Covid-19 Live Updates: Latest News on Vaccine and Cases – The New York Times

Heres what you need to know:Health care workers treating a Covid-19 patient at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, Calif., this month.Credit...Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

Dozens of research papers published over the past few months have found that people whose bodies were teeming with the coronavirus more often became seriously ill and were more likely to die, compared with those who carried much less virus and were more likely to emerge relatively unscathed. Now that information could help hospitals.

The results suggest that knowing the so-called viral load the amount of virus in the body could help doctors distinguish those who may need an oxygen check just once a day, for example, from those who need to be monitored more closely, said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician at Columbia University in New York.

Tracking viral loads can actually help us stratify risk, Dr. Griffin said. The idea is not new: Managing viral load has long formed the basis of care for people with H.I.V., for example, and for tamping down transmission of that virus.

Little effort has been made to track viral loads in Covid-19 patients. This month, however, the Food and Drug Administration said clinical labs might report not just whether a person is infected with the coronavirus, but also an estimate of how much virus is in their body.

This is not a change in policy. Labs could have reported this information all along, according to two senior F.D.A. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Still, the news came as a welcome surprise to some experts, who have for months pushed labs to record this information.

This is a very important move by the F.D.A., said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I think its a step in the right direction to making the most use of one of the only pieces of data we have for many positive individuals.

Nearly half of England is under the nations strictest lockdown measures, and people have been ordered to stay at home, but the coronavirus is still spreading at an alarming rate. Hospitals are treating more patients than at any time during the pandemic, and there is a growing debate about allowing tens of thousands of students to return to classrooms after the holiday break.

The nations scientists have said that a more contagious variant of the virus is driving the rise in cases and, having already imposed severe restrictions on more than 48 million people, it remains unclear what other tools the government has at its disposal to get the outbreak under control.

There were 53,135 new lab-confirmed cases reported on Tuesday, the highest figure yet on a single day. The National Health Service said there were now over 20,000 people in the hospital there, more than at the peak of the pandemic in April.

With the government scheduled to meet to evaluate the current restrictions on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under pressure to impose another national lockdown and shift students especially older ones in colleges and secondary schools, who may be more easily infected by the new virus variant to remote learning.

The government said that it would rely on mass testing to keep the virus from spreading in schools, with military help. Some 1,500 soldiers are being dedicated to providing schools with the guidance, materials and funding they need to offer rapid testing to their staff and students from the start of term, according to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson.

But two teachers unions have said that staff has not been given adequate time to set up mass testing and the countrys board of scientific advisers, known as SAGE, has recommended against allowing classrooms to reopen, according to British media reports.

Even as the countrys health workers find themselves under growing pressure to treat the influx of patients, they are also being asked to speed up the largest mass vaccination program in the nations history.

Around 200,000 people are getting their first shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine every week. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commissions president, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the European Union would take an additional 100 million doses of that vaccine, bringing the total to 300 million doses.

With the approval of a vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford expected in coming days, the number of doses available will expand drastically. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which comes without the stringent temperature requirements of Pfizers, should also be easier to distribute.

There is no evidence that the vaccines are any less effective against the variant of the virus spreading in Britain, and they remain the best chance for the country to break the spread of the current wave of infections.

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Lets do it. All righty. Ready? Yeah, Im ready. That was easy. [laughing] Thank you. I have now been vaccinated as Joe likes to say, theres a big difference between the vaccine and vaccinations. I want to encourage everyone to get the vaccine. It is relatively painless. It happens really quickly. It is safe. Literally, this is about saving lives. Its literally about saving lives. I trust the scientists, and it is the scientists who created and approved this vaccine. So I urge everyone, when it is your turn, get vaccinated. Its about saving your life, the life of your family members and the life of your community.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday and urged the public to get vaccinated as well, declaring, Literally this is about saving lives.

Ms. Harris received the Moderna vaccine at United Medical Center, a public hospital in Southeast Washington, where she rolled up her sleeve and received the shot in her left arm.

That was easy, she said when it was over. Thank you. I barely felt it.

Ms. Harris appeared on live television to receive her shot, just as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. did last week when he received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a hospital in Delaware. Ms. Harriss husband, Douglas Emhoff, was also vaccinated on Tuesday.

