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Extra circumstances of latest Covid variant discovered within the U.S., threatening to worsen nation’s outbreak

More cases of new Covid variant found in the U.S., threatening to worsen nation's outbreak

A man is given a COVID-19 nasal swab test at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) amid a coronavirus surge in southern California on December 22, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.

Mario Tama | Getty Images

Three US states have now identified cases of the new coronavirus strain in people with no travel history, a sign that the variant could already unwittingly spread among Americans.

Florida health officials announced Thursday that they had found the first case of Covid-19 in the state with the new, more contagious variant of the virus. The man, who lives in the county north of West Palm Beach, is in his twenties and has no travel history, the Florida Department of Health said in a Twitter post.

The Florida man was among the first to be diagnosed with the new variant B.1.1.7, which was first identified in the UK. California has now identified at least four cases of the new strain in San Diego County in men with no reported travel history. The cases came just days after Colorado health officials discovered the first cases in people who had not traveled.

“I’m not surprised you have a case and probably more cases in California,” said White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday after announcing that state health officials had found her first case. “We’ll likely see reports from other states.”

U.S. health officials have said the variant’s arrival in the nation comes as no surprise, although if it is allowed to spread uncontrollably it could make matters worse. While the evidence suggests that the new strain is easier and faster to transmit compared to previous versions of the virus, it is not believed to cause more serious diseases in infected people, and current vaccines should continue to work against it, according to the Officials from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a conference call Wednesday.

Nevertheless, the new variant threatens to worsen the situation if more people are hospitalized due to its spread, according to experts. December was the deadliest month of the pandemic in the U.S. as hospitals reached capacity and the much-anticipated vaccine rollout ended slower than expected.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the nation reported more than 6.3 million new infections and more than 77,500 deaths in December. On the way into 2021, a little more than 125,000 people with Covid-19 are currently being hospitalized – more than twice as high as in mid-April last year. This comes from data from the COVID Tracking Project, which is carried out by journalists at The Atlantic.

Another cause for concern: The first cases of the new variant were found in the most populous states in the country amid a busy vacation travel season, Mercedes Carnethon, vice chairman of preventive medicine at Northwestern University, told MSNBC on Friday.

TSA officials said they screened 1.28 million passengers at US airports on the Sunday after Christmas. This is the highest number since Covid stopped traveling in mid-March.

“We can be sure that from the photos we all saw at TSA checkpoints on vacation, we have traveled millions of people between these destinations,” Carnethon said. “We can be pretty sure that this variant is everywhere now.”

The latest findings from Imperial College London also show that the new variant appears to affect people under the age of 20 more than older adults. Part of that shift, however, could be because schools stayed open during a period of lockdown orders, the study says.

The age gap could be an issue as younger people are more likely to be key workers in the community than the first to be vaccinated, Carnethon said.

“I think the priority, I think, needs to be to reinforce the basic messages we know about how to stop community transmission,” Carnethon said. “As we know, our vaccination strategy begins with strengthening our infrastructure for healthcare workers. However, this is not necessarily the population that is causing the coronavirus to spread to the community.”

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New York Gov. Cuomo briefs the press on Covid pandemic as outbreak worsens

NY Gov. Cuomo holds a press briefing as state prepares to distribute Covid vaccine

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will hold a press conference on Wednesday on the coronavirus as Covid-19 hospital admissions hit the levels last reported in early May.

According to the Covid Tracking Project, an independent volunteer organization launched by journalists in the Atlantic, 7,814 patients with Covid-19 were hospitalized in New York on Tuesday. This is the highest number since May 8th.

The increase in sick patients has led the state to prepare to reuse the Javits Center as an emergency Covid-19 field hospital. This emerges from reports in the New York Post quoting Cuomo senior advisor Rich Azzopardi and Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling. Cuomo has already announced that the state will reopen a field hospital on Staten Island after a surge in hospital stays.

The Democratic governor is also considering new lockdown measures in January if the current surge continues, although new restrictions are not guaranteed, he said. According to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the state has reported over 100 daily Covid-19 deaths for over two weeks, a total of more than 37,600 deaths since the pandemic began.

“As we near the New Year and the end of the holiday season, all New Yorkers must remember one simple truth – celebrating smart stop shutdowns,” Cuomo said in a statement Tuesday.

