Tag: Covid19

Health

Virus Variant in Brazil Contaminated Many Who Had Already Recovered From Covid-19

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Post date March 2, 2021

Virus Variant in Brazil Infected Many Who Had Already Recovered From Covid-19

Within a few weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so popular that you can regularly hear their unfathomable alphanumeric names on the television news.

B.1.1.7, first identified in the UK, has demonstrated the ability to spread widely and quickly. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can evade human antibodies and affect the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Scientists have also kept an eye on a third variant that originated in Brazil and is called P.1. Research on P.1 had been slower since its discovery in late December, so scientists weren’t sure how much to worry about it.

“I held my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, an epidemiologist at the Broad Institute.

Now three studies offer a sobering story of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It most likely occurred there in November and then led to a record spike in coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city in part because of an increased risk of contagion, research found.

However, the ability to infect some people who had immunity to previous attacks from Covid-19 was also gained. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effects of a Chinese vaccine currently used in Brazil.

The new studies have yet to be published in scientific journals. Their authors warn that findings from cells in laboratories do not always translate into the real world, and they have only just begun to understand how P.1 behaves.

“The results apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other locations,” said Nuno Faria, a virologist at Imperial College London who led much of the new research.

But even with the puzzles that existed around P.1, experts said it was a variant that should be taken seriously. “It is right to be concerned about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, epidemiologist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has registered six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.

To reduce the risk of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Dr. Faria, it is important to double up on any measure to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Masks and social distancing can work against P.1. And vaccinations can help reduce transmission and protect those who become infected from serious illnesses.

“The ultimate message is that you need to step up all vaccination efforts as soon as possible,” he said. “You have to be one step ahead of the virus.”

Dr. Faria and his colleagues began tracking down the coronavirus when it exploded in Brazil last spring. Manaus, a city of two million people in the Brazilian Amazon, was particularly hard hit. At the height of spring, the Manaus cemeteries were overwhelmed by the corpses of the dead.

But after a peak in late April, Manaus appeared to have overcome the worst of the pandemic. Some scientists believed the decline meant Manaus had gained herd immunity.

Dr. Faria and his colleagues looked for coronavirus antibodies in samples from a Manaus blood bank in June and October. They found that roughly three-quarters of Manaus residents were infected.

However, towards the end of 2020, the number of new cases increased again. “There were actually far more cases than the previous peak of cases, which was in late April,” said Dr. Faria. “And that was very puzzling to us.”

To look for variants, Dr. Faria and his colleagues launched a new genome sequencing effort in town. While B.1.1.7 had arrived in other parts of Brazil, they did not find it in Manaus. Instead, they found a variant that no one had seen before.

Updated

March 1, 2021, 9:49 p.m. ET

Many variants in their samples shared a set of 21 mutations that were not seen in other viruses circulating in Brazil. Dr. Faria texted a colleague, “I think I’m seeing something really strange and I’m pretty worried about it.”

Some mutations in particular worried him, as scientists had already found them in B.1.1.7 or B.1.351. Experiments suggested that some of the mutations might make the variants better able to infect cells. Other mutations allow them to evade antibodies from previous infections or to be produced by vaccines.

While Dr. Faria and his colleagues analyzed their results, researchers in Japan made a similar discovery. Four tourists who returned home from a trip to the Amazon on Jan. 4 tested positive for the coronavirus. Genome sequencing revealed the same mutations that Dr. Faria and his colleagues in Brazil saw.

Dr. Faria and his colleagues posted a description of P.1 on an online virology forum on January 12th. Then they investigated why P.1 is so common. Its mutations could have made it more contagious, or it could have been lucky. Coincidentally, the variant might have surfaced in Manaus when the city became more relaxed about public health policies.

It was also possible that P.1 became common because it could re-infect people. Usually, coronavirus reinfections are rare as the antibodies produced by the body after infection are effective for months. However, it was possible that P.1 had mutations that made it difficult for these antibodies to attach to it, allowing them to slip into cells and cause new infections.

The researchers tested these possibilities by tracking P.1 from its earliest samples in December. At the beginning of January it was 87 percent of the samples. By February it had completely taken over.

The researchers combined the data from genomes, antibodies and medical records in Manaus and came to the conclusion that P.1 conquered the city thanks to biology rather than luck: its mutations contributed to its spread. Like B.1.1.7, it can infect more people on average than other variants. They estimate that it is between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than other coronavirus lineages.

But it also gets a benefit from mutations that allow antibodies from other coronaviruses to escape. They estimate that out of 100 people who were infected in Manaus last year, between 25 and 61 were re-infected by P.1.

The researchers found support for this conclusion in an experiment in which they mixed P.1 virus with antibodies from Brazilians who had Covid-19 last year. They found that the effectiveness of their antibodies against P.1 decreased six-fold compared to other coronaviruses. This decline could mean that at least some people are susceptible to new infections from P.1.

“There seems to be a growing body of evidence to suggest that most of the second wave-related cases are actually some kind of reinfection,” said Dr. Faria.

Dr. Faria and other researchers are now looking across Brazil to observe the spread of P.1. Dr. Ester Sabino, an infectious disease expert at the University of São Paulo Faculty of Medicine, said one of the new outbreaks has occurred in Araraquara, a Brazilian city of 223,000 that did not have high rates of Covid-19 before P.1 arrived.

If the people of Araraquara did not have high antibody levels prior to P.1’s arrival, it suggests that the variant may have spread to locations without Manaus’ extreme history. “This could happen in any other place,” she said.

Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it was time to pay attention to P.1 in the US. He expected it to become more common in the United States, although it would have to compete with B.1.1.7, which could soon become the predominant variant in much of the nation.

“At least it will be one of the competitors,” said Dr. Worobey.

In their experiments, Dr. Faria and his colleagues also received antibodies from eight people who received CoronaVac, a Brazilian-made vaccine that was used in Brazil. They found that the antibodies produced by the vaccine were less effective at stopping the P.1 variant than other types.

Dr. Faria warned that these results, taken from cells in test tubes, don’t necessarily mean vaccines are less effective at protecting real people from P.1. Vaccines can very well provide strong protection against P.1, even if the antibodies they produce are not quite as effective. And even if the variant manages to infect vaccinated people, they will most likely remain protected from a severe attack of Covid-19.

For Dr. Sabino is the ultimate meaning of P.1 the threat that variants pose if they can appear anywhere in the world.

“It’s just a matter of time and chance,” she said.

Tags Brazil, Covid19, Infected, Recovered, Variant, Virus

Business

CDC Traces Covid-19 Outbreaks in Gyms, Urging Stricter Precautions

Post author By
Post date February 27, 2021

On Wednesday, public health officials urged athletes to wear masks and stay three feet apart while exercising as new research describes the rapid spread of coronavirus infections during intense exercise classes at gyms in Honolulu and Chicago.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised fitness centers to take various measures to prevent outbreaks, including enforcing proper mask use and reminding the gym and staff to stay home if they have symptoms of illness or are tested positive for the virus.

Heavy breathing during vigorous physical activity in tight indoor spaces increases the chances of transmission, and fitness instructors giving exercise instructions to members may also have contributed to the spread, according to the CDC study. Exercising outdoors or taking virtual fitness classes could reduce the risk of infection, the authors said.

“It is very important that people who want to go to a gym and exercise are aware of the symptoms of Covid and are aware that if they feel something that looks and feels like a Covid-19 symptom, they will be staying at home as a precaution, ”said Richard A. Teran, a CDC epidemiologist in Chicago who was one of the authors of the Chicago case study released Wednesday.

At a Chicago gym, Dr. Teran and his colleagues 55 coronavirus infections among 81 people who participated in high-intensity personal fitness classes between August 24 and September 1.

Among them were 22 people who had attended class on the day they first had symptoms of the disease or the day after. Three went to an exercise class the day they tested positive or the day after. In total, 43 members of the gym who tested positive took classes when they were potentially contagious, researchers said.

The outbreak occurred even though the gym classes were limited to 25 percent of their usual size and there were only 10 to 15 people in attendance.

Members were required to wear masks when entering the gym. At this point, temperatures were measured and examined for symptoms. But they were allowed to remove their masks during training; Those who were infected were less likely to wear masks during class, the researchers found.

In Hawaii, public health investigators linked 21 infections in late June to a 37-year-old male fitness trainer in Honolulu who taught at various facilities and developed symptoms of Covid-19 – body aches, chills, headaches and coughs, according to a CDC released on Wednesday -Report.

On June 29, a few hours before his first symptoms, he was teaching a one-hour stationary bike class with 10 participants in which no one wore a mask. All of these participants tested positive in early July, including a 46-year-old man who worked as a fitness trainer at another facility. He became acutely ill and was hospitalized in an intensive care unit.

Updated

Apr. 27, 2021, 4:36 p.m. ET

Twelve hours before this instructor started experiencing symptoms, he held several small kickboxing sessions and a personal training session. Of 11 exposed people, 10 were infected at the beginning of July and tested positive. All 10 developed Covid symptoms and one was hospitalized in the intensive care unit.

On July 22nd, the City of Honolulu issued emergency warrants requiring facial covers in fitness centers, including while exercising. Previously, members of the gym could remove their face coverings while exercising.

Fitness centers and gyms have been hard hit since the pandemic broke out in March last year. They were among the first to close last spring, and now they look forward to welcoming customers back.

The International Health Racquet and Sportsclub Association, an industry group, recently reported that 15 percent of the country’s clubs and studios closed last fall and further closings and bankruptcies were expected. The association has encouraged people to return to the gym and adopted the slogan “Exercise is important!”.

Many clubs have implemented new safety protocols and taken steps to improve ventilation, improve air filtration systems, and maximize outdoor air circulation, said Alex Larcom, senior manager for health promotion and health policy for the association.

The outbreaks described in the CDC studies were caused by inconsistent mask use and other behavioral disorders, as well as possibly poorly ventilated buildings, she said.

“In Chicago you had members who went to class when they were symptomatic or Covid-positive,” Ms. Larcom said. This facility wasn’t originally designed as a fitness center, she added, and symptom screening appeared to have been poorly done.

“Across society, we rely on people who are sick or who think they are sick to get out of society,” she said. Those who went to the gym when they had symptoms “probably went to the grocery store, dined, and roamed the community too.”

The CDC researchers emphasized that a diverse approach to safety is required in fitness facilities, including good ventilation, consistent and correct use of the mask, persistent reminders to keep staff and customers at home when sick, and additional hand washing stations.

“Nothing is 100 percent certain,” said Ms. Larcom. “There is never a zero risk. But clubs are not the main driver behind the spread of Covid. “

Tags CDC, Covid19, Gyms, outbreaks, precautions, Stricter, Traces, Urging

Business

Maldives Courts Influencers Amid Covid-19

Post author By
Post date February 27, 2021

Georgia Steel was jet-setting during a period of lockdowns.

Ms. Steel, a digital influencer and reality television star, left England for Dubai in late December, where she was promoting lingerie on Instagram at a luxury hotel. In January, she was at a resort in the Maldives, where spa treatments include body wraps made with sweet basil and coconut powder.

“We’re dripping,” Ms. Steel, 22, told her 1.6 million Instagram followers in a post where she waded through tropical waters in a bikini. Keep in mind, however, that the number of Covid-19 cases in the UK and Maldives was escalating or that England had just announced its third lockdown.

The Maldives, an island nation off the coast of India, not only tolerates tourists like Ms. Steel, but also encourages them to visit. More than 300,000 have arrived since the country reopened its borders last summer, including several dozen influencers, social media stars with a large fan base who are often paid for hawk products. Many influencers were courted by the government and traveled to exclusive resorts with paid junkets.

The government says its open door strategy is ideal for a tourism-dependent country whose decentralized geography – roughly 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean – contributes to social distancing. Since the borders were reopened, significantly less than 1 percent of incoming visitors have tested positive for the coronavirus, official data show.

“You never know what will happen tomorrow,” said Thoyyib Mohamed, the executive director of the country’s official PR agency. “But first I have to say, this is a really good case study for the whole world, especially for tropical destinations.”

The Maldives strategy carries epidemiological risks and underscores how distant vacation spots and the influencers they courted have become hotspots for controversy.

While people around the world seek refuge, some influencers have reported fleeing to small towns or foreign countries, encouraging their followers to do the same, which may endanger the locals and others they come in contact with in their travels.

“So we’re just not in a pandemic, are we?” Beverly Cowell, an administrator in England, commented on Ms. Steel’s Instagram post and gave a voice to many who see such travelers as a circumvention of the rules.

Inviting influencers to visit during the pandemic can damage a destination’s image, said Francisco Femenia-Serra, a tourism expert at Nebrija University in Madrid who studies influencer marketing.

“What is wrong with the Maldives campaign is the timing,” he said, noting that it started before travelers could be vaccinated. “It’s turned off. It’s not the time to do that.”

When the Maldives closed its borders in March last year to protect itself from the virus, it didn’t take the decision lightly: tourism employs more than 60,000 of the country’s 540,000 people, more than any other industry, according to a consultant Nashiya Saeed in the private sector in the Maldives, who recently co-wrote a government study on the economic impact of the pandemic.

“When tourism stopped, there was no income in the country,” said Ms. Saeed. Many laid-off resort workers who live in the capital, Malé, have had to return to their home islands because they could no longer afford it, she added.

While health officials worked to contain local outbreaks, advisers to President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih developed a strategy to resume tourism as soon as possible. One benefit was that most of the country’s luxury resorts are on their own islands, which makes isolation and contact tracing much easier.

“We really planned this, we knew what our advantages were and we played before them,” said Mohamed Mabrook Azeez, spokesman for Mr Solih.

When the Maldives reopened in July, the health authorities requested, among other things, PCR tests, but did not subject tourists to mandatory quarantines. Around the same time, the country’s PR agency switched its international marketing campaign and urged travelers to rediscover the Maldives.

The government and local businesses also invited influencers to stay at resorts and rave about them on social media. What they have done.

“If it’s cloudy, be the sunshine!” Ana Cheri, an American influencer with more than 12 million followers, wrote from a resort in the Maldives in November, a few weeks before her home state of California imposed sweeping bans. “Splash and swing into the weekend!”

Updated

Apr. 27, 2021 at 12:24 AM ET

Ms. Cheri did not respond to multiple emails after initially agreeing to the comment. A publicist for Ms. Steel, a star on the reality show Love Island, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Even before the pandemic, influencers faced setbacks when their trips offended. For example, some who reported traveling in Saudi Arabia have been criticized for the kingdom’s role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Influencers from England, in particular, have been criticized in recent weeks for defying the blocking rules that forbid all but essential travel. Some defended their travels, saying that travel was essential to their work, while others apologized under public pressure.

“I said, ‘Oh, well, it’s legal so it’s fine,” said influencer KT Franklin in an apology video about her trip to the Maldives. “But it’s not good. It’s really irresponsible and inconsiderate and deaf . “

At the end of January, Great Britain banned direct flights to and from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates as the Covid-19 case load increased sharply in both locations. The emirate’s lax immigration rules and constant sunshine had made it a popular spot for the social media set. But as the number of cases rose, officials closed bars and pubs and limited hotels, shopping malls and beach clubs to 70 percent capacity for a month.

Officials in the Maldives, who have welcomed nearly 150,000 tourists so far this year, said they had no plans to introduce similar restrictions.

The country has reported nearly 20,000 coronavirus infections in total, representing about 4 percent of its population, and 60 deaths. But none of the resort clusters have sparked widespread community broadcast, and officials say the risk of this is small as some resort employees have to be quarantined when traveling between islands.

“All in all, I think we managed to do well,” said Dr. Nazla Rafeeg, the chief of communicable disease control at the state health protection agency, although some tourists tested positive before leaving the country. “Our guidelines have withstood the actual implementation.”

Many influencers and celebrities have faced the opprobrium of other social media users stuck at home. Instagram accounts were created to name and shame tourists who apparently violate social distancing and mask-wearing rules abroad.

