Friday. Authorities cautioned that the drop may be due to less testing done over the weekend and the Christmas holiday, and said on Sunday they would be extending social distancing measures until early January. South Korea’s government has faced mounting domestic criticism over its vaccine procurement and rollout plans, which call for the first vaccinations to begin in the first quarter of next year, months after places such as the United States and the European Union. Negative views of the vaccine plans was one of the leading reasons that drove President Moon Jae-in’s disapproval rating to an all-time high of nearly 60%, pollster Realmeter said on Monday. Regulators will shorten the period required to approve vaccines and treatments from and average of 180 days to as little as 40 days, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety announced on Sunday. An additional approval process for the distribution and sale of vaccines, which usually takes several months, will be shortened to around 20 days, the ministry said. Medical workers and elderly residents will begin receiving the vaccinations in February, and plans to vaccinate the broader public is accelerating, presidential chief of staff Noh Young-min said Sunday.

Cold chain doubts delay COVID-19 vaccinations in some German cities (Reuters) -Germany’s coronavirus vaccination campaign faced delays in several cities on Sunday after temperature trackers showed that about 1,000 of the shots made by BioNTech and Pfizer may not have been kept cold enough during transit. “When reading the temperature loggers that were enclosed in the cool boxes, doubts arose about the compliance with the cold chain requirements,” the district of Lichtenfels in the north of Germany’s largest state, Bavaria, said in a statement. Medical staff found that the temperature in one vaccine transport cool box had risen to 15 degrees Celsius, a spokesman for Lichtenfels said, above the maximum of 8C stipulated by the manufacturers. He added that his district had not received advice from BioNtech yet on how to proceed. The regional government of Bavaria’s Upper Franconia region where several affected districts are based said that BioNTech cleared the vaccines late on Sunday. “BioNTech has confirmed the quality of the vaccine shots,” a spokeswoman for Upper Franconia said. “The vaccination programme can start (in our region).” BioNtech had earlier said in a statement it was responsible for the shipment to the 25 German distribution centres and that the federal states and local authorities were responsible for the shipment to the vaccination centres and the mobile vaccination teams.

Rich countries buying most of the world’s vaccine supply has left the rest ‘scrambling for supplies,’ campaigners say –Rich countries’ success in buying up most of the vaccine supply have left the rest of the world “scrambling for supplies” as they try to protect their populations, campaigners say. The world’s wealthiest countries have reserved enough vaccines to allow them to inject their populations multiple times over, and have started administering shots.The oversupply is a consequence of countries buying up multiple types of vaccine before it was clear which ones would work.If, as expected, most major candidates are approved then they will have many more than they need.Meanwhile, poorer countries are firmly at the back of the line, and may have to wait years for mass vaccination.Researchers and campaigners say the difference will be stark: One estimate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says that 51% of vaccine doses have been reserved by countries representing less than 15% of the world’s population.Roz Scourse, a policy advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders, told Insider: “I think the worst case scenario, to be blunt, is that we will continue to see people in low and middle-income countries dying of COVID for many years to come when there are effective vaccines and treatments available.“There isn’t a greater inequity, in my mind, than dying of something when you know that a treatment or a vaccine for that exists somewhere.”She said the current situation means much of the world is “scrambling for supplies.”Researchers for leading charities told Insider they fear that scenario will soon materialise. Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health-policy manager, said countries have become “trapped in this deadly mix insufficient vaccine supply combined with inequality in ability to pay for the vaccine — with too little supply, and the supply that we have being primarily bought by rich countries.”