Read CNBC’s live updates for the latest news on the Covid-19 outbreak.

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HHS releases sweeping new report on U.S. Covid outbreak in transfer towards transparency

HHS releases sweeping new report on U.S. Covid outbreak in move toward transparency

The Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive new report on the state of the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak on Friday, releasing data previously only available to government employees.

The new “Community Profile Report” uses data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the HHS Protection System to show the severity of the outbreak in different states and even counties. The first report shows that 35 states are “red,” indicating a major outbreak.

The report also names “selected high-exposure areas” where the number of new cases is increasing rapidly along with the percentage of positive tests. For example, Nashville, Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Somerset, Pennsylvania are high-pollution areas in the first report.

The report also identifies “Rapid Riser Counties” and displays several heatmaps that contain various statistics that are used to determine how bad the local outbreak is in counties across the country. It records, among other things, the death rates, the percentage of positive tests and hospital admissions in Covid.

It is the most comprehensive picture of the US outbreak released by the federal government about nine months after the virus spread across the country. It is a reminder that such data was withheld from the public for months while it was distributed among federal and some state officials.

Jose Arrieta, who served as the chief information officer for HHS when the government launched HHS Protect, the agency’s Covid-19 hospital data warehouse, said the new report was “certainly a step in the right direction” toward transparency. Arrieta resigned in August.

“A number of agency staff, including myself when I was there, pushed for transparency,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I appreciate the fact that the data is being shared.”

Dr. Janis Orlowski, Chief Health Care Officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, is a member of the working group for White House Health Advisor Dr. Deborah Birx, on improving HHS protection. She said she and other members had been pushing for more data to be released over the past few weeks.

“We pushed for transparency, transparency, transparency … and they are doing a good job,” she said. “I like that it’s transparent and that epidemiologists and other people can look at it and say that’s fine, but it would really be better if we knew X, Y or Z.”

HHS spokeswoman Katie McKeogh said in a statement to CNBC that at least some of the data is in one form or another in scattered reports, but this new report brings it all together.

“As you know, there are different reporting processes at the local, state and state levels, and it has taken time and effort to build consistency between these systems to present the data as you see it today,” she said in a statement opposite CNBC. “This report has been extremely valuable to the federal response and we hope it will be helpful to state and local health departments, hospitals, businesses and the public as well.”

Much of the data in the report has been distributed to governors and state officials by the White House coronavirus task force to guide local Covid-19 strategy. Many of the reports, which in public statements often paint a worse picture of the outbreak than federal officials, were received from reporters.

The new public reports are a major step towards transparency in a federal response that is largely characterized by its opaque data collection.

“We hope that making this data public will help Americans make personal choices to slow the spread,” a group of federal officials who campaigned for the report said in a statement titled “Our data is yours Data”. The group includes Heather Strosnider, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance at CDC, Kelly Bennett, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance in the Assistant Secretary’s Office for Preparedness and Response, Amy Gleason of US Digital Service and Kevin Duvall, Assistant Head of Data Officer at HHS .

“HHS believes in the power of open data and transparency,” they wrote. “Publicly publishing the reports that our own response teams use and using the information by others outside of the federal response will only make the data better.”

A federal conflict over data transparency began this summer when the CDC’s data infrastructure proved inadequate to meet the requirements of the Covid pandemic. For example, federal officials needed daily data on the number of Covid patients in each hospital in order to be able to make potentially life-saving decisions about the allocation of scarce resources.

Instead of working on a quick overhaul of the CDC system, HHS rolled out a new data collection system called HHS Protect this summer with the help of federal companies, including Palantir. While many in the public health sector recognized the limitations of the CDC’s data collection system, some saw it as a move by the Trump administration to phase out the CDC amid a crisis.

Orlowski said the detail of the new public report is a demonstration of what HHS Protect is capable of and a testament to the progress the U.S. has made in collecting public health data during the pandemic.

“Never waste a crisis,” said Orlowski. “As long as we don’t increase the burden on the hospital, I believe we must continue to do so.”

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WHO holds press convention on the coronavirus outbreak

WHO holds press conference on the coronavirus outbreak

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World Health Organization officials hold a press conference on Friday to inform the public about the coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 69.7 million people around the world as governments around the world begin rolling out the first vaccines.

