A Growing Number of Countries Find Cases of the New Virus Variant – The New York Times

Heres what you need to know:The discovery of the virus variant in Japan prompted the country to close its borders to all new entry by nonresident foreigners. Credit...Kyodo News via Getty Images

Japan, Spain, France, Sweden and Canada have found small numbers of infections involving a new, potentially more transmissible variant of the coronavirus, most linked to travel from Britain, where it was first detected.

The rapid spread of the variant led to the lockdown of London and southern England this week, prompted a temporary French blockade of the English Channel and resulted in countries around the world barring travelers from Britain. Because few countries have the level of genomic surveillance that Britain does, there is concern that the variant may have been traveling across the world undetected for weeks.

A recent study by British scientists found no evidence that the variant is more deadly than others but estimated that it is 56 percent more contagious.

So far, the British variant has been diagnosed in seven people in Japan, the countrys health ministry said. All had either recently traveled to Britain or been in contact with someone who had.

The discovery in Japan prompted the country to close its borders to all new entry by nonresident foreigners. The ban will go into effect at midnight on Monday and last through the end of January, the public broadcaster NHK reported.

In Spain, the variant was found in the capital region, local authorities said on Saturday. Antonio Zapatero, a regional health official, said that four cases had been confirmed in Madrid, while another three were being treated as suspicious. At least two of the cases involve people who had recently been to Britain and then tested positive in Madrid, as well as some of their relatives.

The first case of the new fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus in France was identified on Friday, according to the French health ministry. Officials said that the patient was a French citizen living in Britain who had traveled from London to Tours, a city in central France, on Dec. 19, a day before the British government imposed a lockdown following the emergence of the variant.

Officials in Sweden announced on Saturday that a case of the variant had been detected there after a traveler visited Sormland, near Stockholm, from the United Kingdom over Christmas, Reuters reported. No additional cases had been detected, the Public Health Agency of Sweden said.

Health officials in Ontario, Canada, said on Saturday that they had confirmed two cases of the variant in the province. The two cases were a couple from Durham, about 90 miles northwest of Toronto. The couple had no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts, the provinces health ministry said.

It is normal for viruses to mutate, and most of the mutations of the coronavirus have proved minor. The British variant has a constellation of 23 mutations, several of which might alter its transmissibility. Vaccine experts are confident that the available vaccines will be able to block the new variant, although that has to be confirmed by laboratory experiments that are now underway.

The European Unions member nations are scheduled to begin vaccinating against the virus on Sunday with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Hungary began administering the vaccine a day early, on Saturday.

A few other concerning variants have also been identified, including one in South Africa and another in Nigeria. Britain said on Thursday that it would ban travel from South Africa after the British health secretary, Matt Hancock, said two people were confirmed to have been infected with the variant that emerged there.

Germany, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Australia and Singapore have identified infections with the new variant. And Denmark, which has wider genomic surveillance than many other countries, detected 33 cases of the variant from Nov. 14 to Dec. 14, according to the Danish health authorities.

The U.S. has not yet reported any cases of the U.K. variant. But the country will require all airline passengers arriving from Britain to test negative for the coronavirus within 72 hours of their departure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The rule will take effect on Monday.

Hisako Ueno and Mike Ives contributed reporting.

Two critical federal unemployment programs were set to expire after Saturday as President Trump resisted signing a sweeping $900 billion aid package into law until lawmakers more than tripled the size of relief checks, putting the fate of the measure in limbo.

Mr. Trumps resistance to signing the bill risks leaving millions of unemployed Americans without crucial benefits, jeopardizes other critical assistance for business and families set to lapse at the end of the year, and raises the possibility of a government shutdown on Tuesday.

The president blindsided lawmakers this week when he described as a disgrace a relief compromise that overwhelmingly passed both chambers and was negotiated by his own Treasury secretary. He hinted he might veto the measure unless lawmakers raised the bills $600 direct payment checks to $2,000, and Mr. Trump, who was largely absent from negotiations over the compromise, doubled down on that criticism on Saturday while offering little clarity on his plans. A White House spokesman declined to indicate what the president intended to do.

I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill, Mr. Trump said on Twitter Saturday morning. Also, stop the billions of dollars in pork.

If the president does not sign the $2.3 trillion spending package, which includes the $900 billion in pandemic aid as well as funding to keep the government open past Monday, two federal jobless programs established to expand and extend benefits will lapse after Saturday, meaning millions of unemployed workers will lose them.

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A 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in eastern Germany became the countrys first recipient of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine on Saturday, a day ahead of the European Unions planned immunization campaign, an ambitious effort to eventually inoculate more than 450 million people across the 27 nations in the European Union against the coronavirus.