Iran expects to receive 150K doses of Pfizer vaccine from US-based philanthropists -U.S. donors have arranged for around 150,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 to be sent to Iran, state media reported Monday.The Washington Post reported that a statement from Iran’s branch of the Red Crescent Society carried by the Tasnim news agency credited the donation to “coordination with a group of benefactors in the U.S.”The donation of vaccines comes as Iran has struggled to contain the virus and blamed U.S.-led sanctions for its inability to import needed medical supplies.The country also plans to receive roughly 1 million doses of the vaccine for COVID-19 from China, according to the Red Crescent.“Our people should know that for any action we plan to carry out for importing medicine, vaccines and equipment, we should curse [President] Trump a hundred times,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhanisaid earlier this month, addressing Iran’s difficulties in obtaining necessary supplies. The U.S. policy of sanctions has also faced independent criticism, most notably from the Atlantic Council, whose Future of Iran initiative director Barbara Slavin said the Trump administration’s sanctions “will hurt ordinary people, encourage more smuggling and in the long run, undermine dollar-based sanctions.”

Iran begins human trials of locally developed COVID-19 vaccine: state TV – Iranian state media on Tuesday said the country has begun its first human trials for a domestically-manufactured coronavirus vaccine. The shot is developed by Shifa Pharmed, a subsidiary of Barekat, the state-owned drug conglomerate, according to The Associated Press. Unlike Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, which uses RNA, the Iranian treatment uses a more traditional dosage of a weakened version of the virus, akin to the polio vaccine. Clinical trial manager Hamed Hosseini said the phase one trial will enroll 56 volunteers, who will receive two doses of the vaccine over two weeks, with results announced about a month after the final dosage. Among the first three volunteers was Tayebeh Mokhber, whose father chairs the Setad Foundation, the state organization that oversees Barekat. “I am happy that the scientific process went ahead in a proper way,” she said, according to the AP. “I hope the conclusion will be health for our people.” Iranian authorities have fast-tracked a development and approval process that typically takes years with a goal of getting the vaccine to market by late spring. President Hassan Rouhani said Tehran is developing a second vaccine with an unnamed foreign country and that human testing is projected for February, the AP reported. Iran has been the Middle Eastern epicenter of the virus, with nearly 55,000 deaths from the virus and more than 1.2 million infections. Tehran has said U.S. sanctions have undermined its attempts to buy vaccines from abroad. While the U.S. has claimed the sanctions do not apply to medicine, Rouhani has said financial sanctions mean waits of weeks or more to process payments for medical supplies. “Our people should know that for any action we plan to carry out for importing medicine, vaccines and equipment, we should curse Trump a hundred times,” Rouhani said earlier this month.

Israeli Man Dies After Receiving COVID Vaccine As 5K+ “Health Impact Events” Reported In US – Following a handful of reports, including one involving a priest from the Philadelphia area who volunteered as a trial participant, about patients who received a vaccine dying in the weeks following the second dose, one man in Israel has died 2 hours after receiving the vaccine.According to reports in the Israeli press, a 75 year old man from Beit Shean died Monday morning from a hear attack about 2 hours after receiving the vaccine. The patient has received the vaccine at 0830 in the morning, then waited for the customary time at the health clinic before he was released to his home after reportedly feeling well. Some time after that, the man lost consciousness, then was pronounced dead.The Israeli Health Ministry released a statement on the death: “A 75-year-old man from the north of the country suffering from active heart disease and malignant disease, who has undergone a number of heart attacks, was vaccinated this morning against the coronavirus and died at home shortly after the procedure.”An investigation into the man’s death has been ordered by the Director General of the Ministry of Health, Prof. Hezi Levy, who has appointed a case investigation committee to be led by the head of the MoH’s Safety and Quality Division. News of the man’s death follows reports that 5K out of the first 215K recipients of the vaccine in the US reported some kind of “adverse health impact event”, which could be anything that seriously limits an individual’s ability to function and/or complete daily tasks. These events should be severe enough to require medical attention, but exact details are unclear.