As a result, some influencers have failed to post travel content – or at least disable comments on their posts – during the pandemic because they don’t want to bring controversy to court.

The setback against traveling influencers is exaggerated, said Raidh Shaaz Waleed, whose company ensured that Ms. Steel, Ms. Cheri and more than 30 other influencers visit the Maldives as part of a campaign called Project FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. None of the invited visitors, he said, tested positive for the coronavirus.

“If you think about the safety guidelines, if you are socially distancing yourself, you can still have fun,” he said.

Not everyone shares their optimism.

Ms. Cowell, the administrator in England who commented on Ms. Steel of the Maldives’ post, said in emails that promoting such a trip during England’s third lockdown was irresponsible.

The position is particularly difficult to fill, she added, as she appeared on the day she learned that her grandmother, who lives in a nursing home, had contracted the virus.

“It’s not about breaking them off or creating a negative environment online,” Ms. Cowell, 22, said of influencers who break the ban, “it’s about making sure we don’t put celebrities on a pedestal that makes them feel invincible and can.” do what you want. “

Taylor Lorenz contributed to the coverage.

Tags Courts, Covid19, Influencers, Maldives

World News

Covid-19: F.D.A. Panel Offers Inexperienced Mild to Johnson & Johnson’s Vaccine

Post author By
Post date February 27, 2021

Empty vials of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a hospital in South Africa.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Phill Magakoe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine was endorsed on Friday by a panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration, clearing the last hurdle before a formal authorization expected on Saturday, according to two people familiar with the agency’s plans. The nation’s first shipments will go out in the days after that.

It will be the third shot made available to the United States in the year since the first surge of coronavirus cases began washing over the country, and it will be the first vaccine to require just one dose instead of two.

Johnson & Johnson’s formulation worked well in clinical trials, particularly against severe disease and hospitalizations, even though it did not match the sky-high efficacy rates of the first two vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The panel, made up of independent infectious disease experts, statisticians and epidemiologists, voted unanimously in favor of authorizing the vaccine.

“We’re dealing with a pandemic right now,” said Dr. Jay Portnoy, an allergist at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the board. “It’s great that we have this vaccine.”

During Johnson & Johnson’s presentation to the panel, Dr. Gregory Poland, a virologist at the Mayo Clinic and a paid external consultant for the company, noted the vaccine’s efficacy, ease of use and low rate of side effects. It “nearly checks all the boxes,” he said. “To me, it is clear that the known benefits vastly outweigh the known risks.”

The vaccine had an overall efficacy rate of 72 percent in the United States and 64 percent in South Africa, where a concerning variant emerged in the fall. The shot showed 86 percent efficacy against severe forms of Covid-19 in the United States, and 82 percent against severe disease in South Africa.

Those are strong numbers, but lower than the roughly 95 percent efficacy rates of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines against mild, moderate and severe cases of Covid.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is a single dose and uses a different kind of technology than the authorized vaccines. And the scale and size of the Johnson & Johnson trial was vast, spanning eight countries, three continents and nearly 45,000 participants.

Although the vaccine works with one shot, studies are underway to determine if a second dose would increase its protective effects.

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and one of the panelists, pointed out on Friday that in early clinical trials that took place over the summer, Johnson & Johnson found that a second dose led to levels of coronavirus antibodies that were almost three times higher than those produced by one dose alone.

The results of Johnson & Johnson’s two-dose, late-stage clinical trial are not expected until July at the earliest. If those results turn out to be better than a single dose, Dr. Offit asked, “Does this then become a two-dose vaccine?”

Dr. Johan Van Hoof, the global head of vaccine research and development at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the drug development arm of Johnson & Johnson, said that the company decided to pursue the one-shot strategy after its studies on monkeys last spring showed that a single dose was enough to provide strong protection against the disease.

“It’s clear that in a situation of an outbreak, in a raging epidemic, the big challenge is to get the epidemic under control,” he said. “The regimen is extremely well positioned to be used in outbreak situations.”

But Dr. Van Hoof also noted that it will be important to track volunteers who received a single dose to see if their immunity changes in the months to come. It might be necessary to deliver a booster shot for long-term protection. “The big question mark still is, how long does protection last?” he said.

After the vote, the F.D.A. told Johnson & Johnson that it “will rapidly work toward finalization and issuance of an emergency use authorization,” according to a statement. The F.D.A. also said that it had notified other government agencies “so they can execute their plans for timely vaccine distribution.”

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 26	14-day change
New cases	78,262	–29%
New deaths	2,266	–20%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 26	14-day change
New cases	410,857	–5%
New deaths	9,468	–23%

U.S. vaccinations ›

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Decline in Coronavirus Cases ‘May Be Stalling,’ C.D.C. Director Warns

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Friday that a recent decline in coronavirus cases across the U.S. “may be stalling” and urged governors not to relax restrictions.

Over the last few weeks, cases in hospital admissions in the United States have been coming down since early January and deaths have been declining in the past week. But the latest data suggest that these declines may be stalling, potentially leveling off at still a very high number. We at C.D.C. consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory. We are watching these concerning data very closely to see where they will go over the next few days. But it’s important to remember where we are in the pandemic. Things are tenuous. Now is not the time to relax restrictions. Although we’ve been experiencing large declines in cases and admissions over the past six weeks, these declines follow the highest peak we have experienced in the pandemic. We may be done with the virus, but clearly, the virus is not done with us. We cannot get comfortable or give in to a false sense of security that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Not now, not when mass vaccination is so very close.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Friday that a recent decline in coronavirus cases across the U.S. “may be stalling” and urged governors not to relax restrictions.CreditCredit…Josh Bell/The Sun News, via Associated Press

The federal government warned impatient governors against relaxing pandemic control measures on Friday, saying that a recent steep drop in U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths “may be stalling” and “potentially leveling off at still a very high number” — a worrisome development that comes as more cases of concerning new variants have been found and could suggest that a return to normalcy is not yet quite as near as many Americans had hoped.

“Things are tenuous,” Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a White House briefing on the pandemic. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”

Her warning was bolstered by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top epidemiologist, as the Biden administration scrambled to stay ahead of any new wave. President Biden himself flew to Houston to showcase the government’s latest mass vaccine site.

According to a New York Times database, virus cases across the United States appear to be leveling off from the steep decline that began in January, with figures comparable to those reported in late October. Cases have slightly increased week over week in recent days, though severe weather limited testing and reporting in Texas and other states the previous week, and not all states reported complete data on the Presidents Day holiday. The seven-day average of new cases was 77,800 as of Thursday.

While deaths tend to fluctuate more than cases and hospital admissions, Dr. Walensky said at the briefing on Friday, the most recent seven-day average is slightly higher than the average earlier in the week. The seven-day average of newly reported deaths was 2,165, as of Thursday.

“We at C.D.C. consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory,” she said, adding, “I want to be clear: cases, hospital admissions and deaths — all remain very high and the recent shift in the pandemic must be taken extremely seriously.”

Dr. Walensky said some of the rise may be attributable to new variants of the coronavirus that spread more efficiently and quickly. The so-called B.1.1.7 variant, which first emerged in Britain, now accounts for approximately 10 percent of all cases in the United States, up from one to four percent a few weeks ago, she said. The U.S. ability to track variants is much less robust than Britain’s.

“I know people are tired; they want to get back to life, to normal,” she said. “But we’re not there yet.”

As cases had declined, some governors around the United States have begun to relax pandemic restrictions. States with Republican governors appeared to be more eager to make rollbacks, though New York, which has a Democrat as governor, has also been easing restrictions on a variety of activities.

On Friday, Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, announced that on Monday, restaurants would be able to serve alcohol past 11 p.m., and residents would not need to get approval from the state to hold events with 250 people or more. To try to limit the spread of the virus, the state last year ordered bars to stop serving alcohol after 11 p.m., which is three hours earlier than the late-night bar crowd was used to.

Brian Symmes, a spokesman for Mr. McMaster, said the governor “appreciates perspectives that differ from his own” but “respectfully disagrees” with Dr. Walensky’s assessment.

In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Friday that he’d be lifting restrictions around capacity limits for bars, restaurants, gyms and large venues, but extending the state’s emergency order and mask mandate until March 31. The current emergency order was set to expire February 27.

On Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said he was considering lifting a statewide mask mandate in place since July.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said he was also considering pulling back some restrictions, particularly mask mandates for people who have been fully vaccinated. As of Friday, 13 percent of the state’s population has received at least one shot, and 6.2 percent have received two, according to a Times database.

Dr. Fauci echoed Dr. Walensky’s warnings that more rollbacks at state or local levels would be unwise, noting that case levels remained at a “very precarious position.”

“We don’t want to be people always looking at the dark side of things, but you want to be realistic,” he said. “So we have to carefully look at what happens over the next week or so with those numbers before you start making the understandable need to relax on certain restrictions.”

In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown extended the state’s emergency order until May 2. The state recorded a sharp decreases in daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths this week, but citing the new variants Ms. Brown said that “now is not the time to let up our guard.”

Eileen Sullivan Remy Tumin, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.

Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

The federal government has agreed to buy 100,000 doses of a recently authorized Covid-19 treatment from Eli Lilly, increasing the supply of such drugs for patients who are high risk of becoming seriously ill but are not yet hospitalized.

Under the deal, announced on Friday, the government will pay $210 million and Eli Lilly will ship out the doses by the end of March. The government has the option to buy 1.1 million more doses of the treatment through November, but how many of those doses ultimately get ordered will depend in part on the course of the pandemic in the United States.

The treatment is a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies combining the Eli Lilly drug known as bamlanivimab — which was authorized last November and is in use for high-risk Covid-19 patients — with a second drug known as etesevimab. The combination received emergency authorization earlier this month from the Food and Drug Administration. Both drugs consist of artificial copies of the antibodies that are naturally generated when a person’s immune system fights off an infection.

The U.S. government previously agreed to buy nearly 1.5 million doses of bamlanivimab alone. Eli Lilly has delivered more than 1 million doses already, with the remainder to be delivered by the end of March. More than 660,000 doses of bamlanivimab have been shipped out to states and other jurisdictions.

Eli Lilly’s new combination therapy could offer an advantage over bamlanivimab alone if worrisome coronavirus variants — particularly B.1.351, the one first identified in South Africa — take off in the United States. While bamlanivimab alone was found in a lab study to be powerless against the B.1.351 variant, preliminary data suggest that the combination therapy may be better able to fight off variants. That’s because so-called escape mutations in the variants that may enable them to avoid one antibody may not work against the second.

Another monoclonal antibody cocktail, made by Regeneron, is also authorized in the United States. Nearly 100,000 doses of that therapy have been shipped out.

Antibody treatments got a publicity boost last fall when they were given to Donald J. Trump when he was infected in the last months of his presidency, and to other high-profile Republicans, but they were surprisingly underused in many places in their first months of availability. Overwhelmed hospitals did not prioritize the treatments, which are cumbersome and must be given via intravenous infusions. Many patients and doctors did not know to ask for them or how to find them.

In December, the federal government’s early data collected from hospitals suggested that they had given only about 20 percent of their supply to patients. But that picture is changing. Eli Lilly has seen usage of bamlanivimab alone rise to around 40 percent nationwide, with uptake much higher in some places, Janelle Sabo, who leads Eli Lilly’s work on Covid-19 antibodies, said in an interview earlier this week.

Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

As more people in the United States learn of someone close to them who has received a Covid-19 vaccine, they are becoming more open to getting the vaccine themselves, according to the latest survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been monitoring attitudes since December.

Across most demographic groups, vaccine hesitancy, though still substantial, continues to abate. Fifty-five percent of adults now say they have either received one dose or will get it as soon as they can, up from 34 percent in December.

The so-called “wait and see” group is inching down, too, to 22 percent in February from 31 percent in January. But Black adults (34 percent) and Latino adults (26 percent) remain more inclined than white adults (18 percent) to take a wait-and-see approach.

About one in five Americans still refuses to get the shot, or said they would only do so if compelled by work or school.

Kaiser also took note of the political affiliation of its survey respondents. From December to February, the proportion of Democrats who had either gotten the shot or wanted to soared to 75 percent from 47 percent. Republicans remained more hesitant, but there was a notable increase in the amount who were vaccinated or hoped to be, to 41 percent from 28 percent.

Views of the vaccine were divided by age as well. People 65 and older, among the first demographic groups eligible for the shot, were among the most enthusiastic, an attitude that crossed racial lines. But while nearly half of older white people said they had already received at least one dose, only about one-third of older Black people said they had.

The survey also examined the most common reasons for hesitation. People were most concerned about side effects and also about the rapidity with which the vaccines were developed. They were also still gripped by misinformation, fearing they would have to pay for the vaccine (it is available at no cost) and that it would give them Covid (it does not).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday about 47.2 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a vaccine, including about 22.6 million people who have been fully vaccinated.

Credit…Mark Weber/Daily Memphian, via Associated Press

The top health official in Memphis submitted her resignation after state health officials accused her department, which oversees the vaccine rollout in the state’s most populous county, of wasting thousands of doses, the mayor of Shelby County, Tenn., said on Friday.

The swift downfall of Alisa Haushalter, the Shelby County Health Department director, came hours after a news conference in which Dr. Lisa Piercey, Tennessee’s health commissioner, laid out a series of stunning accusations of mismanagement by Ms. Haushalter’s department, including episodes in which a volunteer may have stolen doses and another administered shots to two children.

State health officials have been investigating the department for at least a week after Ms. Haushalter first reported that vaccine doses had expired, Dr. Piercey said.

Investigators confirmed the expiration of 1,578 doses last week, but it was only this week that Shelby County health officials acknowledged that an additional 840 doses had expired on Feb. 15, bringing the total to more than 2,400.

And Dr. Piercey said that when she met with the mayor on Thursday, he said that he had heard a rumor about a volunteer possibly stealing vaccines on Feb. 3, but Dr. Piercey said the theft was never reported to any state or federal authorities. The state health department alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the possible theft shortly after that conversation, she said. Dr. Piercey also said that a volunteer had wrongly vaccinated two children on Feb. 3.

The City of Memphis on Wednesday took over the responsibility of storing, transporting and allocating the vaccines.

Credit…Christinne Muschi/Reuters

Canada’s drug regulator authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine on Friday as well as a version of it developed by the Serum Institute of India. The vaccine, which was developed with Oxford University, has not yet been authorized for use in the United States but has been key to Britain’s rapid vaccination rollout.

The addition of a third vaccine, in addition to the offerings from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, may help Canada alleviate a growing dissatisfaction about the sluggish pace of vaccination in the country.

“Vaccines will keep arriving faster and faster,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a news conference. “We now have a third safe and effective vaccine.”

Mr. Trudeau said that the government expects to receive, within days, about 500,000 doses out of an order of two million doses of the Serum Institute version of the vaccine, known as Covishield. About 20 million doses will start arriving from AstraZeneca in the spring.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, the first virus vector-based inoculation for Covid-19 authorized in Canada, has had some stumbles. In trials in South Africa, where a more contagious virus variant has become dominant, it did not appear to protect people from mild or moderate illness, which led the country to halt its use of the vaccine.

Drug approval officials with Health Canada said on Friday that while some studies suggested that the AstraZeneca vaccine is less effective overall than others, the sample sizes used were not large enough to yield a clear conclusion. But in Germany, many people regard it as “second-class” compared to the vaccine developed by the German company BioNTech and Pfizer, and are avoiding AstraZeneca’s.

Credit…Lyndon French for The New York Times

Across the United States and the world, the coronavirus seems to be loosening its stranglehold. The curve of cases, hospitalizations and deaths has yo-yoed before, but never has it plunged so steeply and so quickly.

Is this it, then? Is this the beginning of the end?

The road ahead is potholed with unknowns: how well vaccines prevent further spread of the virus, whether emerging variants remain susceptible enough to the vaccines and how quickly the world is immunized, so as to halt further evolution of the virus.