Vaccinations also began in Hungary, where photographs showed health care workers getting the shot at the Southern Pest Central Hospital in Budapest. The authorities in Slovakia also began administering their first doses on Saturday, Reuters reported.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Unions executive arm, released a video in advance of the official rollout on Sunday, calling the campaign a touching moment of unity.

Roughly two-thirds of all Germans are willing to be vaccinated against coronavirus, according to a survey conducted by YouGov for the German news agency D.P.A., but more than half of respondents said they were concerned about possible side effects.

The doses for Europe are being produced at BioNTechs manufacturing sites in Germany, and Pfizers site in Puurs, Belgium, according to the two companies, and countries across the bloc have begun receiving their first deliveries.

In Germany, all 16 states received 9,750 doses of the vaccine on Saturday. Each state is to send them to regional immunization centers, and then teams of drivers are to distribute them to nursing homes and care centers for the elderly across the country.

Karsten Fischer, who is responsible for managing the response to the pandemic in the Harz district of Saxony-Anhalt, said the logistics in his region made it possible to begin vaccinations within hours of receiving the doses, and he saw no reason to wait.

We did not want to waste a day, as the stability of the vaccine decreases over time, Mr. Fischer told the public broadcaster M.D.R. We wanted to begin administering immediately.

The first inoculation was administered in the city of Halberstadt, to 101-year-old Edith Kwoizalla; 40 other residents and 11 members of the staff at the nursing home also received doses, M.D.R. reported.

Every day we wait is one day too many, Tobias Krger, the director of the home, told reporters.

Germanys eastern states have been hardest hit by the second wave of the virus. More than 1.6 million people have been infected in the country, and more than 29,400 have died, many of them older citizens, especially those living in nursing homes.

Residents of nursing homes and their caregivers, as well as emergency medical staff and individuals 80 years and older, are set to be among the first vaccinated in Germany, based on a plan that was drawn up by leaders, medical advisers and members of the national Ethics Council. Members of the government do not plan to receive inoculations before their peers, Jens Spahn, the countrys health minister, said on Saturday.

We have deliberately said that we will begin offering the vaccine to the most fragile, Mr. Spahn said. If there comes a time when it makes sense, say to bolster confidence, each one of us is ready to be vaccinated.

California, the wealthiest and most populous state of the worlds wealthiest country, has long had a dearth of hospital beds just 1.8 beds per 1,000 people, according to 2018 data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Now a record-shattering slew of coronavirus cases has wiped out intensive care unit capacity in a large swath of the state.

Southern California, its most populous region, and San Joaquin Valley, a central region, have 0 percent I.C.U. capacity, keeping them under a stay-at-home order until at least Dec. 28, the California Department of Public Health said on Saturday.

Intensive care units in the Bay Area region are at 11.3 percent capacity and the Greater Sacramento Region has 16.9 percent capacity. Both will likely remain under the order at least into the new year.

Before the pandemic, Californias ratio of hospital beds per person was only slightly higher than Washington State and Oregon, both of which ranked last in the nation. Many of the states hospitals kept their number of beds low in part to limit costs.

I.C.U. beds have been limited as well: California only had 2.1 beds per 10,000 people, more plentiful than just 10 other states, according to KFFs 2018 data.

California is the first U.S. state to report more than 2 million coronavirus cases so far. On Friday, the weekly average of new cases per day in the state was 36,418, according to a New York Times database. That is a 21 percent increase from two weeks prior.

The situation is now out of control, officials and health care workers have warned. At Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, resources are so stretched that gurneys have been placed in the gift shop and the lobby is being used to treat patients. And keeping health care facilities sufficiently staffed has been yet another hurdle.

With bubble-enclosed Santas and Zoom-enhanced family gatherings, much of the United States played it safe over Christmas while the coronavirus rampaged across the country. But, as during Thanksgiving, a significant number of Americans traveled, raising the prospect of a spike in infections on top of the current surge.

Many European countries are under restrictions, but Christmas is celebrated so broadly and New Years festivities will follow shortly that the concern of a post-holiday spike reaches far beyond a single country.

Case numbers remain about as high as they have ever been, both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Total U.S. infections surpassed 19 million on Saturday, while the world total passed the 80 million mark, according to a New York Times database.

For now, the U.S. is no longer seeing overall explosive growth, although Californias worsening outbreak has canceled out progress in other parts of the country. The state has added more than 300,000 cases in the seven-day period ending Dec. 22. And six Southern states have seen sustained case increases in the last week: Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Texas.