Argentina begins COVID-19 vaccination drive with Russian Sputnik V – Argentina began its COVID-19 vaccine rollout Tuesday using the Russian Sputnik V version, becoming the third country in the world to administer that type of shot outside of trials.Around 300,000 people are expected to be given the shot as inoculations began Tuesday, with the country expecting to receive 20 million doses within the next two months.Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez lauded the public’s trust in the vaccine on state television, saying that he thinks “people have a lot of faith in the vaccine,” Bloomberg reported.Some critics of the Sputnik V vaccine have questioned its efficacy after the Kremlin announced its registration before all clinical trials were completed. Developers have found it is 91 percent effective after people received two doses.Vaccines are free and voluntary for residents of Argentina. Priority rollouts mirror those of other nations, which focus primarily on inoculating vulnerable elderly populations and medical workers.Argentina ranks 11th in the world for COVID-19 deaths at 42,868 since the pandemic began. It is 12th in most cases at 1.6 million.The doses to Argentine residents Tuesday mark the first step of the Sputnik V immunization process. A second dose containing a different vector will arrive next month and will be administered to everyone who has received the first shot. Mexico, Costa Rica, and Chile also began inoculations this week using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which was also the first vaccine to be deployed in the U.S. Several other countries in Latin America are awaiting final approval for AstraZeneca’s vaccine variant. Meanwhile, in Europe, residents of Belarus also began receiving the Sputnik V vaccine on the same day as Argentina, as Russia seeks to send its vaccine candidate to more people outside its borders, the Associated Press reported.

Britain set to infect 2,500 people with COVID-19 for research – New strains of COVID-19 have stirred new fears among people. After the UK reported a new strain which is more contagious than the original, countries have stepped up measures to identify and isolate. The strain has already been spotted in different countries including Canada, and eight European countries have also found the strain in circulation.Even though vaccination drives against COVID-19 have begun around the world, there’s a lot about the virus scientists still don’t understand.Scientists in the UK want to get to know the virus better, and to achieve this, they’re infecting 2,500 healthy volunteers with COVID-19. They will attempt to understand how the virus behaves in the body, and how much it takes for the virus to develop, the Sun reported.The government has put out $45 million for the research, which will be undertaken by the Imperial College, the National Health Service’s Royal Free Hospital, along with a pharmaceutical company hVIVO.Usually, such studies are shunned due to the ethical questions about infecting healthy people with a virus.The project will begin in January, with the pilot results expected to come out in May. The volunteers – aged between 18-30 will be given an experimental nasal vaccine, after which they’ll be infected with the virus. All volunteers will be paid $5,300 for their three-week stay at a hospital, where they will be monitored all day and night, as reported by Mail Online.

Catastrophe worsens as UK records nearly 100,000 new COVID-19 cases in 48 hours – The number of COVID-19 cases continues to surge, with a record 53,135 positive tests announced Tuesday. This was on top of the previous record of 41,385 new cases announced Monday, meaning there have been almost 100,000 cases in the first two days of this week. Another 414 people were reported dead. In the week to December 29, the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 in England alone rose from 18,063 to 21,787. The main area of increase was in London which saw a 44 percent increase from 1,552 COVID patients to 2,237.The figures take the number of deaths as measured by the government to 71,567. The true figure is substantially higher and is approaching 90,000. Yesterday, the statistical associations in England and Wales produced figures showing there had been 87,000 deaths where COVID was mentioned on the death certificate. The figures will rise as Scotland and Northern Ireland have not yet released fatality data for the period between December 24 and 28.The terrible death toll is the outcome of the homicidal herd immunity policy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Apart from during the national lockdown of a few months’ duration, from the end of March, the government has allowed the virus to rip through the population. The new strain circulating in Britain since September is accelerating a catastrophic resurgence of the virus. It is now present on every continent. Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the National Health Service (NHS), said yesterday, “Now again we are back in the eye of the storm with a second wave of coronavirus sweeping Europe and, indeed, this country.”By Monday, there were more people in hospital in England (20,426) than the 18,974 patients recorded on April 12 at the height of the first wave.Hospitals are being overwhelmed with a number having to declare emergencies. The situation in London is the most acute. The London Ambulance Service had one of its “busiest ever days” on December 26, with 7,918 calls – up by more than 2,500 on last year. On Sunday, an internal incident was declared at Queen Elizabeth Hospital due to fears of a shortage of oxygen. The hospital was forced to divert patients to other hospitals in the city. According to a Sky News reporter at Queen’s Hospital in Romford, patients were yesterday being treated inside ambulances “because they don’t have enough beds left – that’s how bad the situation is”. The Daily Mirror reported, “Some health boards are considering the option of setting up tents outside hospitals to triage patients, as they work in ‘major incident mode’.”The surge in infections threatens to overwhelm a vaccine rollout taking place at a snail’s pace. At present only 600,000 people have received the vaccine. The delivery of the second required dose, only issued to people among the highest priority, began just yesterday.