And the greatest ambiguity is human behavior. Will Americans desperate for a return to pre-pandemic lifestyles continue to wear masks and distance themselves from family and friends? How much longer can communities keep businesses, offices and schools closed?

Covid-19 deaths are unlikely to again rise quite as precipitously as in the past, and the worst may be behind us. But if Americans let down their guard too soon and if the variants spread in the United States as they have elsewhere, another spike in cases may well arrive in the coming weeks.

Buoyed by the shrinking rates over all, governors are lifting restrictions across the United States and are under enormous pressure to reopen completely.

“Everybody is tired, and everybody wants things to open up again,” said Ashleigh Tuite, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Toronto. “Bending to political pressure right now, when things are really headed in the right direction, is going to end up costing us in the long term.”

Looking ahead to late March or April, the majority of scientists interviewed by The Times predicted a fourth wave of infections. But they stressed that it is not an inevitable surge if precautions are maintained for a few more weeks.

“Just hang in there a little bit longer,” Dr. Tuite said. “There’s a lot of optimism and hope, but I think we need to be prepared for the fact that the next several months are likely to continue to be difficult.”

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

In Washington, Republicans stand united in opposition to President Biden’s first major legislative proposal, a $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan that they have labeled a bloated, budget-busting “blue state bailout.”

But in rural Maine, Anthony McGill, a self-identified conservative Republican, describes the bill as something else entirely: “Most of it sounds like a good idea,” he said.

While Mr. McGill doesn’t agree with all the provisions, he supports the central thrust of the bill — another round of direct stimulus payments to nearly all Americans.

“There’s a lot of people that could use those checks. I don’t know about needing them, but we could all use them,” said Mr. McGill, 52, who voted for former President Donald J. Trump in November. “The debt is so far out of hand that it’s a fantasy number at this point. We might as well just blow it out till everything collapses.”

As Democrats prepare to vote as soon as Friday to pass the relief package in the House, Republican elected officials are struggling to overcome intraparty divides over whether to embrace the major pieces of the proposal — as well as to reconcile with the fact that many Republican voters support the plan. While Democrats are working swiftly to move their bill, Republicans are consumed by sideshows like false claims of voter fraud and what they call cancel culture, which are two major themes of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, starting on Friday in Orlando, Fla.

The lack of a unified Republican economic message reflects an unsettled party that is unable to agree on how to chart a path through a Democratic-controlled Washington. While congressional Republicans take a scattershot approach to try to undermine the legislation, mayors and governors in their party are pushing for the plan, saying their states and cities need the federal aid to keep police officers on their beats, reopen schools and help small businesses.

Polling shows a significant number of Republican voters agree: More than four in 10 Republicans back Mr. Biden’s aid package, according to polling from the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. Over all, 72 percent of Americans said they supported the bill, a number that includes 97 percent of Democrats.

Global Roundup

Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

BRUSSELS — In vaccine-hungry, cash-rich Europe, the hunt for more doses has nations trading with each other, weighing purchases from Russia and China, and fielding offers from middlemen ranging from real to outright frauds.

Anger has been building over the European Union’s sluggish Covid vaccine rollout, which has left the E.U. member nations far behind several other wealthy countries, and many E.U. states are now looking beyond the bloc’s underwhelming joint purchasing strategy.

An immense black — or at least gray — market has arisen, with pitches from around the world at often exorbitant prices. Sellers have approached E.U. governments claiming to offer 460 million doses of vaccines, according to early results of an investigation by the bloc’s anti-fraud agency that were shared with The New York Times.

While they still plan to get vaccines from the bloc, some nations are also trying to negotiate directly with drug makers and eyeing the murky open market, where they are still unsure of the sellers and the products. Some have also agreed to swap vaccines with each other, deals some of them now have reason to regret.

The European Union last year was slow to make massive advance purchases from drug companies, acting weeks after the United States, Britain and a handful of other countries. This year, the bloc was blindsided by slower-than-expected vaccine production, and individual countries have fumbled the rollout.

About 5 percent of the E.U.’s nearly 450 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, versus almost 14 percent in the United States, 27 percent in Britain and 53 percent in Israel, as of earlier this week, according to the Our World in Data database and governments.

The stumbles by the world’s richest bloc of nations have turned vaccine politics toxic. Particularly galling to many Europeans is the sight of a former E.U. member, Britain, forging ahead with its vaccination and reopening plans, while many of their own societies remain under lockdown to contain a new surge of dangerous variants, their economies sinking deeper into recession.

In other international news on the pandemic:

The government in France has announced stricter border checks between Germany and the eastern Moselle region, one of several areas experiencing a spike in coronavirus infections. It is the latest pandemic measure to challenge the E.U.’s open borders. Officials said that starting Monday, those wanting to cross the border would have to present a negative coronavirus test from the past 72 hours. Cross-border workers in the area will be exempt.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe threatened this week to punish residents who do not take Covid vaccines. “You are not going to be forced to be vaccinated, but the time shall come when those who are not vaccinated won’t get jobs,” he said on Wednesday. The country of 15 million people received 200,000 donated doses from the Chinese company Sinopharm, and 600,000 more doses are expected in early March. Zimbabwe is also set to receive more than 1.1 million doses as part of the Covax distribution program for poor and middle-income countries.
North Korea’s borders have been closed for a year because of the pandemic, but some Russian diplomats and their families found a way home on a route that included a bus ride and a trip on a hand-pushed railroad trolley. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that the journey by trolley was the only possible way for them to cross the border.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Dr. Anthony Fauci sought to reassure Black Americans that vaccine rollouts would be as equitable as possible and tried to quell anxieties over the safety of the inoculation among people of color during a televised forum Friday night.

Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said increasing pharmacies’ vaccine inventory and creating mobile units to get to hard-to-reach areas will help.

Experts say that Black and Latino Americans are being vaccinated at lower rates because they face obstacles like language barriers and inadequate access to digital technology, medical facilities and transportation. But mistrust in government officials and doctors also plays a role and is fed by social media misinformation. And in cities across the country, wealthy white residents are lining up to be vaccinated in low-income Latino and Black communities.

“It’s affecting us like no other disease, like no other epidemic has. That’s because for Black Americans, we were already behind,” Representative Barbara Lawrence, Democrat of Michigan, said during the forum on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out.”

“We’re looking at historic fear of vaccines and a fear of the health care industry because are they going to hurt us, harm us, ignore us or are they going to help us?” she said.

President Biden has said he wants to make racial equality a centerpiece of his vaccination rollout plan. He has begun shipping vaccines to federally qualified community health centers in Black and Latino communities.

While new data shows rates of vaccination in New York City’s Black and Latino communities are lower than rates in largely white communities and New York State’s Latino and Black residents were behind in vaccination totals, the absence of comprehensive national data on race and ethnicity makes it impossible to know just how equitable vaccine distribution is.

“This vaccine does not discriminate,” Ms. Lawrence said. “It hurts me when I see a line of people getting vaccines and my people are not represented but I’m invited to the funerals of those who have died. I have taken the vaccine. I believe in it. I need my people, my community, to step up.”

Credit…Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The phone and online registration system set up by the District of Columbia for its residents to use to schedule Covid-19 vaccination appointments has been faltering after the city broadened the eligibility of prioritized residents who can make appointments on Thursday.

D.C. widened the criteria from people 65 and older to include residents with certain health conditions and those working jobs that require contact with multiple people.

But many complained on Thursday and Friday that the phone number listed for scheduling a jab was not in service, and that the website was returning error messages. Some people were able to secure an appointment, though it was not immediately clear why they were successful when others were not.

“In short … it did not go well,” one of the city’s council members, Charles Allen, said in an email to constituents on Thursday.

Mayor Muriel Bowser blamed the problems on the “high volume of traffic” on the city’s vaccination site and said in a tweet that the city was trying to fix the problems quickly. The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The city’s health department apologized for the problems and said the “technical review failure” on Thursday had been addressed. However, the problems persisted on Friday when the city released another 4,350 vaccine appointments.

As of Friday, nearly 11 percent of D.C. residents had received one dose of a vaccine, and nearly 5 percent had received two doses, according to a New York Times database.

Credit…Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

RIO DE JANEIRO — The daily death toll of Covid-19 in Brazil hit a record high of 1,582 on Thursday, according to a news consortium’s survey of local health departments. The painful milestone came as President Jair Bolsonaro railed against face masks, despite compelling scientific evidence that they are effective at preventing infections.

A rise in coronavirus infections in several states in Brazil, which officials say is being driven by more contagious variants, has overwhelmed hospitals across the country.

While epidemiologists and health officials warn of a worsening crisis in the weeks ahead, Mr. Bolsonaro took aim at masks during his weekly address on Facebook Thursday. Citing an unspecified German study, the president said masks were bad for children and that wearing them could lead to headaches, difficulty concentrating and a “decreased perception of happiness.”

Mr. Bolsonaro has been criticized at home and abroad for his cavalier response to the coronavirus pandemic. He has questioned the use of quarantine measures, social distancing and has sowed doubts about vaccines, saying he does not intend to get a shot.

While new cases and deaths are dropping in a number of other countries that were hard hit by the pandemic, including the United States, Brazil is in the grip of a second wave that began in November and shows no sign of easing.

The country began vaccinating medical professionals and older people last month, but the campaign is off to a slow start because the government has struggled to procure enough doses to quickly inoculate its 212 million citizens.

This week, Brazil’s Covid death toll surpassed 250,000, which is second only to the U.S. count of more than 500,000 deaths. The Brazilian health minister, Eduardo Pazuello, said on Thursday that the country had entered a “new stage of the pandemic” as a result of variants that he said are three times more contagious than earlier strains of the virus. “That is the reality we’re living today in Brazil,” he said.

Credit…Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

For people who have had Covid-19, a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine is enough to provide robust protection from the coronavirus, according to two new studies from Britain that were published late Thursday in The Lancet, a prominent medical journal.

The studies, among the first fully vetted papers to weigh in on how to vaccinate people who have had Covid-19, added strong evidence to the case for inoculating people who already have antibodies against the virus — but only with one dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

One of the studies, led by researchers at University College London and Public Health England, described the benefits of that strategy.

“This could potentially accelerate vaccine rollout,” they said. And that in turn could forestall dangerous new mutations: “Wider coverage without compromising vaccine-induced immunity could help reduce variant emergence,” the paper said.

In recent weeks, several studies on the topic were posted online that were not yet published in scientific journals, showing that one dose of a coronavirus vaccine amplified people’s antibodies from an earlier infection.

People’s immune responses to being infected are highly variable: Most people make considerable and long-lasting antibodies, while others who had milder infections produce relatively few, making it difficult to know how protected they are from the virus.

Vaccines act as a sort of booster for those people’s immune responses, inducing enough antibodies to offer protection. But a single dose, rather than the full two-dose protocol, is enough for those who have been infected, a number of studies have suggested.

Some researchers in the United States are trying to persuade the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend giving only one dose to people who have recovered from Covid-19. The studies from Britain seem likely to put pressure on health officials there to consider the same approach.

More than 28 million people in the United States and four million people in Britain, along with many others whose illnesses were probably never diagnosed, have been infected so far.

One of the new studies — led by Charlotte Manisty, a professor at University College London, and Ashley D. Otter, a research scientist at Public Health England — tracked 51 health workers in London who have submitted to routine tests for antibodies and infection since March. That gave researchers an unusually detailed picture of any pre-existing protection from the virus.

Roughly half of the health workers had experienced a mild or asymptomatic infection. And a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine increased their antibody levels more than 140-fold from their peak levels before being inoculated, the study said. That appeared to give them better protection against the coronavirus than two doses of the vaccine did in people who had never been infected, the researchers wrote.

The study raised the idea of giving people blood tests in the weeks before they became eligible for a Pfizer vaccine to determine whether they already had antibodies. People’s immune responses to an infection are highly variable, making it difficult to predict without a blood test who can be fully protected with a single dose.

As a further benefit of the single-dose strategy, the researchers wrote that it would spare people who have already been infected from the unpleasant side effects that sometimes follow a booster shot in that group.

The second study, led by scientists at Imperial College London, measured the immune responses of 72 health workers who were vaccinated in late December. A third showed signs of having previously been infected.

For those people, one dose of the Pfizer vaccine stimulated “very strong” antibody responses, the study said, as well as “very strong T-cell responses,” referring to another arm of the immune system.

It is not clear how long the post-vaccine immune response will last in people who have previously been infected compared with those who have not.

Credit…Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The head of Canada’s largest pension fund stepped down on Thursday evening after news broke that he had flown to the United Arab Emirates to receive a coronavirus vaccine, despite federal rules banning inessential travel and a long line of older and immunocompromised citizens across the country waiting for their shots.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced in a news release on Friday that it had accepted the resignation of its chief executive, Mark Machin, who had “decided to travel personally to the United Arab Emirates where he arranged to be vaccinated against Covid-19.” The board added: “We take that responsibility of leadership very seriously.”

At about $375 billion, the fund is Canada’s largest, with more than 20 million contributors and beneficiaries.

Mr. Machin, who last year earned about $4.2 million at the helm of the crown corporation, is the latest public figure in the country to be publicly sanctioned for traveling abroad for personal reasons, while much of the country is hunkered down during the pandemic’s second wave.

His trip was perceived as not just selfish, but as queue-jumping by many Canadians, who have grown increasingly impatient with the sluggish rollout of vaccinations across the country. Less than 4 percent of the country’s 38 million people have received a dose — far fewer than most Western nations.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is an independent corporation, but the country’s finance minister appoints its directors. Through her spokeswoman, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, called Mr. Machin’s decision “very troubling” and said Canadians expect the organization to “be held to a higher standard.”

Mr. Machin’s trip was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday night. Soon after, he sent an internal memo to staff stating the trip was supposed to be “very private” and that he was disappointed it has become the focus of “expected criticism,” The Globe and Mail reported.

Credit…Cameron Pollack for The New York Times

Even as the overall number of coronavirus cases in South Carolina declines, the situation away from the state’s coastline has remained stubbornly dangerous, with some counties in the central and western parts of the state reporting some of the most dire case counts relative to their populations in the Southeast.

Those regions have kept the state’s case count from declining further, and over the last week, South Carolina has reported more cases per capita than any other state, as of Thursday.

The cases are staying high in a mix of small and large counties, including the metropolitan areas of Columbia, the state’s capital and second-largest city, and Spartanburg. Those two metro areas have reported more cases per capita over the last two weeks than all but three other metro areas in the United States, according to a New York Times database. And they are doing so even as cases in Charleston, the state’s largest city, have consistently fallen.

Gov. Henry McMaster cited the overall decline in U.S. cases on Friday in deciding to roll back several public health measures beginning next week. Starting Monday, there will no longer be an 11 p.m. curfew for alcohol sales at restaurants, and large gatherings can resume, though he encouraged people to voluntarily follow the guidelines that had been in place.

“With the spread of the virus consistently decreasing across the country and more of the most vulnerable South Carolinians being vaccinated every day, I believe these targeted and limited safety measures are no longer necessary,” Mr. McMaster said in a statement. “The virus is still among us and we all must continue to make responsible decisions to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, but those decisions are for South Carolinians to make.”

The move from Mr. McMaster came on the same day that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that the recent decline in cases may be stalling and said governors should keep public health measures in place. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions,” she said.

Brian Symmes, a spokesman for Mr. McMaster, said the governor “appreciates perspectives that differ from his own” but “respectfully disagrees” with Dr. Walensky’s assessment.

One day earlier, on Thursday, South Carolina’s top epidemiologist, Dr. Linda Bell, said in an interview with a local television station that while it was understandable that residents would be optimistic as vaccines rolled out, it was important for them to not forget that the situation was still severe in much of the state.

“We cannot say yet that we have passed the worst part of the pandemic,” Dr. Bell said on WIS-TV.

“I don’t want people to be too encouraged to the point that they stop doing the preventive measures, looking at the current decline in cases,” she added, “because we have declined to a level that has taken us to the height of cases that we were seeing after the Fourth of July, and I want to remind people that we were actually very alarmed.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting.