The countrys virus-related deaths in general have continued to climb. And hospitalizations are hovering at a pandemic height of about 120,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

More than 330,000 people in the United States have died since the pandemic began, and two of the four worst days for deaths so far have been during the past week. A number of states set death records on Dec. 22 or Dec. 23, including Alabama, Wisconsin, Arizona and West Virginia, according to The Timess data.

Holiday reporting anomalies may obscure any post-Christmas spike until the second week of January. Testing was expected to decrease around Christmas, and many states said they would not report data on certain days. On Christmas Day, numbers for both new infections, 91,922, and deaths, 1,129, were significantly lower than the seven-day averages. On Saturday, the country had at least 225,900 new cases and at least 1,640 new deaths, an expected increase over Friday as some states reported two days worth post-Christmas.

The lessons learned from Thanksgiving are mixed. Case numbers and deaths have continued to rise since, but the patterns look more like a plethora of microspreads than a mass superspreader event.

Over all, experts have told The Times, areas of the U.S. that were improving pre-Thanksgiving like the Midwest continued to do well afterward, while regions that were seeing higher numbers before the holiday continued to worsen.

Only time will tell whether new infections will result from increased exposure during the late-December holidays from seeing family, passing through airports or buying food for celebrations. More than one million people passed through Transportation Safety Administration travel checkpoints on each of four recent days Dec. 18, 19, 20 and 23 but that was less than half the number for those days last year, according to the agencys data. Only a quarter of the number who flew on the day after Christmas last year did so on Friday, and Christmas Eve travel was down by one-third from 2019.

So, as with Thanksgiving, Christmas will produce a continuing ramification of whoever is infected over the winter holidays, said Catherine L. Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, so it is crucial to keep up protective measures.

What the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come will bring, Dr. Troisi said, is up to us.

Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot.

The time frame was dangerously accelerated, many people warned. The vaccine was a scam from Big Pharma, others said. A political ploy by the Trump administration, many Democrats charged. The internet pulsed with apocalyptic predictions from longtime vaccine opponents, who decried the new shot as the epitome of every concern theyd ever put forth.

But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated.

In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent this summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity.

Resistance to the vaccine is certainly not vanishing. Misinformation and dire warnings are gathering force across social media. At a meeting on Dec. 20, members of an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited strong indications that vaccine denouncements as well as acceptance are growing, so they could not predict whether the public would gobble up limited supplies or take a pass.

But the attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 percent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes.

The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 percent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths.

Shortly after 2 p.m. on Dec. 15, Dr. Taison Bell became the second person in his hospital, UVA Health in Charlottesville, to receive a dose of Pfizers new coronavirus vaccine. I feel fine, he said. But my right arm, if you were to interview it, is probably not excited about whats happened to it.

His limb experienced a bit of swelling and soreness, nothing out of the ordinary for a vaccine. It was a sign that the injection was doing its job: instructing Dr. Bells cells to churn out a protein called spike, which will teach his immune system to recognize and thwart the new coronavirus, should he ever encounter it. His second dose, scheduled for early January, will clinch the process.

The shot introduced a microscopic shift that will have an outsize impact on his risk of getting Covid-19. But, Dr. Bell said, little else in his life will change until more of his community joins the vaccinated pool.

Dr. Bell, 37, remains a relative rarity among the people he sees both inside and outside of work. His wife, Kristen, and their children, Alain and Ruby, are unlikely to be vaccinated before the spring or summer. They, like many others, will soon live in a home divided by the splinter-thin prick of a needle one person vaccinated, three not. They represent a liminal state that will persist for months nationwide, as the first people to be injected navigate a new coexistence with the vulnerable at home.

Although the new vaccines have been shown to be highly effective at preventing people from developing symptomatic cases of Covid-19, little data exists on how well they can stop the spread of the virus, raising the possibility that vaccinated people, despite being much safer individually, could still pose a threat to those they love.

For that reason, were still going to be taking all the same precautions, Ms. Bell said. Our day-to-day isnt going to change for months, as the vaccines continue to get rolled out.

In one video, during the lockdown in Wuhan, she filmed a hospital hallway lined with rolling beds, the patients hooked up to blue oxygen tanks. In another, she panned over a community health center, noting that a man said he was charged for a coronavirus test, even though residents believed the tests would be free.

At the time, Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer turned citizen journalist, embodied the Chinese peoples hunger for unfiltered information about the epidemic. She was one of several journalists, professionals and amateurs, who had flocked to Wuhan after the lockdown was imposed in late January.

The authorities were preoccupied with trying to manage the chaos of the outbreak, and for a brief period, Chinas strict censorship regime loosened. Reporters seized that window to share residents raw accounts of terror and fury.

Now, Ms. Zhang has become a symbol of the governments efforts to deny its early failings in the crisis and promote a victorious narrative instead.