UK Covid cases break another new daily record | The Independent The UK has seen another new coronavirus record with 55,892 more cases recorded in the past 24 hours and another 964 deaths. The new figures marked an increase on Wednesday’s record of 53,135, which had been the highest daily figure since the beginning of the pandemic. Of the new cases, 49,510 were recorded in England, with 2,622 in Scotland, 1,831 in Wales and 1,929 in Northern Ireland. The new figures bring the UK case total to 2,488,780 with 73,512 deaths. Speaking as the figures were released, Dr Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England, pleaded with members of the public to stay in on New Year’s Eve, echoing pleas from police and the government. Dr Doyle said: “We must not now add further fuel to the fire, as meeting in close and large groups this New Year’s Eve risks further transmission. “We know the overwhelming majority of deaths reported today are people who sadly passed away in just the last few days.

Covid news – live: UK breaks daily cases record as SAGE warns full lockdown ‘may not be enough to stop spread’ – A return to a national lockdown might not be enough to control the spread of the new variant of coronavirus in England, Sage experts have warned, as police have said large New Year’s Eve parties “should not be happening”. Forces reminded the vast majority of the population that indoor mixing between people from different households will be illegal. The organisers of gatherings of more than 30 people could be punished with £10,000 fines. It comes as more than three quarters of England’s population has been ordered to stay at home to stop then spread of the virus, with large areas of the country placed under tier 4 restrictions overnight. It leaves a total of 44 million people, or 78 per cent of England’s population, in tier 4, where non-essential shops, gyms, cinemas, casinos and hairdressers have to remain shut. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham joined calls for people to celebrate New Year’s Eve safely, before warning “this is the moment of maximum danger” as the region prepares to enter a period of tier 4 restrictions.

The UK is making a risky bet to stretch its supply of coronavirus vaccines, and scientists are split on the untested strategy –UK officials announced Tuesday that they would prioritize getting people their first doses of coronavirus vaccines instead of holding enough to ensure they can get a second dose on time.Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is supposed to be given as two injections 21 days apart.The new guidelines allow people to wait up to 12 weeks between receiving their first and second doses.The UK is the first country to publicly commit to the untested strategy, although some scientists in the US had also advocated for a single-dose strategy. Scientists are split on the UK’s plan to give initial doses of coronavirus vaccines to as many people as possible, even at the risk of delaying their booster shots. UK officials announced Tuesday that the country would prioritize getting its population first doses of the coronavirus vaccine instead of holding enough for a second dose. The idea is to boost the number of people getting vaccinated with the country’s initial supply of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine. “At this stage of the pandemic, prioritising the first doses of vaccine for as many people as possible on the priority list will protect the greatest number of at risk people overall in the shortest possible time,” UK officials said in a statement Tuesday. The vaccine is about 95% effective at preventing COVID-19 when given as two doses 21 days apart, and that’s how it’s being administered in the US. The UK’s strategy runs the risks of leaving people vulnerable to the coronavirus, because no one has tested what happens when doses are given farther apart.