Credit…Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Colleges and universities across the country are pledging to reopen more fully in the fall, with some administrators worried that students won’t return to campus if normality, or some semblance of it, isn’t restored by September.

Schools from large state institutions to small private ones have announced they are laying plans to bring students back to dormitories, deploy professors to teach most (if not all) classes in person and restart extracurricular activities, in stark contrast to the past academic year of largely virtual courses and limited social contact. The announcements of these changes coincide with the sending of acceptance letters to the class of 2025.

Some schools have taken a financial hit because of deferred admissions or lost room-and-board fees.

Bradley University, in Peoria, Ill., which has 5,600 undergraduate and graduate students, said earlier this month that it would return to “traditional residential education” in the fall, with in-person classes and activities on campus.

Kansas State University announced on Wednesday that it too is planning a “more normal” fall semester, with largely in-person classes, events and activities. Ohio State announced on Thursday that it plans to offer “robust” in-person activities and classes, allowing students to live in residence halls and fans to attend football games.

Katherine Fleming, New York University’s provost, told colleagues in an email on Tuesday of plans to have “all faculty teaching their classes in-person, in the classroom, in the fall 2021.” She conceded, however, that this would depend in part on whether enough professors were vaccinated by then.

Indeed, most school officials said that whether they can deliver on these promises hinges on factors like how much the virus can be suppressed, the availability of the vaccine — which is still in scarce supply, even for those who are eligible — and guidance from government authorities.

Despite their hopefulness about the fall, schools have struggled with keeping the virus in check. Positivity rates rose among college students, as among the general population, over the holidays, when people traveled. Administrators have put out many stern warnings that small parties and gatherings have been a source of infection. Many have noted, however, that the classroom itself has not proven to be a vector of infection, as long as students and teachers follow safety guidelines like wearing masks and social distancing.

More than 120,000 coronavirus cases have been linked to American colleges and universities since Jan. 1, and more than 530,000 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times survey. The Times has identified more than 100 deaths, but the vast majority involved employees, not students.

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Biden Tours Texas Emergency Aid Centers After Winter Storms

President Biden spent the day in Houston touring a local food bank and other areas hit by recent snowstorms. Storm damage is expected to total $20 billion, according to the Insurance Council of Texas.

Mr. President, welcome. This is our emergency operations center, Harris County Emergency Operations Center. For me and these folks you see here, this has been our home away from home. Over fire, flood, Covid and now this winter weather event. These folks are the tip of the sphere. Thank you for What you are doing. All I did is I got a call and before you asked the question I just said yes. He did. He said yes before I even asked the question. Absolutely. It’s incredible. It’s an incredible place. They’re doing — and they have so many talented people here, not just volunteers, really talented people.

President Biden spent the day in Houston touring a local food bank and other areas hit by recent snowstorms. Storm damage is expected to total $20 billion, according to the Insurance Council of Texas.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

At an emergency response center in Houston, President Biden praised officials who’d slept in stairwells as they worked around the clock to answer the call of terrified residents who had no power or drinkable water when devastating snowstorms hit. At a food bank, Mr. Biden hugged a little girl who was volunteering. He then turned to a woman to discuss the death of his eldest son, plugging into the pain of people around him by accessing his own.

“Incredible,” Mr. Biden said as he surveyed what was happening around him. “It’s absolutely amazing, and we could do so much more.”

Infrastructure and coronavirus relief may be on the official agenda in Washington, but the overwhelming nature of grief was the unofficial theme of the week.

On Monday, Mr. Biden presided over a solemn observance of a grim pandemic milestone: more than 500,000 Americans dead. “While we have been fighting this pandemic for so long, we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow,” he said during a speech at that White House that evening.

And when he traveled to Houston with Jill Biden, the first lady, the president for the first time used his new platform to show support for a community ravaged by twin crises of devastating snowstorms and the pandemic.

“You’re saving people’s lives,” Mr. Biden told a group of officials at an emergency operations center. “As my mother would say, you’re doing God’s work.”

Across Texas, the damage from the storms is extensive and the recovery is expected to be slow. The damage is expected to cost upward of $20 billion, according to the Insurance Council of Texas. Coronavirus vaccinations had all but stalled because of the storm, but are beginning to rebound — Mr. Biden was expected to visit a mass-vaccination site at a nearby stadium later Friday.

As soon as Mr. Biden hit the ground, the tone of his visit was different from what victims of natural disasters encountered when his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, would visit. Mr. Trump more than once threatened to withhold disaster funding if he had toxic political relationships with officials in those places.

Mr. Biden, who has been pushing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, was joined by Republicans who praised him for approving a major disaster declaration for Texas, ensuring the flow of federal resources to some 126 counties across the state that were hit by the storms — about half the number requested by Gov. Greg Abbott, who joined Mr. Biden on the trip.

“The governor and Senator Cruz and I asked for a declaration from the federal government which provides access to public and private assistance through FEMA,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and another participant on the trip, referring to the state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz. “That’s going to be important for our recovery.”

Mr. Cruz did not participate. He was in Florida, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

In Harris County, where Houston is, about 50 percent of 4.9 million residents lost power as the storms hit. Nearly two weeks later, about 10,000 residents are still boiling their water, according to county officials. More than 50,000 across the state still do not have access to safe water, according to officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

During the visit to the food bank, Dr. Biden slipped cans of peaches into packages of food for students who rely on free school meals. Mr. Biden talked to children and told them about his own family.

It was a marked difference from Mr. Trump, who was criticized in 2018 for visiting a disaster relief center in Puerto Rico, only to throw paper towels at people who’d survived a Category 5 hurricane. “I was having fun,” Mr. Trump said afterward. “They were having fun.”

Tags Covid19, FDA, Green, Johnson, Johnsons, Light, Panel, Vaccine

World News

Covid-19 Information: Reside World Updates

Post author By
Post date February 24, 2021

President Biden touring a Pfizer manufacturing site on Friday in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The White House said on Tuesday that weekly shipments of coronavirus vaccines to the states would rise by one million doses to 14.5 million, as vaccine manufacturers continue to ramp up production.

The figure was provided to governors in a call with Jeffrey Zeints, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, on Tuesday. With tens of millions of eligible Americans waiting to get shots, state officials have been clamoring for more vaccine, saying health practitioners could easily double or triple the number of shots they are administering.

Ms. Psaki said the increase was the fifth boost in distribution in five weeks, and said it came just short of doubling the vaccine shipments underway at the time Mr. Biden took office on Jan. 20.

Before snowstorms disrupted vaccine distribution last week, the average number of daily doses administered across the country had been steadily increasing as the two federally approved vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna, get more efficient and expand production. While that acceleration was expected well before Mr. Biden assumed office, officials have been anxious to highlight every increase in shipments as evidence that the new administration is fiercely battling the pandemic. As of Tuesday, the seven-day average rate of doses administered across the country was 1.4 million a day, after peaking at about 1.7 million before the storms, according to a New York Times vaccine database.

Many vaccination appointments last week that were postponed by snowstorms and other disruptive weather are resuming this week. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti said vaccinations would start back up again on Tuesday at all of the city-run sites and indicated that people whose inoculations had been delayed by the weather would be given priority over those making new appointments.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday morning, top officials from Pfizer and Moderna reiterated previous supply commitments in front of lawmakers Both firms promised earlier this month to deliver a total of 400 million doses by the end of May, weeks ahead of schedule, and a total of 600 million by the end of July.

John Young, Pfizer’s chief business officer, testified that his firm will be able to ship more than 13 million doses per week by mid-March, compared to a weekly shipment of just four to five million at the start of this month. He cited a variety of reasons, including federal regulatory approval to count each vial as holding six doses instead of five, more efficient production processes and faster laboratory tests of the vaccine before it is shipped.

Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, testified that his company expects to double its current shipments to more than 10 million per week by April.

More supply is expected to come from Johnson & Johnson, but not as quickly as federal officials initially had hoped. Federal regulators are widely expected to grant emergency use authorization for that vaccine by early next week.

Dr. Richard Nettles, a company vice president testified that the firm is prepared to deliver 20 million doses of its vaccine by the end of March. Of that, he said, nearly four million doses could be shipped as soon as the Food and Drug Administration gives the firm the green light. Unlike the other two authorized vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s requires only one dose.

Dr. Nettles’s testimony was the first public indication by the company of how many doses it could supply before April.

His promise falls short of the 37 million doses that Johnson & Johnson’s federal contract called for it to deliver by the end of March. Asked what accounted for the gap, Dr. Nettles did not directly answer. But he implied that the company would catch up, saying the firm will deliver the entire 100 million doses it has promised by the end of June, as the contract requires.

Together with the deliveries from Moderna and Pfizer, which developed its vaccine with a German partner, BioNTech, the new supply from Johnson & Johnson would mean that the nation would have enough doses on hand by the end of next month to vaccinate about 130 million Americans. That would cover roughly half of all eligible adults and 40 percent of the total population.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 22	14-day change
New cases	59,462	–40%
New deaths	1,454	–28%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 22	14-day change
New cases	287,166	–19%
New deaths	6,753	–25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

From the beginning, Florida’s vaccination effort has focused almost exclusively on people 65 and older. The only other people eligible for shots in the state have been those with certain underlying medical conditions, health care workers and paramedics — and not any of the other kinds of essential workers that many states have begun to vaccinate.

Nor would Florida say when their turns would come. As of last week, Florida was the only state that had not released a priority order for making more categories of people eligible, according to the Kaiser Permanente Foundation.

That changed on Tuesday when Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said he wanted to add law enforcement officers and schoolteachers to the eligible pool if they are 50 or older. Mr. DeSantis said they could start getting vaccinated as soon as next week at mass vaccination sites that the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to open in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville.

“I think that we’re going to have the ability to do that, between the federally supported sites and some of the new vaccine that may be coming online very, very soon,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference in Hialeah, near Miami.

Other states have continued to expand their eligibility requirements for vaccines as they race to immunize as many vulnerable people as possible before more contagious variants become dominant. But vaccine supply has not yet caught up with the demand, even as weekly supplies will increase for states.

In California, 10 percent of the state’s first vaccine doses will be saved for teachers and school employees beginning on March 1. The state has already expanded access to residents with chronic health conditions and disabilities and has begun to vaccinate farmworkers, according to the Los Angeles Times. New York also expanded its vaccine eligibility requirements for people with chronic health conditions.

States have increasingly expanded eligibility to teachers, grocery workers, other essential workers and high-risk adults, according to a New York Times vaccine rollout tracker.

In Florida, the governor had initially resisted the Biden administration’s push for FEMA sites there. He changed his mind when he realized that they would bring tens of thousands of additional vaccine doses to the state.

Labor unions, workers and younger people in Florida have expressed frustration with the state government leaving them in the dark about which groups would be next to receive the vaccines. It remains unclear when people who are not police officers or teachers 50 and older could expect to get a shot. People younger than 65 with serious health conditions who are supposed to be eligible now have had trouble finding providers in the state who are willing to vaccinate them.

Florida has more than 4.4 million residents who are 65 or older; about 45 percent of them have received at least one dose of vaccine, Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday, though the rate varies considerably from county to county. His administration indicated last week that it hoped to reach 50 percent before widening eligibility.

Mr. DeSantis also announced that CVS Health was expanding Covid-19 vaccinations at more than 80 pharmacy locations in 13 Florida counties, including at Navarro Discount Pharmacy and CVS pharmacy y más, which cater to Latinos.

Jackson Health System, a nonprofit medical complex in Miami-Dade County, expanded its vaccine appointments Tuesday to residents 55 to 64 years old who have one of 13 medical conditions, including several types of cancer, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, end-stage renal disease, morbid obesity and more.

Last week, Mr. DeSantis faced criticism when he opened a pop-up vaccination site to people 65 and older in Lakewood Ranch, an affluent and mostly white community in Manatee County that was developed by a Republican political donor. The vaccinations there were limited to residents of the two wealthiest ZIP codes in the county at a time when Black communities lagged behind in vaccinations.

The Bradenton Herald, a local newspaper, reported that Vanessa Baugh, a county commissioner who helped organize the vaccination site, had created a V.I.P. list of vaccine recipients that included herself and the developer of Lakewood Ranch, Rex Jensen. The Herald also reported that the Manatee County sheriff is investigating whether Ms. Baugh broke state law.

Mr. DeSantis defended the pop-up site last week, saying, “If Manatee County does not like us doing this, we are totally fine with putting this in counties that want it.”

Later in the week, he opened another pop-up site in Pinellas Park, a largely white middle-income community near St. Petersburg.

Credit…Daniel Dreifuss for The New York Times

A variant first discovered in California in December is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus, two new studies have shown, fueling concerns that emerging mutants like this one could hamper the sharp decline in cases over all in the state and perhaps elsewhere.

In one of the new studies, researchers found that the variant has spread rapidly in a San Francisco neighborhood in the past couple of months. The other report confirmed that the variant has surged across the state, and revealed that it produces twice as many viral particles inside a person’s body as other variants do. That study also hinted that the variant may be better than others at evading the immune system — and vaccines.

“I wish I had better news to give you — that this variant is not significant at all,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But unfortunately, we just follow the science.”

Neither study has yet been published in a scientific journal. And experts don’t know how much of a public health threat this variant poses compared with others that are also spreading in California.

A variant called B.1.1.7 arrived in the United States from Britain, where it swiftly became the dominant form of the virus and overloaded hospitals there. Studies of British medical records suggest that B.1.1.7 is not only more transmissible, but more lethal than earlier variants.

Some experts said the new variant in California was concerning, but unlikely to create as much of a burden as B.1.1.7.

“I’m increasingly convinced that this one is transmitting more than others locally,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the research. “But there’s not evidence to suggest that it’s in the same ballpark as B.1.1.7.”

Dr. Chiu first stumbled across the new variant by accident. In December, he and other researchers in California were worried about the discovery of B.1.1.7 in Britain. They began looking through their samples from positive coronavirus tests in California, sequencing viral genomes to see if B.1.1.7 had arrived in their state.

On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Chiu was shocked to find a previously unknown variant that made up one-quarter of the samples he and his colleagues had collected. “I thought that was crazy,” he said.

It turned out that researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles separately discovered the same variant surging to high levels in Southern California. Dr. Chiu announced his initial finding, and the Cedars-Sinai team went public two days later.

Since then, researchers have been looking more closely at the new variant, known as B.1.427/B.1.429, to pinpoint its origin and track its spread. It has shown up in 45 states to date, and in several other countries, including Australia, Denmark, Mexico and Taiwan. But it has so far taken off only in California.

It was unclear at first whether the variant was inherently more transmissible than others, or whether it had surged in California because of gatherings that became superspreading events.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Federal regulators have informed Pfizer and BioNTech that they plan to approve the companies’ request to store their vaccine at standard freezer temperatures instead of in ultra-cold conditions, potentially expanding the number of sites that could administer shots, according to two people familiar with the companies who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce new guidance to providers as early as Tuesday, modifying documents related to the emergency use authorization that was previously granted for the vaccine, they said.

Pfizer and BioNTech, its German partner, said Friday that they had submitted new data to the F.D.A. showing their vaccine could be safely stored at -13 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit for up to two weeks. That could open up the possibility that smaller pharmacies and doctors’ offices could administer shots using their existing refrigerators or freezers.

Regulators had previously approved distribution only if the vaccine was stored in freezers that kept it between -112 and -76 degrees Fahrenheit. Pfizer ships its vials in specially designed containers that can be used as temporary storage for up to 30 days, then refilled with dry ice every five days. The vaccine can be refrigerated for up to five days in a standard refrigerator if it had not yet been diluted for use in patients.

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

New coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are on the downswing in the United States and around the world, but hot spots along the East Coast have been sticking around longer compared to the rest of the country.

In the current wave of regional outbreaks, eight states that border the Atlantic Ocean have seen upticks in the past few months and only recently have started to level off or decline.