After getting the vaccine, Ms. Harris urged Americans to get vaccinated as well, saying: It is relatively painless. It happens really quickly. It is safe.

I trust the scientists, and it is the scientists who created and approved this vaccine, she added. So I urge everyone, when it is your turn, get vaccinated. Its about saving your life, the life of your family members and the life of your community.

MOSCOW After months of questions over the true scale of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia and the efficacy of a Russian-developed vaccine, the state statistical agency in Moscow has added to the uncertainty with new figures indicating that the death toll from Covid-19 is more than three times as high as officially reported.

From the start of the pandemic early this year, the health crisis has been enveloped and, critics say, distorted by political calculations as President Vladimir V. Putin and Kremlin-controlled media outlets have repeatedly boasted of Russian successes in combating the virus and keeping the fatality rate relatively low.

Russia has reported more than three million cases of infection, making it the worlds fourth-hardest-hit country, and 55,827 deaths, which ranks it No. 8 worldwide for the highest number of deaths from the virus. A demographer at a government agency who questioned the official fatality figures, dismissing them as far too low, was fired over the summer.

New data issued on Monday by Rosstat, the state statistics agency, however, indicated that the demographer was right and that the real number of fatalities was far higher than previously reported. The agency reported that the number of deaths from January to November was 229,732 higher than over the same period last year, an increase that a senior official blamed largely on the coronavirus.

Tatiana Golikova, a deputy prime minister leading Russias efforts to combat the pandemic, told a government briefing on Monday that more than 81 percent of the increased number of deaths in 2020 was due to Covid, which would mean that the virus had killed more than 186,000 Russians so far this year.

This is still far fewer than the more than 334,000 deaths caused by Covid-19 in the United States but means that Russia has suffered more fatalities as a result of the pandemic than elsewhere in Europe like Italy, France and Britain, whose poor record has been regularly cited by Russian state media as proof of Russias relative triumph.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday criticized the speed of vaccine distribution under the Trump administration and promised to step up the pace when he takes office, while offering a sobering warning about the continuing toll of the pandemic.

As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should, Mr. Biden said in Wilmington, Del., adding that at the current pace, Its going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.

Mr. Biden promised a much more aggressive effort under his administration.

This is going to be the greatest operational challenge weve ever faced as a nation, Mr. Biden said, but were going to get it done.

The president-elect will take office in just over three weeks amid a crisis that has already killed more than 335,000 people in the United States. He has vowed to get at least 100 million vaccine shots into the arms of Americans in his first 100 days in office.

The administration of vaccines has gotten off to a slower start than federal officials had hoped. As recently as earlier this month, federal officials had said their goal was for 20 million people to get their first shots by the end of the year. As of Monday morning, 11.4 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been distributed across the country, but just 2.1 million people in the United States had received their first dose, according to a dashboard maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that most likely reflects a reporting lag of several days.

Earlier Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. She got her shot on live television, just as Mr. Biden did last week. Ms. Harriss husband, Douglas Emhoff, was also vaccinated on Tuesday.

Margaret Keenan, the first patient in Britain to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Dec. 8, received her second injection on Tuesday, making her the first publicly known person to be fully vaccinated against the virus outside a clinical trial.

Ms. Keenan made headlines this month when she became the first person in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested coronavirus vaccine, wearing a Christmas penguin T-shirt and saying she felt privileged to be vaccinated. At the time, she said, If I can have it at 90, then you can have it, too!

The second injection given to Ms. Keenan, now 91, provided some good news in Britain as the country reported 53,135 new lab-confirmed cases on Tuesday, its highest daily number since the start of the pandemic.

Although nearly half of England is under lockdown, the virus is spreading at an alarming rate, and hospitals are treating more patients than at any time during the health crisis.

Over 600,000 people have received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine in Britain, but scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that two million people needed to be vaccinated every week to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed like they were during the first wave.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 71,000 people in Britain have died from the coronavirus, the second highest death toll in Europe after Italy.

The New Yorker did something on Monday that had few precedents in the magazines 95-year history: It published an issue devoted to a single feature article. The topic was, of course, the coronavirus.