Britain will allow mixing of COVID-19 vaccines on rare occasions (Reuters) – Britain will allow people to be given shots of different COVID-19 vaccines on rare occasions, despite a lack of evidence about the extent of immunity offered by mixing doses.In a departure from other strategies globally, the government said people could be given a mix-and-match of two COVID-19 shots, for example if the same vaccine dose was out of stock, according to guidelines published on New Year’s Eve. “(If) the same vaccine is not available, or if the first product received is unknown, it is reasonable to offer one dose of the locally available product to complete the schedule,” according to the guidelines. Mary Ramsay, head of immunisations at Public Health England, said this would only happen on extremely rare occasions, and that the government was not recommending the mixing of vaccines, which require at least two doses given several weeks apart. “Every effort should be made to give them the same vaccine, but where this is not possible it is better to give a second dose of another vaccine than not at all,” she said.COVID-19 has killed more 74,000 people in Britain – the second-highest death toll in Europe, and health officials are racing to deliver doses to help end the pandemic as fears grow that the health service could be overwhelmed. Earlier this week, the government reactivated emergency hospitals built at the start of the outbreak as wards fill up with COVID-19 patients.Britain has been at the forefront of approving the new coronavirus vaccines, becoming the first country to give emergency authorisation to the Pfizer/BioNTech and the AstraZeneca/University of Oxford vaccines last month. Both vaccines are meant to be administered as two shots, given several weeks apart, but they were not designed to be mixed together.

Covid wards ‘full of children’ for first time in pandemic, warn nurses – Medics are starting to see “whole wards of children” suffering from Covid for the first time during the pandemic, a senior nurse has warned. Laura Duffell, a matron at King’s College Hospital, London, said the new strain of Covid was affecting children and younger adults with no underlying health conditions in worrying numbers. She said: “It’s very different. That’s what makes it so much scarier for us as doctors, nurses and porters and everyone else who is working on the front line. “We have children who are coming in. It was minimally affecting children in the first wave… we now have a whole ward of children here and I know that some of my colleagues are in the same position, where they have a whole ward of children with Covid.” Ms Duffel, a Royal College of Nursing branch official, described a picture of NHS hospitals close to buckling under the strain of rising numbers of Covid patients. She told Radio 5 Live on Friday: “20 to 30 year olds with no underlying conditions are coming in. In intensive care you could have up to two or three very sick ventilated patients at the moment, which is far beyond what you should have. “Some of my colleagues across London have been looking after up to 15 adults on a Covid ward with one health care assistant supporting them, so you don’t stop.” Senior clinicians have now warned that severe staff shortages mean there is little prospect of the Nightingale hospitals riding to the rescue of the NHS as it struggles to cope with the imminent threat of being overwhelmed by Covid patients. Consultants and nursing leaders say that high levels of nursing vacancies, coupled with high numbers of staff themselves going off sick with coronavirus or stress will make it near impossible to use the Nightingale hospitals built around the country at the start of the pandemic.

UK Reports Record 57K COVID Cases; Japanese Officials Urge State Of Emergency: Live Updates – State and county officials across the US are still struggling with a backlog in new cases, but just as hospitals in LA County and other hard-hit areas seemed to be at their breaking point, it appears the number of hospitalizations and deaths are starting to slow – even as Joe Biden and Dr. Fauci continue to warn that the worst lies ahead. Yesterday, the US topped 20MM total confirmed cases, nearly 2x the total from India (which has the second-largest outbreak, by total confirmed cases). But the US isn’t the only country struggling with surging COVID-19 numbers: over the past few days, as the situation in Tokyo has intensified with the number of confirmed new cases reaching unprecedented levels, Japanese officials are demanding the government impose new restrictions on movement and business.Still, US hospitalizations – seen as the most reliable indicator of the pandemic’s trajectory – climbed to a new high late Friday, with 125.3K people admitted, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. That compares with the two previous waves of the virus, in April and in July, that peaked at about 60K.COVID Tracking Project said Saturday that it will likely take at least another week before the data in the US “return to normal.”On Saturday, the governors of Tokyo and three surrounding prefectures – Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, Saitama Gov. Motohiro Ono, Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa and Chiba Gov. Kensaku Morita – pleaded with the Japanese government – via Yasutoshi Nishimura, the government’s coronavirus point man – to declare a state of emergency, Nikkei reports.Following a meeting that lasted longer than three hours, Koike told reporters that the government must restrict the movement of people because coronavirus cases are surging at an unprecedented rate. Nishimura, Japan’s COVID point-man, said he recognizes the governors’ tough situation, and added that the government would take the request “seriously”. “ We take this request seriously…and will consider measures accordingly.” We agreed that we are in a severe situation that warrants us considering the declaration of a state of emergency,” Nishimura said.However, he added that the government needs to consult with its coronavirus expert panel before making a decision.The number of new cases reported in Tokyo has surged over the past week, with a record 1.3K reported on Thursday. The government in April declared a state of emergency for seven prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, before expanding the measure nationwide. The emergency was lifted on May 25.Elsewhere, authorities in Sydney, Australia (along with other parts of New South Wales) tightened rules on mask-wearing, ordering people to wear masks in shopping malls and on public transit as Australia’s most populous state tries to control another outbreak. In the UK, the record run of new cases continued, with authorities reporting more than 57K new cases on Saturday morning (cases were confirmed over the past 24 hours).