South Carolina leads the nation with the highest rate of new virus cases, followed by New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Florida, Delaware and Georgia.

It has become a familiar pattern across the country — cases go up in one region, and down in another — a sequence driven in some part by weather. A few months ago, the Upper Midwest, where it starts to get cold in the fall, was outpacing other regions in new infections. And before that, cases in the Sunbelt surged.

“It’s whack-a-mole,” said Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University. “One part of the country sees a surge, and then another, and then it declines.”

In New York City on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he believed the city’s case numbers and positive test rates had not declined more dramatically because of population density, a legacy of poverty and a high number of New Yorkers without health care.

“There’s challenges for sure,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference. “But I feel very good about our ability to turn it around with intensive vaccination — if we can get supply.”

According to health data, the city’s seven-day average positive test rate was 7.3 percent on Sunday, the latest day for which data was available, down from a recent peak of 9.7 percent from Jan. 2-4. (New York State, which compiles testing data and calculates statistics differently from the city, most recently reported the city’s seven-day average at 4.49 percent, down from 6.4 percent on Jan. 4-7.)

New cases have declined to half their peak globally, largely because of steady improvements in some of the same places that endured devastating outbreaks this winter. The global decline has been driven by six countries, led by the United States, which still leads the world in the number of new cases a day, based on a seven-day average, followed by Brazil and France.

Public health experts in the worst-hit countries attribute the progress to some combination of increased adherence to social distancing and mask wearing, the seasonality of the virus and a buildup of natural immunity among groups with high rates of existing infection.

“It’s a great moment of optimism, but it’s also very fragile in a lot of ways,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a long tunnel.”

The emergence of new variants of the virus, however, has caused great concern, increasing the pressure to get people vaccinated as soon as possible. A variant first found in Britain is spreading rapidly in the United States, and it has been implicated in surges in Ireland, Portugal and Jordan. The variant first found in South Africa, which weakens the effectiveness of vaccines, has also surfaced in the United States.

Allison McCann, Lauren Leatherby and Josh Holder contributed reporting.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Credit…Russell Cheyne/Reuters

Scotland will emerge from its lockdown in three-week stages over the next few months, beginning with reopening schools, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Tuesday.

Scotland’s schools, which began reopening on Monday, will resume in-person instruction in phases through March, Ms. Sturgeon said, and stay-at-home orders would begin to be relaxed on April 5, allowing communal worship and some businesses to reopen. Most businesses and activities would be allowed to resume after April 26, Ms. Sturgeon said.

About one-third of adults in Scotland have received at least the first dose of a Covid vaccine. The progress with vaccinations and the early data suggesting that vaccination significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization were “extremely welcome and encouraging news,” Ms. Sturgeon told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Much of Scotland has been locked down since early January because of the rapid spread of a new variant of the virus. The variant now accounts for more than 85 percent of new cases in Scotland, Ms. Sturgeon said on Tuesday. The country reported 655 new cases on Monday and 56 deaths from Covid-19.

The first studies of Britain’s mass inoculation program indicate that a single dose of either the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine averts most coronavirus-related hospitalizations, researchers said on Monday, though they said it was too early to give precise estimates of the effect. Scotland is aiming to offer every adult a first dose of vaccine by the end of July.

Ms. Sturgeon said the timeline for relaxing restrictions would be contingent on data showing that the virus was being kept at bay. To that end, she said, contact tracing was vital, and travel restrictions would probably remain in force for some time. “Maximum suppression is important for our chances of getting back to normal,” she said.

“I know how hard all of this continues to be after 11 long months of this pandemic,” Ms. Sturgeon said, but “I think that we can be much more hopeful today than we have been able to be this entire pandemic.”

On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a long-awaited plan for completely lifting restrictions in England by June 21. His plan also begins with schools, and would keep pubs and most other businesses shut for at least another month.

Ms. Sturgeon’s plan for Scotland is more limited in scope, at least so far; she said more details would be released in March.

Here’s what else is going on around the world:

Galicia, in northwestern Spain, on Tuesday became the country’s first region to approve fines for people who refuse to get vaccinated against Covid-19. The law, which was approved in Galicia’s regional parliament, sets fines of as much as 60,000 euros, or nearly $73,000, if a person’s decision to refuse vaccination is deemed to result in “a very serious risk or harm for the health of the population.” The law was approved by lawmakers of the conservative Popular Party, which governs Galicia, but fiercely criticized by opposition politicians as an attack on individual choice. The central government of Spain, which is led by the Socialist Party, also opposed the Galician law.

Ukraine said it had obtained its first vaccine supply on Tuesday, buying 500,000 doses of an Oxford-AstraZeneca version made in India. Ukraine, which has been reporting more than 5,000 cases a day, said the doses were earmarked for front-line medical workers. “We are grateful to our Indian partners,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote on Twitter after the delivery on Tuesday.
In Japan, the pressures of the pandemic have been compounded for women. Many have lost their jobs, others live alone and some women have faced disparities in housework and child care. The rising psychological and physical toll of the pandemic has been accompanied by a worrisome spike in suicide among women. In Japan, 6,976 women died by suicide last year, nearly 15 percent more than in 2019. It was the first year-over-year increase in more than a decade.
Sixteen lawmakers in Lebanon received a vaccine inside the parliament building, violating regulations aimed at keeping the process fair and transparent and sparking controversy about jumping the vaccine line. On Tuesday, Adnan Daher, the parliamentary secretary, confirmed to reporters that 16 lawmakers had received shots. He said the lawmakers were all of the proper age and their turn to be vaccinated had come. But according to lists compiled by local news outlets, about half were younger than 75.
Lab monkeys, whose DNA resembles that of humans, are a tool for developing Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals. The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain.

Credit…John Minchillo/Associated Press

A recent sampling of coronavirus cases in New York City found that the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant first found in Britain made up about 6.2 percent of new cases earlier in February.

The 6.2 percent estimate, released Tuesday by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, offers the best sketch yet of the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant in New York City since the first city case was detected last month.

The B.1.1.7 variant has clearly taken hold in New York City. But so far it is not spreading as fast as some disease modelers predicted.

“It certainly is not in a dizzying ascent, or taking over,” said Dr. Ronald Scott Braithwaite, a professor at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine who has been modeling New York City’s epidemic and is an adviser to the city. “Six percent is a ways away from becoming a majority strain.”

One study found that nationwide B.1.1.7 cases are doubling about every 10 days and the Centers for Disease Control has predicted the B.1.1.7 variant could become the dominant source of infection across the country in March.

The variant was first identified in Britain late last year and has caused a surge of cases in a number of countries. But its trajectory in New York is far from clear.

Across the city, the number of new coronavirus cases has been slowly declining since early January, although more than 20,000 new cases are still being detected weekly. The test positivity rate remains over 7 percent.

Until recently Professor Braithwaite’s modeling team had predicted that unless the current pace of vaccinations accelerated, the B.1.1.7 variant could lead to a third wave of cases in New York City and a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. The variant is more contagious and it is also likely deadlier.

But his model, which is watched by New York City health officials, now predicts that as B.1.1.7 becomes a larger share of infections it will cause a plateau in new cases, before cases continue their slow decline.

Dr. Braithwaite said he was more worried about the B.1.351 variant, first detected in South Africa, which has been found in New York State. Existing vaccines are not as effective against that variant.

Over the last month, New York City has taken steps to sequence and screen more and more coronavirus samples to detect variants. But surveillance remains spotty.

The 6.2 percent estimate comes from a recent sample of 724 cases, of which 45 were found to be caused by the B.1.1.7 variant. The sample was conducted at the Pandemic Response Laboratory in New York City, which does about 20,000 coronavirus tests daily. The laboratory has begun doing genomic sequencing of some of the positive cases.

An earlier sample of cases from January found that under 3 percent of cases were B.1.1.7. In the first week of February, there was a major jump to 7.4 percent. But in the most recent sample involving cases sequenced between Feb. 8 and Feb. 14, the percentage dropped to 6.2, according to the Health Department.

Credit…Oded Balilty/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — The Israeli government promised to send thousands of extra Covid-19 vaccines to friendly nations like the Czech Republic and Honduras, but critics have rekindled a debate about Israel’s responsibilities to vaccinate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

On Tuesday, the governments of the Czech Republic and Honduras confirmed that Israel had promised them each 5,000 vaccine doses manufactured by Moderna. The Israeli news media reported that Hungary and Guatemala would be sent a similar number, but the Hungarian and Israeli governments declined to comment, while the Guatemalan government did not respond to a request for comment.

The donations are the latest example of a new expression of soft power: vaccine diplomacy, in which countries rich in vaccines seek to reward or sway those that have little access to them.

Jockeying for influence in Asia, China and India have donated thousands of vaccine doses to their neighbors. The United Arab Emirates has done the same for allies like Egypt. And last week, Israel even promised to buy tens of thousands of doses on behalf of the Syrian government, a longtime foe, in exchange for the return of an Israeli civilian detained in Syria.

The vaccines allocated on Tuesday were given without conditions, but they tacitly reward recent gestures from the receiving countries that implicitly accept Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians consider their capital.

Israel has given at least one shot of the two-dose, Pfizer-manufactured vaccine to just over half its own population of nine million — including to people living in Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories — making it the world leader in vaccine rollouts. That has left the Israeli government able to bolster its international relationships with its surplus supply of Moderna vaccines.

But the move has angered Palestinians because it suggests that Israel’s allies are of greater priority than the Palestinians living under Israeli control in the occupied territories, almost all of whom have yet to receive a vaccine.

Israel has pledged at least twice as many doses to faraway countries as it has so far promised to the nearly five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Credit…Apu Gomes/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed a $7.6 billion stimulus package that will send $600 payments to about 5.7 million low-income Californians.

The relief package was “desperately needed to millions and millions of Californians,” Mr. Newsom said at a news conference on Tuesday.

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers are pressing forward with a much larger $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. The House is preparing for a final vote on the measure by the end of the week, as Democrats race to get it to President Biden’s desk before unemployment benefits begin to lapse in mid-March.

The California stimulus package provides $2.1 billion in funding for grants to small businesses struggling during the pandemic. It also includes fee waivers for bars, restaurants, barbershops and other hard-hit businesses.

The legislation comes as Mr. Newsom is facing blowback from small business owners angered over the state’s lockdowns. An effort to recall Mr. Newsom is gaining steam: since March, 1.5 million Californians have signed a petition to oust him.

“The backbone of our economy is small business. We recognize the stress, the strain that so many small businesses have been under and we recognize as well our responsibility to do more,” Mr. Newsom said on Tuesday.

In November, Mr. Newsom announced that the state would provide temporary tax relief and $500 million in grants for businesses impacted by the pandemic.

Although reported coronavirus cases in California have steadily declined in past weeks, a new variant spreading in the state could pose a fresh threat. Two new studies show that a variant first found in California is more contagious than earlier forms of the virus. Scientists have warned that new variants could set back the nation, even as new cases and hospitalizations drop.

Credit…Al Bello/Getty Images

Some Covid-19 vaccine doses administered on Feb. 15 at a drive-through inoculation site on Long Island were deemed ineffective and patients who received them must be revaccinated, New York State officials said on Tuesday.

The doses were made ineffective when a staff member, who was taking syringes to the site, saw that the temperature of one cooler was approaching a level that could be too low for the shots, said Jack Sterne, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office. The staff member then added a hand warmer to it, against protocol, to try to raise the temperature, as Newsday first reported.

Only 81 of the 1,379 vaccines administered that day were affected — and more than 3 million have been doled out across the state without similar issues, Mr. Sterne said.

Still, in response, Mr. Sterne said that officials would increase staff training around the handling of vaccines.

Those who received the ineffective doses faced no health risks, have all been notified and will receive priority for rescheduled appointments, Jill Montag, a spokeswoman for the state’s health department, added.

“New Yorkers’ health and safety is our top priority, and due to this vaccine’s very specific temperature sensitivity, we have a process in place to identify if any temperature excursions occur,” Ms. Montag said in a statement. “This process worked, allowing us to quickly pinpoint this issue, identify the extremely small number of individuals impacted, and immediately begin taking action.”

Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

The enormous scale of illness and death wrought by the coronavirus is traced in figures that have grown so far beyond the familiar yardsticks of daily life that they can sometimes be difficult to get a handle on.

The news on Monday that the United States had recorded 500,000 Covid-19-related deaths in just a year is just the latest example.

One way to put that in context is to compare it to other major causes of death in 2019, the year before the pandemic took hold in the country.

500,000 deaths is …

Three times the number of people who died in the U.S. in any kind of accident, including highway accidents, in 2019 (167,127).
More than eight times the number of deaths from influenza and pneumonia (59,120).
More than 10 times the number of suicides (48,344).
More than the number of deaths from strokes, diabetes, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and related causes, combined (406,161).
Only heart disease (655,381) and cancer (599,274) caused more deaths.

When full data for 2020 is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Covid-19 will certainly be one of the leading killers. But trying to project where it will rank may be complicated. A very large share of deaths from Covid-19 have been people who were medically vulnerable because of other significant health problems like cancer, lung or heart disease. Some number of them would probably have succumbed to those causes, and been counted in those categories, if their deaths had not been hastened by Covid-19.

Credit…Sarah Silbiger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Biden’s nominee for health secretary, Xavier Becerra, pledged Tuesday morning to work to “restore faith in public health institutions” and to “look to find common cause” with his critics, as Republicans sought to paint him as a liberal extremist who is unqualified for the job.

Appearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Mr. Becerra, the attorney general of California, was grilled by Republicans who complained that he has no background in the health profession, and who targeted his support for the Affordable Care Act and for abortion rights.

“Basically, you’ve been against pro-life, on the record,” Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, said to Mr. Becerra. He asked whether Mr. Becerra would commit to not using taxpayer money for abortions, which is currently barred by federal law, except in instances where the life of the mother is at stake, or in incest or rape.

“I will commit to following the law,” Mr. Becerra replied — leaving himself some wiggle room should the law change.

Tuesday’s appearance was the first of two Senate confirmation hearings for Mr. Becerra; he is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Despite the tough questions, Mr. Becerra appears headed for confirmation in a Senate evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but with Vice President Kamala Harris available to break a tie.

If confirmed, Mr. Becerra will immediately face a daunting task in leading the department at a critical moment, during a pandemic that has claimed half a million lives and has taken a particularly devastating toll on people of color. He would be the first Latino to serve as secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

While Mr. Becerra, a former member of Congress, lacks direct experience as a health professional, he took a deep interest in health policy while in Washington and helped write the Affordable Care Act. He has more recently been at the forefront of legal efforts to defend it, leading 20 states and the District of Columbia in a campaign to protect the act from being dismantled by Republicans.

Republicans and their allies in the conservative and anti-abortion movements have seized on Mr. Becerra’s defense of the A.C.A. as well as his support for abortion rights.

The Conservative Action Project, an advocacy group, issued a statement on Monday signed by dozens of conservative leaders, including several former members of Congress, complaining that Mr. Becerra had a “troubling record” with respect to “policies relating to the sanctity of life, human dignity and religious liberty.”

They cited in particular his vote against banning “late-term abortion,” and accused him of using his role as attorney general “to tip the scales in favor of Planned Parenthood,” a group that advocates abortion rights. Asked by Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, about the late-term abortion vote, Mr. Becerra noted that his wife is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and said he would “work to find common ground” on the issue. Mr. Romney was not impressed. “It sounds like we’re not going to reach common ground there,” he replied.

Democrats are emphasizing Mr. Becerra’s experience leading one of the nation’s largest justice departments through an especially trying period, and his up-from-the-bootstraps biography. A son of immigrants from Mexico, he attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and for law school. He served 12 terms in Congress, representing Los Angeles, before becoming the attorney general of his home state in 2017.

Credit…Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

The world needs monkeys, whose DNA closely resembles that of humans, to develop Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals.

The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain.