The briefing comes as U.S. regulators say approval of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine is imminent. On Thursday evening, an advisory group to the Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly approved the emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine for use in anyone over the age of 15. The UK, Canada and Bahrain have already approved the vaccine for most adults.

It couldn’t be more urgent. More Americans are now dying from the disease than at any other time in the pandemic. The country reported more than 224,400 new cases of the virus on Thursday and more than 2,700 people in the country died of Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week expressed concern about the “growing awareness that the pandemic is over”.

Tedros said the positive news about vaccine development “gets us all going,” but the public must continue to adhere to public health guidelines.

Read CNBC’s live updates for the latest news on the Covid-19 outbreak.

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Italy coronavirus outbreak: What’s taking place there now

Italy coronavirus outbreak: What's happening there now

Healthcare workers transfer a COVID-19 patient to a biocontainment stretcher in the Covid emergency room of the San Filippo Neri Hospital during lockdown measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on October 29, 2020 in Rome, Italy.

Antonio Masiello | Getty Images

Italy became Europe’s first coronavirus hotspot earlier this year after cases occurred in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto in February.

It imposed the first lockdown outside of China after the virus spread across the country and across the continent.

In the summer, as elsewhere, there was a lull in infections in Italy before a second wave of coronavirus infections set in.

Now the daily number of infections remains high and a record number of daily deaths were reported last week. Here is a snapshot of the current developments in Italy.

What is the virus situation like?

Italy currently has the second highest number of coronavirus infections in Europe after France with 1,728,878 confirmed cases. This is based on data from Johns Hopkins University. Over 60,000 people have died of the disease in the country.

13,720 new Covid cases and 528 more deaths were recorded on Monday, with the numbers likely to be lower due to the delay over the weekend. It comes after 18,887 new cases on Sunday and 21,052 on Saturday. On Friday, 24,099 new infections were counted, as data from the Ministry of Health show – a number that points more to the current virus trend in Italy.

993 deaths were recorded last Thursday, surpassing an earlier record of 919 daily deaths during the first wave of the virus.

Italy’s health department, the Higher Health Institute, said Monday that nearly 40% of Italy’s 60,000 deaths have occurred in the hardest-hit region, Lombardy.

What about the vacation?

Last week the Italian government passed another package of tough restrictions, which are seen as a crucial way to avoid further hikes in certain cases.

This includes the ban on travel between Italian regions between December 21 and January 6, which means families across Italy cannot get together for Christmas unless they travel before the rules come into force.

Measures put online by the Italian Ministry of Health include a ban on leaving your hometown on Christmas Day, St. Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day, December 26) and New Year’s Day.

The government has maintained the current curfew. People are not allowed out of their homes between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. (and until 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day), except for work or health reasons. That rules out a midnight mass for millions of Catholics in Italy.

Italian tourists traveling abroad from December 21 to January 6 will have to undergo quarantine upon their return, the ministry said. Foreign tourists who come to Italy during the same period must also be quarantined.

Red zones

As in other countries, Italy has applied a tiered system to differentiate parts of the country according to their risk profile, with different rules applying in these areas.

The areas with the highest risk are classified as “red zones” and are subject to the strictest restrictions. This is followed by “orange zones” with medium to high risk and increased restrictions, and yellow zones of medium risk with baseline restrictions.

Currently, the yellow area includes the regions: Emilia Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Liguria, Marche, Molise, Trento, Apulia, Sardinia, Sicily, Umbria and Veneto.

The orange areas include: Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Lombardy, Piedmont, Bolzano, Tuscany and Aosta Valley.

The only red zone at the moment is the central region of Abruzzo. In a red area, only stores selling essential goods can remain open and restaurants and bars can only offer take-away service.

Red zone residents are not allowed to move around their own area (whether by public or private transport) unless there is a vital reason to do so. Anyone who has to leave the house for work, study, health or emergency reasons must fill out a form. In a red zone, visiting or meeting relatives or friends with whom you do not live together in an open or closed place is prohibited.

Bans and continued restrictions clearly affect some Italians more than others; A story about an Italian went viral after an argument with his wife who took a walk to cool off and ran 450 km after an argument with his wife. Italians called the man, who was fined 400 euros by the police for violating the curfew, “Forrest Gump” after the character who walks thousands of kilometers across America.