The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright, examines how the United States permitted the virus to become the yearlong catastrophe he identifies in the opening sentence. It includes interviews with Dr. Deborah L. Birx; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci; and Dr. Barney S. Graham, an immunologist whose research aided the development of several early vaccines and a monoclonal antibody treatment.

The article also includes fly-on-the-wall descriptions of White House meetings and the experiences of Dr. Ebony Hilton, a Virginia anesthesiologist who witnessed firsthand how the virus worsened racial disparities in health.

At roughly 31,000 words, the article is as long as a novella, roughly five times the length of a typical major magazine article.

Mr. Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, initially turned in 76,000 words. I have an appetite to go into depth, he said in an interview. (He added, with a laugh: I get paid by the word.)

The Plague Year occupies the issues entire feature well the heart of the magazine, typically occupied by three or four long feature articles. The New Yorker had done that only a handful of times before, notably for John Herseys Hiroshima in 1946, for the first installment of Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 and for Mark Danners The Truth of El Mozote, a report on an atrocity in El Salvador, in 1993.

You really needed the real estate to do what he was out to do, said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.

Mr. Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his nonfiction book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower.His novel The End of October, published last April, tells the story of a new strain of influenza breaking out. Mr. Wright did extensive research and reporting for his work of fiction; Dr. Graham, the National Institutes of Health immunologist featured in the New Yorker article, is thanked in the books acknowledgments.

Global Roundup

The pandemic has caused the highest number of excess deaths in the Netherlands since World War II, the CBS, the countrys independent national statistics bureau, said on Tuesday.

Up to last week, the Netherlands which has a population of roughly 17 million people reported 162,000 deaths, about 13,000 more than usual, according to the CBS, the statistics bureau, whose figures are used by the government and businesses in the Netherlands. During both waves of the virus, when European countries struggled to contain cases, the number of excess deaths in the country was notable. All excess deaths during the first wave in the spring were caused by the coronavirus, according to the statistics bureau, and an August heat wave also caused some excess deaths this year.

Over the summer, the country had barely any lockdown measures in place, and some people were able to go on vacation. But over the past few months, as the country has been facing and trying to fight a brutal second wave of the pandemic, 6,100 more people died than would have been expected. The Netherlands has also found cases of the British variant in the past week.

The pandemic has hit the Netherlands particularly hard. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced harsh new lockdown measures the strictest of the pandemic until at least Jan. 19 because of a dramatic increase in the number of infections, with figures up to around 9,000 per day, according to the government.

In other developments from around the globe:

A woman in hotel quarantine in Queensland, Australia, is the first person in the country found to have a new South African strain of the coronavirus that is thought to be more contagious, health officials said on Tuesday. The woman had traveled from South Africa and has been transferred to a hospital north of Brisbane.

Officials in India said on Tuesday that they had found six cases of the virus variant first detected in Britain. The Indian Union Health Ministry said the patients had traveled from Britain and have been isolated in government-run facilities, while their close contacts have been quarantined. India is one of dozens of countries that have temporarily banned flights from Britain.

The United States on Tuesday began vaccinating its 28,500 troops in South Korea, as the government there reported a single-day record for coronavirus deaths. Service members are receiving the Moderna vaccine, though it is not mandatory, U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement. There have been more than 450 coronavirus cases tied to U.S. forces serving in South Korea. The country, which is struggling to contain a third wave of infections, has had a total of 58,725 cases and 859 deaths, with 40 reported on Tuesday. South Korean officials say vaccinations for the public will begin in February.

The Philippines on Tuesday banned foreign travelers from 19 countries and territories until Jan. 15 in an effort to keep out a more virulent strain of the coronavirus that was first detected in Britain. In addition to Britain, which was already under a travel ban, the countries and territories affected are: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Passengers who arrived before Wednesday and Filipino citizens arriving from those places must quarantine at a designated facility for 14 days, according to a government advisory.

Venezuela signed a contract with Russia to begin a mass vaccination campaign using Russias Sputnik V vaccine, according to the main government-run television network, VTV. President Vladimir V. Putin announced in August that Russia had developed the worlds first coronavirus vaccine, even though it had not been tested in a major clinical trial, and Russia has offered it in recent weeks to teachers, medical workers, and others. This has led to widespread distrust of the vaccine among the Russian public.