As new variants of the coronavirus threaten to make the current batch of vaccines obsolete, scientists are racing to find new sources of monkeys, and the United States is reassessing its reliance on China, a rival with its own biotech ambitions.

The pandemic has underscored how much China controls the supply of lifesaving goods, including masks and drugs, that the United States needs in a crisis.

American scientists have searched private and government-funded facilities in Southeast Asia as well as Mauritius, a tiny island nation off southeast Africa, for stocks of their preferred test subjects, rhesus macaques and cynomolgus macaques, also known as long-tailed macaques.

But no country can make up for what China previously supplied. Before the pandemic, China provided over 60 percent of the 33,818 primates, mostly cynomolgus macaques, imported into the United States in 2019, according to analyst estimates based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The United States has about 22,000 lab monkeys — predominantly pink-faced rhesus macaques — at its seven primate centers. About 600 to 800 of those animals have been subject to coronavirus research since the pandemic began.

Scientists say monkeys are the ideal specimens for researching coronavirus vaccines before they are tested on humans. The primates share more than 90 percent of our DNA, and their similar biology means they can be tested with nasal swabs and have their lungs scanned. Scientists say it is almost impossible to find a substitute to test Covid-19 vaccines in, although drugs such as dexamethasone, the steroid that was used to treat former President Donald J. Trump, have been tested in hamsters.

The United States once relied on India to supply rhesus macaques. But in 1978, India halted its exports after Indian news outlets reported that the monkeys were being used in military testing in the United States. Pharmaceutical companies searched for an alternative, and eventually landed on China.

But the pandemic upset what had been a decades-long relationship between American scientists and Chinese suppliers.

Credit…Daniel Dreifuss for The New York Times

Over the past year, hospital intensive care units have been overrun with critically ill Covid-19 patients, who develop severe pneumonia and other organ dysfunction. At times, the influx of coronavirus cases overwhelmed the resources in the units and the complexity of the care these patients required.

An interactive graphic by The New York Times explores how coronavirus surges affected I.C.U.s and their specialty medical staff.

New cases in the United States have fallen since their peak in early January, but almost three-quarters of the nation’s I.C.U. beds were occupied over the week ending Feb. 18.

The national average for adult I.C.U. occupancy was 67 percent in 2010, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though this number and all hospitalization figures vary depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.

When the coronavirus rips through a community, I.C.U.s fill up. Hospitals have been forced to improvise, expanding capacity by creating I.C.U.s in areas normally used for other purposes, like cardiac or neurological care, and even hallways or spare rooms.

Elective surgeries often get put on hold to keep beds available, and early in the pandemic, hospitals saw huge drops in people admitted for any reason other than Covid-19. I.C.U. staff members, regardless of specialty, often spent most or all of their time on Covid patients.

“We’re all exhausted,” said Dr. Nida Qadir, the co-director of the medical intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. “We’ve had to flex up quite a bit.”

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Covid-19 World Information: Dwell Updates on Variants, Instances and Deaths

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Post date February 22, 2021

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Boris Johnson Maps Out Plan to Lift Virus Lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain outlined a plan to remove lockdown measures as a path toward “freedom” for the region.

We cannot escape the fact that lifting lockdown will result in more cases, more hospitalizations and sadly, more deaths, and this would happen whenever lockdown is lifted, whether now or in six or nine months, because there will always be some vulnerable people who are not protected by the vaccines. This roadmap should be cautious, but also irreversible. We’re setting out on what I hope and believe is a one-way road to freedom, and this journey is made possible by the pace of the vaccination program. In England, everyone in the top four priority groups were successfully offered a vaccine by the middle of February. The sequence will be driven by the evidence. So outdoor activity will be prioritized as the best way to restore freedoms while minimizing the risk. At every stage, our decisions will be led by data, not dates.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain outlined a plan to remove lockdown measures as a path toward “freedom” for the region.CreditCredit…Pool photo by Geoff Caddick

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said Monday that schools in England would reopen on March 8 and that people would be allowed to socialize outdoors starting on March 29, the tentative first steps in a long-awaited plan to ease a nationwide lockdown prompted by a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus.

Mr. Johnson’s “road map” was intended to give an exhausted country a path back to normalcy after a dire period in which infections skyrocketed and hospitals overflowed with patients. At the same time, Britain rolled out a remarkably successful vaccination program, injecting 17 million people with their first doses.

That milestone, combined with a decline in new cases and hospital admissions, paved the way for Mr. Johnson’s announcement. But the prime minister emphasized repeatedly that he planned to move slowly in reopening the economy, saying that he wanted this lockdown to be the last the nation had to endure.

Under the government’s plan, pubs, restaurants, retail shops, and gyms in England will stay closed for at least another month — meaning that, as a practical matter, daily life will not change much for millions of people until the spring.

“We’re setting out on what I hope is a one-way journey to freedom,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement to the House of Commons. “This journey is made possible by the success of the vaccine program.”

The specific timetable, Mr. Johnson said, will hinge on four factors: the continued success of the vaccine rollout; evidence that vaccines are reducing hospital admissions and deaths; no new surge in cases that would tax the health service; and no sudden risk from new variants of the virus.

“At every stage,” the prime minister said, “our decisions will led by data, not dates.”

Mr. Johnson was scheduled to present the plan to the nation in an evening news conference, along with data that he said showed that the two main vaccines — from Pfizer and AstraZeneca — both reduced severe illness.

Mr. Johnson’s appearance in Parliament ended days of speculation about the government’s timetable. But it is likely to kindle a new round of debate about whether Mr. Johnson is easing restrictions fast enough.

With pubs and restaurants not allowed to offer indoor service until May, some members of Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party are likely to revive their pressure campaign to lift the measures more quickly.

Mr. Johnson, however, appears determined to avoid a repeat of his messy reopening of the economy last May after the first phase of the pandemic.

Then, the government’s message was muddled — workers were urged to go back to their offices but avoid using public transportation — and some initiatives, like subsidizing restaurant meals to bolster the hospitality industry, looked reckless in hindsight.

Under Mr. Johnson’s plan, the current coronavirus restrictions would be lifted in four steps, with a gap of five weeks between steps. That way, the government would have four weeks to analyze the impact of each relaxation and another week’s notice of the changes to the public and businesses.

All the moves would be made throughout England, with no return to the regional differences in rules that applied last year, depending on local infection rates. The government warned that the dates specified are the earliest at which the restrictions would be lifted, and that the steps may happen later.

When students go back to school, they will be regularly tested for the virus while older pupils will be required to wear face masks. Those living in nursing homes will be allowed one regular visitor, but few other restrictions will be lifted.

Starting on March 29, up to six people would be allowed to meet outdoors, including in gardens. Outdoor sports will be permitted and though people will be urged to stay in their areas, they will not be urged to remain in their homes.

Then, no earlier than April 12, retail shops will reopen, along with hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, museums, and libraries, while people will be able to eat and drink outside in pub and restaurant gardens in small groups.

Starting on May 17, up to six people, and groups drawn from two households, will be able to meet indoors, including in pubs and restaurants. Hotels will also be able to reopen and spectators will be allowed into sporting events in limited numbers.

Restrictions on foreign travel could also be eased, though that will be addressed by one of several policy reviews being launched by the government. These will also focus on the possible use of vaccine passports to help open up the economy, and on guidance and rules on social distancing measures such as the use of face masks.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 21	14-day change
New cases	55,195	–44%
New deaths	1,247	–32%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 21	14-day change
New cases	292,003	–20%
New deaths	5,729	–25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Movie theaters in New York City will be permitted to open for the first time in nearly a year on March 5, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced at a news conference on Monday.

The theaters will only be permitted to operate at 25 percent of their maximum capacity, with no more than 50 people per screening. Masks will be mandatory, and theaters must assign seating to patrons to guarantee proper social distancing. Tests for the virus will not be required.

Movie theaters were permitted to open with similar limits in the rest of the state in late October, but New York City was excluded out of concern that the city’s density would hasten the spread of the virus there.

The virus has battered the movie theater industry. In October, the owner of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in the United States, temporarily closed its theaters as Hollywood studios kept postponing releases and cautious audiences were hesitant to return to screenings. AMC, the world’s largest movie theater chain, has increasingly edged toward bankruptcy.

The economic effects of the pandemic have been particularly felt in New York City, one of the biggest movie markets in the United States. Theaters in the city closed in mid-March, as the region was becoming an epicenter of the pandemic in the country.

While other indoor businesses, including restaurants, bowling alleys and museums had been allowed to open in the city, Mr. Cuomo had kept movie theaters closed out of concern that people would be sitting indoors in poorly-ventilated theaters for hours, risking the further spread of the virus.

Theaters that open will be required to have enhanced air filtration systems. Public health experts say when considering indoor gatherings, the quality of ventilation is key because the virus is known to spread more easily indoors.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement was applauded by the National Association of Theater Owners.

“New York City is a major market for moviegoing in the U.S.; reopening there gives confidence to film distributors in setting and holding their theatrical release dates, and is an important step in the recovery of the entire industry,” the association said in a statement.

The move came just days after Mr. Cuomo said that indoor family entertainment centers and places of amusement could reopen statewide, at 25 percent maximum capacity, on March 26. Outdoor amusement parks will be allowed to open with a 33 percent capacity limit in April.

The governor also said that the state was working on guidelines to allow pool and billiards halls to reopen after the state lost a lawsuit from pool hall operators. Those establishments will be allowed to reopen at 50 percent capacity with masks required, he said.

Cases in New York remain high despite climbing down from its January peak. Over the last seven days, the state averaged 38 cases per 100,000 residents each day, as of Sunday. That is the second-highest rate per capita of new cases in the last week in the country, after South Carolina.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

The Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that vaccine developers would not need to conduct lengthy randomized controlled trials to evaluate vaccines that have been adapted to target concerning coronavirus variants.

The recommendations, which call for small trials more like what’s required for annual flu vaccines, would greatly accelerate the review process at a time when scientists are increasingly anxious about how the variants might slow or reverse progress made against the virus.

The guidance was part of a slate of new documents the agency released on Monday, including others addressing how antibody treatments and diagnostic tests might need to be retooled to respond to the virus variants. Together, they amounted to the federal government’s most detailed acknowledgment of the threat the variants pose to existing vaccines, treatments and tests for the coronavirus and come weeks after the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said the agency was developing a plan.

“We want the American public to know that we are using every tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic, including pivoting as the virus adapts,” Dr. Woodcock said in a statement Monday.

Most of the vaccine manufacturers with authorized vaccines or candidates in late-stage trials have already announced plans to adjust their products to address the vaccine variants. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines use mRNA technology that the companies have said can be used to alter the existing vaccines within six weeks, although testing and manufacturing would take longer.

Moderna has already begun developing a new version of its vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against a virus variant that originated in South Africa, known as B.1.351, which seems to dampen the effectiveness of the existing vaccines.

A fast-spreading coronavirus variant first observed in Britain has also gained a worrisome mutation that could make it harder to control with vaccines. That variant with the mutation was found in the United States last week.

Still, the guidance did not appear to be written with the assumption that new vaccines were imminent, or would be needed at all. Despite the recent indications that some variants — and particularly B.1.351 — make the currently authorized vaccines less effective, the shots still offer protection and appear to greatly reduce the severity of the disease, preventing hospitalizations and death.

An updated Covid-19 vaccine can skip the monthslong process of a randomized clinical trial that would compare it with a placebo, the agency said. But a tweaked vaccine will still need to go undergo some testing. In trials proposed by the F.D.A., researchers will draw blood from a relatively small group of volunteers who have been given the adapted vaccine. Scientists will then observe what percentage of volunteers’ samples produce an immune response to the variants in the lab, and how large that response is. The vaccines will be judged acceptable if they produce an immune response that is relatively close to what is prompted by the original vaccines.

The volunteers will also be monitored carefully for side effects. The agency said the testing can be done in a single age group and then extrapolated to other age groups.

The guidance also encouraged the use of animal studies to support the case for modified vaccines, in case immune response studies come up with ambiguous conclusions.

The F.D.A. acknowledged that many questions remain unanswered, such as what type of data would trigger the need for an adapted vaccine and who would make that decision. The agency also noted that scientists have not yet determined what level of antibodies in a vaccinated person’s blood would protect someone from the virus.

Some other vaccines are regularly updated in a similar way. Because the influenza virus evolves rapidly from one year to the next, vaccine developers have to come up with new recipes annually.

The newly tweaked Covid-19 vaccines would be authorized under an amendment to the emergency authorization granted to the original vaccine, regulators said.

Credit…David Goldman/Associated Press

The number of Americans hospitalized for Covid-19 is at its lowest since early November, just before the surge that went on to ravage the country for months.

There were 56,159 people hospitalized as of Feb. 21, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That’s the lowest since Nov. 7. It’s a striking decline for a nation that is approaching 500,000 total deaths and once had some of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots.

On Monday evening, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to have a moment of silence for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from Covid-19.

While deaths remain high, because it can take weeks for patients to die from Covid-19, the number of U.S. hospitalizations has steadily and rapidly declined since mid-January, when the seven-day average reached about 130,000, according to a New York Times database. Experts attributed that peak to crowds gathering indoors in colder weather, especially during the holidays, when more people traveled than at any other time during the pandemic.

Experts have pointed to a variety of explanations for why the country’s coronavirus metrics have been improving over the past few months: more widespread mask use and social distancing after people saw friends and relatives die, better knowledge about which restrictions work, more effective public health messaging, and, more recently, a growing number of people who have been vaccinated. The most vulnerable, like residents of nursing homes and other elderly people, were among the first to receive the vaccine.

While scientists hope the worst is behind us, some warn of another spike in cases in the coming weeks, or a “fourth wave,” if people become complacent about masks and distancing, states lift restrictions too quickly or the more contagious variants become dominant and are able to evade vaccines.

The change can be felt most tangibly in intensive care units: Heading into her night shift in the I.C.U. at Presbyterian Rust Medical Center in Rio Rancho, N.M., Dr. Denise A. Gonzales, the medical director, said she had seen a difference in her staff.

“People are smiling. They are optimistic,” she said. “They’re making plans for the future.” During the worst of the crisis, “working in such a highly intense environment where people are so sick and are on so much support and knowing that statistically very few are going to get better — that’s overwhelming.”

Though the winter wave that hit her hospital system was “twice as bad” as the summer surge, she said it seemed more manageable because hospitals had prepared to move patients around, staff had more knowledge about P.P.E. and treatment therapies, and facilities had better airflow.

At the CoxHealth hospital system in Springfield, Mo., there was a “moment of celebration” as staff emptied the emergency Covid-19 I.C.U. wing built last spring. “We have not defeated this disease,” said Steve Edwards, the system’s chief executive. “But the closing of this unit, at least for now, is a tremendous symbolic victory.”

Staff members wearing biohazard suits and heavy-duty masks were pictured in a rare occasion of relief and joy that Mr. Edwards shared on Twitter.

This is a moment of celebration as we vacated the emergency Covid ICU. Our number of Covid patients at Cox South has dropped to 43, and only 5 critical. We are mindful of future worries, but for now, HERE COMES THE SUN! pic.twitter.com/57t2TvWweB

— Steve Edwards (@SDECoxHealth) February 18, 2021

Dr. Kyan C. Safavi, the medical director of a group that tracks Covid-19 hospitalizations at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said the number of newly admitted patients has dropped sharply. The hospital is admitting about 10 to 15 new patients daily, a decline of about 50 percent from early January, Dr. Safavi said.

“Everybody’s physically exhausted — and probably a little bit mentally exhausted — but incredibly hopeful,” Dr. Safavi said.

Credit…Pool Photo by Jane Barlow, via AFP–Getty Images

The first studies of Britain’s mass inoculation program showed strong evidence on Monday that the coronavirus vaccines were working as intended, offering among the clearest signs yet that the vaccines slash the rate of Covid-19 hospital admissions and may be reducing transmission of the virus.