Different efficacy data for Chinese COVID-19 vaccine “real and valid”-media (Reuters) – Different efficacy results for a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine released separately in China and in United Arab Emirates are both real and valid, an executive at China National Biotec Group (CNBG) told state media. China approved its first COVID-19 vaccine for general public use on Thursday, a shot developed by an affiliate to state-backed Sinopharm, after the developer said the vaccine showed 79.34% efficacy based on an interim analysis of late-stage clinical trials. That rate is lower than the 86% rate for the same vaccine reported by the United Arab Emirates on Dec. 9. Countries have certain differences in their standards and procedures in diagnosing patients, and the final results of COVID-19 case identification were different, Yang Xiaoming, chairman at Sinopharm unit’s CNBG, told Global Times, a tabloid published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party. “Therefore, there were differences between the comprehensive multi-country data we reviewed and the protection rate data previously evaluated by the UAE and Bahrain,” Global Times quoted Yang as saying in a report published on Thursday. “But these two results are both real and valid,” Yang said, without offering further details for the data.

100s Of Israelis Infected With COVID After Receiving Pfizer Vaccine Amid Frenzied Inoculation Campaign – In a world where the rollout of covid vaccines has been far slower than the so-called experts predicted – which is bizarre considering the plunge in public faith in the “covid scientist” sector amid the surge in horror stories involving adverse side-effects from both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, to which the mainstream media has finally caught on as detailed in “As COVID-19 vaccines come online, fewer Americans want to take them” – the same mainstream media has been fawning over those counties which have steamrolled through popular skepticism and opposition with authoritarian ruthlessness to unleash widespread vaccination campaigns, praising them as model nations for everyone to follow. Countries like Israel, where over 1 million people or 12% of the population has already been vaccinated. The New York Times rushed to congratulate Israel, explaining “How Israel became a world leader in vaccinating against COVID-19” in which it wrote that… Israel’s campaign, which began Dec. 20, has distributed the vaccine to three times as much of its population as the second-fastest nation, the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, according to figures compiled mostly from local government sources by Our World in Data. By contrast, less than 1% of the population of the United States and only small fractions of the population in many European countries received a vaccine dose by the end of 2020, according to Our World in Data, though China, the United States and Britain have each distributed more doses overall. In short: Israel is great and shining example of how to force millions to get injected with some mRNA, while the US (and orange man of course) bad. Which would be fantastic, if only it wasn’t for the ideologically-mandated and rushed conclusion, which is laughable at best and potentially lethal at worst because just as Israel has been scrambling to get everyone vaccinated with substances whose side effects are still very much unknown, the Times of Israel reported that over two hundred Israeli citizens have been diagnosed with the disease days after getting the Pfizer/BioNTech shots. The number of those who got Covid-19 despite being vaccinated was at around 240 people, according to data from the Times of Israel According to the official explanation provided by the Israeli media, while the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine doesn’t contain the coronavirus and can’t infect the recipient, time is needed for the genetic code in the drug to train the immune system to recognize and attack the disease. The course of the US-made vaccine requires two shots. According to the studies, immunity to Covid-19 increases only eight to ten days after the first injection and eventually reaches 50 percent. The second shot is administered 21 days from the first one, while the declared immunity of 95 percent is achieved only a week after that. And, of course, there’s still a five percent chance of getting infected even if the vaccine is at its full potential.

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