Ms. Zhang abruptly stopped posting videos in May, after several months of dispatches. The police later revealed that she had been arrested, accused of spreading lies. On Monday, she will go to court, in the first known trial of a chronicler of Chinas coronavirus crisis.

The prosecution is part of the Chinese Communist Partys continuing campaign to recast Chinas handling of the outbreak as a succession of wise, triumphant moves by the government. Critics who have pointed to officials early missteps have been arrested, censored or threatened by the police; three other citizen journalists disappeared from Wuhan before Ms. Zhang did, though none of the rest has been publicly charged.

Prosecutors have accused Ms. Zhang of picking quarrels and provoking trouble a frequent charge for government critics in China and recommended between four and five years in prison.

Ms. Zhang appeared to know the risks of her actions. In one of her first videos, on Feb. 7, she mentioned that another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, had just disappeared, and another, Fang Bin, was under surveillance. Whistleblower doctors had been silenced, she added.

But as someone who cares about the truth in this country, we have to say that if we just wallow in our sadness and dont do something to change this reality, then our emotions are cheap, she said.

Soon after her arrest, she began a hunger strike, according to her lawyers. She has become gaunt and drained but has refused to eat, the lawyers said, maintaining that her strike is her form of protest against her unjust detention.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa When the pandemic began, global public health officials raised grave concerns about the vulnerabilities of Africa. But its countries over all appeared to fare far better than those in Europe or the Americas, upending scientists expectations.

Now, the coronavirus is on the rise again in swaths of the continent, posing a new, possibly deadlier threat.

In South Africa, a crush of new cases that spread from Port Elizabeth is growing exponentially across the nation. Eight countries, including Nigeria, Uganda and Mali, recently recorded their highest daily case counts all year.

The second wave is here, John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has declared.

When the virus was first detected, many African countries were considered particularly at risk because they had weak medical, laboratory and disease-surveillance systems and were already battling other contagions. Some were riven by armed conflict, limiting health workers access. In March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first African director general of the World Health Organization, cautioned, We have to prepare for the worst.

But many African governments pursued swift, severe lockdowns that while financially ruinous, especially for their poorest citizens slowed the rate of infection. Some deployed networks of community health workers. The Africa C.D.C., the W.H.O. and other agencies helped expand testing and moved in protective gear, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

The reported toll of the pandemic on the continent 2.6 million cases and 61,000 deaths, according to the Africa C.D.C. is lower than what the United States alone currently experiences in three weeks.

But that accounting is almost certainly incomplete. Evidence is growing that many cases were missed, according to an analysis of new studies, visits to nearly a dozen medical institutions and interviews with more than 100 public health officials, scientists, government leaders and medical providers on the continent.

It is possible and very likely that the rate of exposure is much more than what has been reported, Dr. Nkengasong said in an interview.

Elsewhere, countries are bracing for their third lockdowns in the hopes of avoiding yet another wave of infections:

Austria entered a third lockdown on Saturday, with all nonessential shops and schools to remain closed for three weeks and movement to be restricted, after the country eased restrictions in mid-December to allow for preparations ahead of the Christmas holiday.

Until Jan. 24, people in Austria are only allowed to leave their homes for work, shopping or to exercise outdoors, and personal contacts are limited to no more than two households.

Ice skating rinks and ski lifts in the alpine country will remain open despite the lockdown, but operating at half capacity and with distancing requirements.

On Sunday, Israel is also set to enter its third weekslong lockdown following a sharp increase in positive coronavirus test results over the past week. Israelis will be barred from traveling more than 1,000 meters beyond their homes except those participating in protests, receiving a vaccination or fulfilling any other task on a list of exemptions, the government said in a statement on Friday.

Museums, malls, national parks, zoos, salons and many other places will be closed, but some schools will remain open, the government said. The lockdown is slated to go into effect about a week after Israel started vaccinating people against Covid-19. As of Saturday, more than 200,000 had already received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

Since the start of the pandemic, millions of Americans have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of businesses have closed. But the losses in the performing arts and related sectors have been staggering.

During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.

In many areas, arts venues theaters, clubs, performance spaces, concert halls, festivals were the first businesses to close, and they are likely to be among the last to reopen.

The public may think of performers as A-list celebrities, but most never get near a red carpet or an awards show. The overwhelming majority, even in the best times, dont benefit from Hollywood-size paychecks or institutional backing. They work season to season, weekend to weekend or day to day, moving from one gig to the next.

Jennifer Koh, a classical violinist with a dazzling technique, has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the worlds most prestigious stages.

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A Growing Number of Countries Find Cases of the New Virus Variant - The New York Times