A single dose of either the AstraZeneca vaccine or the one made by Pfizer could avert most coronavirus-related hospitalizations, the British studies found, though researchers said it was too early to give precise estimates of the effect.

The findings on the AstraZeneca shot, the first to emerge outside of clinical trials, represented the strongest signal yet of the effectiveness of a vaccine that much of the world is relying on to end the pandemic.

And separate studies of the Pfizer vaccine offered tantalizing new evidence that a single shot may be reducing the spread of the virus, showing that it prevents not only symptomatic cases of Covid-19 but also asymptomatic infections.

The findings reinforced and went beyond studies out of Israel, which has also reported that the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech offered significant protection from the virus in real-world settings, and not only in the clinical trials held last year. No other large nation is inoculating people as quickly as Britain, and it was the first country in the world to authorize and begin using both the Pfizer shot and the one developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

The studies released on Monday — two on the Pfizer shot and one on it and the AstraZeneca injection — showed both vaccines were effective against the more infectious coronavirus variant that has taken hold in Britain and spread around the world.

“Both of these are working spectacularly well,” said Aziz Sheikh, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who helped run a study of Scottish vaccinations.

Still, the findings contained some cautionary signs. And even as British lawmakers cited the strength of the vaccines in announcing a gradual loosening of lockdown restrictions, government scientists warned that many more people needed to be injected to prevent cases from spreading into vulnerable, vaccinated groups and occasionally causing serious disease and death.

Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

The U.S. economy remains mired in a pandemic winter of shuttered storefronts, high unemployment and sluggish job growth. But attention is shifting to a potential post-Covid boom.

Forecasters have always expected the pandemic to be followed by a period of strong growth as businesses reopen and Americans resume their normal activities. But in recent weeks, economists have begun to talk of something stronger: a supercharged rebound that brings down unemployment, drives up wages and may foster years of stronger growth.

There are hints that the economy has turned a corner: Retail sales jumped last month as the latest round of government aid began showing up in consumers’ bank accounts. New unemployment claims have declined from early January, though they remain high. And measures of business investment have picked up.

Economists surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this month predicted that U.S. output would increase 4.5 percent this year, which would make it the best year since 1999. Some expect an even stronger bounce: Economists at Goldman Sachs forecast that the economy would grow 6.8 percent this year and that the unemployment rate would drop to 4.1 percent by December, a level that took eight years to achieve after the last recession.

“We’re extremely likely to get a very high growth rate,” said Jan Hatzius, Goldman’s chief economist. “Whether it’s a boom or not, I do think it’s a V-shaped recovery,” he added, referring to a steep drop followed by a sharp rebound.

The growing optimism stems from several factors. Coronavirus cases are falling in the United States. The vaccine rollout is gaining steam. And largely because of trillions of dollars in federal help, the economy appears to have made it through last year with less structural damage than many people feared last spring.

Consumers are also sitting on a trillion-dollar mountain of cash, a result of months of lockdown-induced saving and rounds of stimulus payments.

“There will be this big boom as pent-up demand comes through and the economy is opening,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley. “There is an awful lot of buying power that we’ve transferred to households to fuel that pent-up demand.”

Even if there is a strong rebound, however, economists warn that not everyone will benefit.

Standard economic statistics like the unemployment rate and gross domestic product could mask persistent challenges facing many families, particularly the Black and Hispanic workers who have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s economic pain. That could lead Congress to pull back on aid when it is still needed.

Credit…Mike Stobe/Getty Images

New Jersey, home to several major league sports teams, will allow a limited number of fans to attend sports and entertainment events at venues with 5,000 or more seats as soon as next week, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Monday.

Indoor venues will be limited to 10 percent of their seating capacity, while outdoor venues will be limited to 15 percent capacity, Mr. Murphy said in a radio interview on WFAN. The events can begin next Monday at 6 a.m.

Mr. Murphy’s announcement comes two weeks after a similar decision by New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, whose plan allowed fans at venues with 10,000 or more seats starting this week, provided that seating is limited to 10 percent of the venue’s capacity.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement covered several New York City-area sports franchises, like the Nets, Knicks, Rangers and Islanders, which can begin to have fans in the stands as soon as Tuesday. Attendees in New York have to show proof of a negative P.C.R. test for the coronavirus taken within 72 hours of the event.

Mr. Murphy said that New Jersey would not require test results, but people at the venues will be required to wear face coverings at games and remain socially distanced. Public health experts say when considering indoor gatherings, the quality of ventilation is key because the virus is known to spread more easily indoors.

Cases in New Jersey, while still high, are now on the decline, nearing levels reported in early November. Over the last seven days the state averaged 33 cases per 100,000 residents each day, as of Sunday. That was the third-highest rate per capita of new cases in the last week, after New York and South Carolina.

The governor’s announcement will allow his state’s pro hockey team, the Devils, to play home games starting next Tuesday, the team’s first home game after the change takes effect.

“This is a day toward which our entire staff has been planning, working, and looking forward to for the past 11 months,” said the team’s president, Jake Reynolds, in a statement.

The state also has two pro football teams, the Giants and the Jets; a Major League Soccer team, the Red Bulls; and a National Women’s Soccer League franchise, Sky Blue F.C. Mr. Murphy said he hoped those teams would still be able to have fans when their seasons began later this year.

“I’ll be shocked if we’re not at a higher level of capacity for Jets, Giants, Rutgers football, you name it, as we get into the summer and fall,” Mr. Murphy said.

Several other states have already permitted sports fans inside venues during the pandemic, especially at outdoor stadiums for football and baseball. But Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Murphy had resisted until December, when Mr. Cuomo worked with the N.F.L. to allow a limited number of fans at a Buffalo Bills playoff game in their open-air stadium.

Mr. Murphy also said that New Jersey would start to allow parents and guardians to watch their children play both indoor and outdoor college sports, provided venues meet capacity limits, on Monday. The state reopened high school sports to parents earlier this month, with indoor attendance limited to 35 percent or 150 people.

New Jersey will also allow houses of worship and religious services to operate at 50 percent capacity effective Monday, the governor said. The limit is an increase from the previous cap of 35 percent maximum capacity up to 150 people.

Alison Saldanha contributed reporting.

Credit…Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The French Riviera, the famed strip along the Mediterranean coast that includes jet-setting hot spots like Saint-Tropez and Cannes, will be locked down over the next two weekends in an attempt to fight back a sharp spike in coronavirus infections.

France has been under a nighttime curfew since mid-January and restaurants, cafes and museums remain closed, but the government of President Emmanuel Macron has resisted putting a third national lockdown in place.

It has been a calculated gamble, with Mr. Macron hoping that he could tighten restrictions just enough to stave off a new surge of infections without resorting to the more severe rules in place in many other European countries.

The strategy has largely worked, but infection rates remain at a stubbornly high level of about 20,000 new cases per day. Officials have made it clear that the existing national restrictions would not be loosened and that more local lockdowns could be enforced in the coming days.

The French Riviera, which includes the city of Nice, has the country’s highest infection rate, and officials have grown increasingly alarmed as they surged to 600 cases per week per 100,000 residents — about three times the national rate.

“The epidemic situation has sharply deteriorated,” Bernard Gonzalez, a regional official for the Alpes-Maritimes area, said on Monday as he announced the lockdown, which will affect the coastal area between the cities of Menton and Théoule-sur-Mer.

Officials said that controls at the border with Italy, in airports and on roads would be toughened and that the police would carry out random coronavirus tests. New measures also include a closure of all larger shops and an acceleration of the vaccination campaign.

Infection rates surged as many French people flocked to the coast, attracted by the temperate Mediterranean weather as they sought to escape gloomy cities like Paris.

“We will be happy to receive lots of tourists this summer, once we win this battle,” Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, said last week. “But it is better to have a period while we say ‘Do not come here, this is not the moment.’”

Credit…Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

NAIROBI, Kenya — Officially, Tanzania has not reported a single coronavirus case since April 2020. According to government data, the country has had only 509 positive cases and 21 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Almost no one believes those numbers to be credible. But they fit with President John Magufuli’s declaration that the pandemic was “finished.”

Now, facing criticism from the World Health Organization and skepticism from the public as Tanzanians take to social media to voice concern about a growing number of “pneumonia” cases, Mr. Magufuli is changing course and asking people to take precautions against the coronavirus and wear masks.

Speaking during a church service in the port city of Dar es Salaam, the president asked congregants to continue praying for the disease to go away but also urged them to follow “advice from health experts.”

In a statement released by his office, Mr. Magufuli said his government had never barred people from wearing masks but urged them to use only those made in Tanzania.

“The masks imported from outside the country are suspected of being unsafe,” the statement said.

Mr. Magufuli’s comments come a day after the director-general of the World Health Organization urged the country to start reporting coronavirus cases and share data.

Mr. Magufuli, 61, who was re-elected last October, has derided social distancing, publicized unproven treatments as a cure for the virus, questioned the efficacy of coronavirus testing kits supplied by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and said that “vaccines don’t work.”

Yet health experts, religious entities and foreign embassies have issued warnings about the rising number of cases — and as deaths follow, the reality is harder to dismiss.

The vice president of the semiautonomous island of Zanzibar, Seif Sharif Hamad, died last week after contracting the virus, according to his political party. The United States Embassy in Tanzania also said in a statement it was “aware of a significant increase in the number of Covid-19 cases” since January.

Lawmakers are increasingly asking the health authorities to explain why so many people were dying from respiratory problems.

Speaking on Friday at the funeral of a government official, however, Mr. Magufuli said that citizens should put God first and not be instilled with fear about the virus.

“It is possible that we wronged God somewhere,” he said. “So let’s stand with God, my fellow Tanzanians.”

In his statement, the W.H.O. chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he had spoken to “several authorities” in the country about their plans to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus but had yet to receive any response.

“This situation remains very concerning,” he said.

Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to have a moment of silence during a candle lighting ceremony at the White House this evening to remember the nearly 500,000 people in the country who have died from Covid-19. They will ask Americans to join them.

Mr. Biden will also call for lowering federal flags to half-staff for the next five days, when the number of deaths is expected to pass the somber milestone. About 100,000 of these deaths have occurred since Jan. 18.

“Tonight’s events, including the president’s remarks, will highlight the magnitude of loss at this milestone marked for the American people and so many families across the country,” Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, said during a briefing Monday afternoon. “It will also speak to the power of the American people to turn the tide on this pandemic by working together, following public health guidelines and getting in line to be vaccinated as soon as they are eligible.”

Even as the number of deaths each day remains high, there are signs of improvement across the country. Since mid-January, the number of U.S. hospitalizations has steadily and swiftly declined. And the number of new cases has decreased more than 40 percent over the past two weeks and is down 70 percent since its high point on Jan. 8, according to a New York Times database.

Experts credit the declines, in part, to widespread mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccinations. About 12 percent of people in the country have received at least one vaccine dose, and about 5 percent are fully vaccinated.

Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Around the United States, the vaccine rollout has reflected the same troubling inequalities as the pandemic’s death toll, leaving Black, Latino and poorer people at a disadvantage. In New York City, home to more than three million immigrants from all over the world, data released last week suggests that vaccination rates in immigrant enclaves scattered across the five boroughs are among the city’s lowest.

This month, The New York Times interviewed 115 people living in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods about the rollout and their attitudes toward the vaccines.

Only eight people said they had received a shot. The interviews revealed language and technology roadblocks: Some believed there were no vaccine sites nearby. Others described mistrust in government officials and the health care system. Many expressed fears about vaccine safety fomented by news reports and social media.

The broader public may find it difficult to understand why people in communities ravaged by the coronavirus would be reluctant to line up to get vaccinated, said Marcella J. Tillett, the vice president of programs and partnerships at the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

“This is where there has been a lot of illness and death,” said Ms. Tillett, whose foundation is distributing funds to social service organizations for vaccine education and outreach. “The idea that people are just going to step out and trust a system that has harmed them is nonsensical.”

To be sure, thousands of immigrant New Yorkers have gotten vaccinated, navigating the system with patience, if not ease. Others have relied on social service organizations. BronxWorks recently held a five-day vaccine pop-up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, administering hundreds of shots each day.

To increase participation in immigrant enclaves and communities of color, the city has opened vaccine mega-sites at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Citi Field in Queens, which offer vaccinations to eligible residents of each borough. (There have been reports of suburbanites coming in to claim doses.)

The state is holding online “fireside chats” in several languages, opening new sites in Brooklyn and Queens, and continuing to bring pop-up sites to neighborhood organizations.

On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would boost bus service to the two new vaccine sites from public housing projects and community centers in Brooklyn and Queens to better serve Black, Latino and poorer New Yorkers who are most vulnerable to the virus.

Still, obstacles remain.

Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times

Coronavirus clusters at six elementary schools in Georgia resulted from poor social distancing and, to a lesser extent, inadequate mask use by students, public health officials reported on Monday.

Teachers played a role in transmitting the virus in all but one of the clusters, and two of the clusters probably involved teacher-to-teacher transmission that was followed by teacher to student transmission, the study found.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined nine clusters of three or more linked infections involving teachers and students in Cobb County, Ga., between Dec. 1 and Jan. 22, a period when the county, in suburban Atlanta, was experiencing a surge in cases.

Some 2,600 elementary school students — about 80 percent of the district’s total — were going to school in person at the time, and some 700 staff members were working in person.

The researchers identified transmission clusters involving 13 educators and 32 students at six schools in the county; some schools had more than one cluster.

In four of the nine clusters, an educator was identified as the index patient, or original source of infection. One cluster had a student as the index patient, and the researchers could not determine who the index patient was in the rest.

The study was limited in many ways, the investigators conceded. They said it was “challenging” to try to distinguish between infections acquired at school and those that were acquired in the community.

Some clusters may have been missed, they said, because almost half the people who were identified through contact tracing as having possibly been exposed refused to be tested.

Because infected adults are more likely to have symptoms and be tested, teachers may have been identified more frequently than students as index cases, the researchers said, while instances of student-to-student or student-to-teacher transmission may have gone undetected.

Even so, the authors said, their findings were consistent with studies in other countries. One in Britain found that transmission at schools happened most often from teacher to teacher; a German study found that in-school transmission rates were three times as high when the cluster began with an educator, rather than a student.

The C.D.C. investigators urged teachers to follow precautions to prevent coronavirus infection when they are not in school, and to limit their interactions with colleagues at meetings and over lunch.

They also called for teachers to be vaccinated. “Although not a requirement for reopening schools, adding Covid-19 vaccination for educators as an additional mitigation measure, when available, might serve several important functions, including protecting educators at risk for severe Covid-19 associated illness, potentially reducing in school SARS-CoV-2 transmission and minimizing interruption to in-person learning,” the researchers said.

Credit…Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

A coronavirus testing campaign in San Francisco has found more evidence that a variant first observed in California may be more contagious.

Looking at more than 600 cases in one of the city’s predominantly Latino communities, scientists found that the proportion of virus samples carrying this variant greatly increased from late November to late January.

Although the study was relatively small, and no one knows whether the variant affects the effectiveness of vaccines, “this is not the time to let down the guard,” said Joe DeRisi, the co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and one of the scientists involved in the new study. A more contagious variant could threaten to reverse the decline in cases seen over the past couple of months in California and elsewhere.

The results were announced on Monday by the University of California at San Francisco, which carried out the research in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Latino Task Force for Covid-19. The data have not yet been published.

The variant first came to light on Jan. 17, when the California Department of Public Health reported that it had become noticeably common in several communities across the state. The variant, which has gone by several names, is now known as B.1.429.

The variant might have become common in one of two ways. It might be more contagious, or it might simply have gone through a superspreading event, fueling its spread. “Just by random chance, a bad wedding or choir practice can create a large frequency difference,” Dr. DeRisi said.

Soon after the announcement, researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles reported that B.1.429 was rapidly becoming more common around that city. But those findings were based on a limited sample of just 185 coronavirus genomes that had been fully sequenced.

To get more samples, Dr. DeRisi and his colleagues focused their efforts on the predominantly Latino community in the Mission District neighborhood. There they have been running a community testing program since last April, called Unidos en Salud.

Looking at their samples from late November, the researchers found that 16 percent of the coronaviruses belonged to B.1.429. By January, after sequencing 630 genomes, the team found 53 percent were B.1.429.

Because the researchers were running their tests in a community, they could investigate how the B.1.429 variant spread from person to person. In some cases, entire families came to get tested. In other cases, the researchers followed up on positive tests to ask if they could test other people in the same household. The researchers studied the spread of B.1.429 and other variants in 326 households.

The researchers found that B.1.429 was more likely to spread among people living in the same house than other variants were. People had a 35 percent chance of getting infected if someone else in their home was infected with the B.1.429 variant. If the person was infected with another variant, the rate was only 26 percent.

“What we see is a modest, but meaningful difference,” Dr. DeRisi said.

Credit…Vassil Donev/EPA, via Shutterstock

When vaccines arrived this winter in Bulgaria, which had one of the highest excess mortality rates in Europe, the authorities hoped people would clamor for a shot.

Instead, they were greeted by many with a shrug and skepticism.

Just 1.4 percent of the nation’s seven million people have been inoculated with the first dose, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

The rollout of mass vaccination programs has been slow in many parts of Europe, but Bulgaria is lagging even further behind.

In an effort to speed up progress, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov called for “green corridors” allowing anyone who wanted a vaccination to get one, regardless of whether they were in a priority group under the country’s vaccination plan.

The goal was to administer around 10,000 shots per day, he said. The reaction appears to be better than expected: The lines evoked the period of communist rule, when people would spend hours waiting to get basic supplies like oil or meat.

Since Friday, 30,000 people received their first vaccination, according to data provided by the health ministry.

In comparison, around 120,000 total doses have been administered since vaccination campaign began in December.

Apostol Dyankov, a 38-year-old environmental expert in Sofia, received his shot on Sunday.

“I spent the weekend, browsing Twitter to figure out where this was for real,” he said. “The news was so unexpected that I couldn’t believe it’s actually happening. The lines I saw on the news reminded me of socialist times, when a store would receive a shipment of bananas.”

Donka Popopa, an owner of a construction business, described a chaotic scene at a vaccination site in Plovdiv, the country’s second-largest city, where medical workers were vaccinating all comers.

“We waited for several hours, even though we were told to come in the morning,” she said, adding that it had been difficult to figure out whether and when her employees were eligible for vaccination.

The health minister, Kostadin Angelov, told reporters in Sofia on Sunday that the turnout was a triumph.

“I would like to thank all the people who believed in science,” he said. “To those who have not been vaccinated, I would like to say something loud and clear: Bulgarians, hope is in your hands, the decision is yours. Please, trust the science, trust the doctors.”

Officials acknowledge, however, that maintaining the early burst of enthusiasm will be a challenge.

Tags cases, Covid19, deaths, global, Live, News, Updates, Variants

Health

Research Counsel Folks Who Had Covid-19 Ought to Get Single Vaccine Dose

Post author By
Post date February 20, 2021

People Who Have Had Covid Should Get Single Vaccine Dose, Studies Suggest

Almost 30 million people in the United States – and likely many others whose diseases have never been diagnosed – have been infected with the coronavirus to date. Should these people still be vaccinated?

Two new studies answer this question with an emphatic yes.

In fact, research suggests that for these people, just one dose of the vaccine is enough to charge their antibodies and destroy the coronavirus – and even some other infectious variants.

The results of these new studies are consistent with the results of two others published in the past few weeks. Taken together, the research suggests that people who have had Covid-19 should be immunized – but a single dose of the vaccine may be enough.

“I think it’s a really strong rationale for why people who were previously infected with Covid should get the vaccine,” said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the new research.

A person’s immune response to a natural infection varies widely. Most people make plenty of antibodies that last for many months. However, some people who have had mild or no symptoms of Covid-19 produce few antibodies that quickly drop to undetectable levels.

The vaccines “even hit the pitch,” said Dr. Gommerman, so that anyone who has recovered from Covid-19 will make enough antibodies to protect against the virus.

The latest study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal, analyzed blood samples from people with Covid-19. The results suggest that her immune system would have problems fighting off B.1.351, the coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.

But a shot of the Pfizer BioNTech or Moderna vaccine changed the picture dramatically: It increased the amount of antibodies in her blood by a thousand times – “a massive, massive surge,” said Andrew T. McGuire, immunologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who led the study.

Rinsed with antibodies, samples from all participants were able to neutralize not only B.1.351, but also the coronavirus that caused the SARS epidemic in 2003.

In fact, the antibodies appeared to work better than those in people who did not have Covid and had received two doses of a vaccine. Several studies have shown that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are about five times less effective against the variant.

The researchers received blood samples from 10 volunteers in the Seattle Covid Cohort Study who were vaccinated months after contracting the coronavirus. Seven of the participants received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine and three received the Moderna vaccine.

Blood taken about two to three weeks after vaccination showed a significant increase in antibody levels compared to the samples taken before vaccination. The researchers don’t yet know how long the increased levels of antibodies will last, but “hopefully they will last,” said Dr. McGuire.

The researchers also saw a surge in immune cells remembering and fighting the virus, said Dr. McGuire. “It looks pretty clear that we are boosting their pre-existing immunity,” he said.

In another new study, New York University researchers found that a second dose of the vaccine was of no great benefit at all for people with Covid-19 – a phenomenon that has also been seen with vaccines against other viruses.

In this study, most people had been infected with the coronavirus eight or nine months previously, but their antibodies increased hundreds to a thousand times with the first dose of a vaccine. However, after the second dose, the antibody levels did not rise any further.

“It is real evidence of the strength of immunological memory that they are given a single dose and have a huge increase,” said Dr. Mark J. Mulligan, director of the NYU Langone Vaccine Center and lead author of the study.

In some parts of the world, including the United States, a significant minority of the population is already infected, noted Dr. Mulligan firmly. “You should definitely be vaccinated,” he said.

It is unclear whether the thousand-fold increase in antibody levels recorded in the laboratory will occur in real-world environments. However, research shows that a single shot is enough to significantly raise antibody levels, said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai in New York.

Dr. Krammer led another of the new studies that showed that people who had Covid-19 and received a dose of vaccine had more serious side effects from the vaccination and had more antibodies than those who had not been infected before.

“When you put all four papers together, you get pretty good information about people who have had an infection and only need one vaccination,” said Dr. Krammer.

He and other researchers are trying to convince scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend only one dose for those who have recovered from Covid-19.

Ideally, these people should be monitored after the first shot in case their antibody levels drop after a few weeks or months, said Dennis R. Burton, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

The fact that the charged antibodies seen in the new study can fight the 2003 SARS virus suggests that a single dose of the vaccine may have induced the volunteer’s bodies to produce “largely neutralizing antibodies” – immune molecules that are able to target a wide range of related antibodies to viruses, said Dr. Burton.

He and other scientists have spent decades investigating whether largely neutralizing antibodies can fight multiple versions of HIV at the same time. HIV mutates faster than any other virus and evades most antibodies quickly.

The new coronavirus is mutating much more slowly, but there are now several variants of the virus that appear to have become more contagious or which are thwarting the immune system. The new study could provide clues on how to make a single vaccine that stimulates the production of largely neutralizing antibodies that can destroy all variants of the coronavirus, said Dr. Burton.

Without such a vaccine, scientists would have to adjust the vaccines every time the virus changes significantly. “You’re kind of a whac-a-mole approach,” he said. It will likely take many months, if not more, to develop and test this type of vaccine against the coronavirus, but “this is the longer term way to approach this virus.”

Tags Covid19, Dose, people, Single, Studies, Suggest, Vaccine

Health

Know-how Govt Apologizes After Dozens of Occasion Attendees Contract Covid-19

Post author By
Post date February 16, 2021

Technology Executive Apologizes After Dozens of Event Attendees Contract Covid-19

A technology executive in California apologized for hosting a conference in Culver City. After that, two dozen participants and employees of the event tested positive for the coronavirus.

The managing director, Peter H. Diamandis, was one of those who had contracted the coronavirus. In late January, he hosted the conference – an annual summit for a paid membership group called Abundance 360 - with around 80 attendees, panelists, and support staff.

The gathering disregarded instructions from Los Angeles County public health officials who repeatedly urged people to avoid excessive travel or public mixing. At the time of the conference, southern California was experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases and many hospitals were still overwhelmed.

Mr Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit group that awards cash prizes for technological innovation, said in a blog post on Friday that he was “deeply sorry”. He added that the safety protocols for the event – including repeated Covid-19 tests for attendees, none of whom showed positive results at the time – had created a false sense of security, leading people to become less vigilant about masks and distancing were.

“I was wrong,” Diamandis said, adding that masks, physical distancing and vaccines are the best ways to fight the virus. “I hope others can learn from my mistakes.”

According to Diamandis, hundreds of people attended the conference virtually, and some asked if they could attend physically. The X-Prize office in Culver City, bordering Los Angeles, has been converted into a studio, and Mr Diamandis’ Instagram posts reveal he shares a brightly lit stage with panelists, some on video calls and others in person.

Mr Diamandis said those who attended the event had been asked to share negative test results for the coronavirus before arriving and that workers and attendees were repeatedly tested at the event, giving more than 450 negative results.

“I trusted that an immunity bubble was a ‘real thing’,” said Diamandis.

But two days after the studio production ended, an employee tested positive. He sent emails informing attendees, asking them to isolate and retest.

On Friday he wrote that at least 24 people were infected. MIT Technology Review, which reported on the meeting last week, found that at least 32 people associated with the conference may have been infected.

General membership to Abundance 360 costs $ 12,500 annually, according to the organization’s online materials. According to MIT Technology Review, attendees at the January event each paid more than $ 30,000. When the conference began on January 23, California had a strict home-stay order. it was picked up two days later.

Updated

Apr. 16, 2021, 5:26 p.m. ET

On Tuesday, state and county health officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether Mr Diamandis could be fined or otherwise disciplined.

Representatives for Mr Diamandis, who has a degree in medicine from Harvard Medical School and whose entrepreneurial ventures include a coronavirus vaccine development company and a competition to improve Covid-19 testing technology, did not immediately respond to inquiries after Tuesday Comments.

Many people see a negative coronavirus test as a permit to socialize without precaution, but doctors and scientists say it is dangerously wrong.

Some types of tests, especially those that give quick results, do not reliably detect low levels of the virus and can falsely label infected people as “negative”. And even the best tests cannot see into the future: people can become infected with the coronavirus after a negative test result.

According to Diamandis, participants took part in PCR tests, which are molecular tests performed using a technique called a polymerase chain reaction. These tests are considered to be relatively reliable, but they are not perfect. (Antigen tests, which are designed to detect pieces of coronavirus protein rather than their genetic material, tend to give faster results than molecular tests, but they are more difficult to identify coronavirus cases.)

According to Diamandis, the PCR tests created a false sense of security. “We didn’t make it compulsory to wear masks 100 percent of the time in the studio,” he said. “This is definitely one of my biggest mistakes and one of the most important lessons I’ve learned.”

These lessons – particularly about relying too much on test results – hit Mr. Diamandis after he became ill himself.

“When it became clear that I had personally got Covid-19 (which sucks as everyone says), I tested myself twice a day with fast PCR and fast antigen for several consecutive days,” he wrote his blog post. “I was amazed that NONE of the tests were positive.”

Four days after his quarantine, a PCR spit test finally discovered the virus, Diamandis said.

He also noted that a group of people at the Culver City event – the 35 audiovisual experts who ran the live broadcast – wore masks throughout the production process and did not report positive test results.

“There were no COVID cases in this group,” wrote Diamandis. “Conclusion again: masks work.”

Tags Apologizes, Attendees, contract, Covid19, Dozens, event, executive, technology

Business

Japan’s Financial system Surges, however Covid-19 Looms

Post author By
Post date February 15, 2021

Japan's Economy Surges, but Covid-19 Looms

However, the last two quarters of the growth failed to offset the damage caused by the pandemic. The economy fell by 4.8 percent over the course of the year. This was the first annual decline since 2009, when the country suffered the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Updated

Apr. 14, 2021, 6:09 p.m. ET

While the people of Japan don’t face the same short-term economic threat as the US, growth is expected to slow again in the first three months of this year.

After a sharp increase in the daily number of infections, Japan declared a second, albeit more limited, state of emergency in late December. The edict, originally announced for a month, was extended to early March, in part in response to the emergence of new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

“Because of the urgency, consumer spending, especially on services, will decrease in the first three months of the year,” said Akane Yamaguchi, an economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research.

However, she said the damage will not be nearly as severe as it was last spring, when lockdowns destroyed demand for exports and Japan’s national emergency spread across the country.

Japan has further complicated the economic picture for 2021 and has been slow to start vaccinating.

The Pfizer shot was the first to receive approval from Japanese regulators on Sunday. Frontline health workers are expected to get their first doses this week, but it will be months before the public comes into question.

The effects of the pandemic have been much less severe in Japan than in the west. The total death toll is below 7,000, and daily infection rates peaked at around 8,000 in early January. However, a solid vaccination program could give more people the confidence to return to shops and restaurants, said Nagahama of Dai-Ichi Life Research.

Tags Covid19, Economy, Japans, looms, Surges

Health

Three Males Are Accused in Scheme to Promote Covid-19 Vaccines

Post author By
Post date February 13, 2021

Three Men Are Accused in Scheme to Sell Covid-19 Vaccines

Three Baltimore men were accused by federal prosecutors of setting up a fake website to sell Covid-19 vaccines for $ 30 a dose.

The men, Olakitan Oluwalade, 22, and Odunayo Baba Oluwalade, 25, who are cousins, and Kelly Lamont Williams, 22, are charged with conspiracy for wire fraud, the US District Attorney’s Office said on Thursday.

Prosecutors said the men created a website similar to that of Moderna, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company, which received federal approval in December to distribute its Covid-19 vaccine.

The real website is modernatx.com, and the website created by the men that authorities have since confiscated was modernatx.shop. Prosecutors said the fake domain’s source code revealed that the creator used a tool to copy the real Moderna website.

“The logo, the markings, colors and texts on the fake domain were visually similar,” said a statement from the company’s actual homepage. But prosecutors said the bogus website had an addition, “You might be able to purchase a COVID-19 vaccine in advance,” with a link to “Contact Us.”

The men were caught after an undercover agent contacted the number on the fake website on Jan. 11 and completed a transaction for 200 doses of the vaccine for $ 6,000. Officials said the three men never had any cans.

The agent was ordered to transfer half of the funds to Mr. Williams’ account with the Navy Federal Credit Union. By January 15, agents had confiscated the fake domain and ransacked Mr. Williams’ home.

Investigators found texts between Mr. Williams and the cousins discussing the system, according to court documents.

An agent used Mr. Williams’ phone to send a message to Odunayo Baba Oluwalade and sent some of the money from the exchange to the cousins, prosecutors said. Her two houses were also soon searched.

It was unclear how much money the men had cheated. A spokeswoman for the US law firm said Friday that she could not provide any further details on the charges than stated in the statement.

A representative from Moderna could not be reached immediately on Friday.

A lawyer, Richard Bardos, said he had been assigned to the Odunayo Baba Oluwalade case but declined to comment further, referring to a Maryland law prohibiting lawyers from speaking about ongoing cases.

Jonathan Van Hoven, a lawyer for Mr. Williams, declined to comment. The Maryland District Attorney’s Office said Olakitan Oluwalade has not yet been assigned a lawyer.

“As the public searches for vaccines to protect themselves and their families from Covid-19, scammers wait to take advantage of their desperation,” said James R. Mancuso, a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations. “We want to remind the public to exercise extreme caution online, especially when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and protective equipment.”

Tags accused, Covid19, Men, Scheme, Sell, vaccines