Jason Gutierrez, Jennifer Jett, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.

Over the weekend, Bulgaria received the first shipment of 9,750 doses of the coronavirus vaccine. Before the vaccination rollout on Sunday, Bulgarian authorities turned to hot dog trucks to deliver the vaccine to different locations across the country.

Escorted by the police, several refrigerated vans delivered the doses to a number of cities. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine must be stored at extreme temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius to remain effective, and it can be kept at temperatures of 2 degrees to 8 degrees Celsius for up to only five days.

News about the unorthodox choice of transportation prompted a wave of mockery on social media.

Hot dog-themed memes, bearing the logo of Pfizer, with Photoshopped images and frankfurter-related puns and jokes have flooded Facebook and Twitter. One Facebook post included a picture of frankfurters stamped with the Pfizer logo.And an old, popular ad for this particular hot dog brand showing a shopkeeper in a butchers store holding a string of hot dogs was being shared online, but, this time, with an updated tagline: The vaccines are here.

The vaccination campaign begins at a time when Bulgaria has one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the E.U. with more than 25 people per 100,000 dying from the virus over 14 days, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and its health system has been struggling to cope with the flood of virus patients.

While some Bulgarians have mocked the creative way of transportation, others have expressed concern that the incident signals that the state is not well prepared to receive and store the first batch of the vaccines.

It doesnt matter if the trucks have images of hot dogs or Black Angus beef plastered on them, Mariya Sharkova, a lawyer specializing in health care, said. What matters is for the government to strictly follow the distribution and storage regulations.

She is concerned that the delivery of vaccines in food trucks may make the country legally liable, she said, since the vaccine manufacturer cannot be held responsible if transport and distribution protocols are not observed properly.

Bulgarian authorities knew, for a while now, exactly when the first vaccines were arriving, said Desislava Nikolova, a health editor, at the Bulgarian newspaper Capital Weekly. It perplexes me why the government needed to use a hot dog truck instead of a vehicle licensed for distribution of thermolabile medicines. According to Bulgarian law, transportation of pharmaceuticals follows strict rules and each vehicle needs to be licensed and registered with health authorities.

Kostadin Angelov, the health minister, assured Bulgarians that the hot dog trucks had met all of the requirements needed for storage of the vaccine, and said he found the hot dog inspired jokes inappropriate.

Seeking to exploit that aspect is unacceptable, he told reporters on Sunday shortly after becoming the first Bulgarian to be inoculated. Bulgaria is not the only country where private logistics companies provide transportation.

Mr. Angelov vowed that this first batch was an exception and the next deliveries of the vaccine would be distributed using transportation provided by the manufacturer.

Ms. Sharkova worries that the delivery incident might further worsen vaccine skepticism among some Bulgarians.

There are many people outside of the anti-vax movement who are hesitant to get vaccinated, she said. Instead of using the vaccine arrival to defuse their fears, the state has become a target of ridicule.

Coronavirus: Then & Now

As 2020 comes to a close, we are revisiting subjects whose lives were affected by the pandemic. When Thomas Fuller first spoke with the Clarks in March, they were passengers trapped on a cruise ship that was being kept at sea because of a coronavirus outbreak onboard.

OAKLAND, Calif. Never again! So said Cookie Clark, a retired real estate agent, as her Hawaiian cruise on the Grand Princess came to an end in San Francisco Bay in March.

With more than 20 people infected with the coronavirus onboard, the ship was a floating symbol of the nations disjointed reaction to the pandemic reaching American shores. President Trump had said he didnt want the ship to dock because it would increase the tally of infected people in the country. So the ship was kept circling for days off the California coast, while the authorities on shore debated what to do and the passengers and crew grew increasingly frustrated.

Im ready to get the hell off this ship, Ms. Clark said from her cabin.

The Grand Princess finally got clearance to dock on March 9, and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge to a pier in the port of Oakland. When Ms. Clark and her husband, Joe, disembarked, they were taken to Travis Air Force Base along with other passengers, to be quarantined for two weeks in rudimentary conditions.

The ordeal might have been enough to make homebodies out of anyone, and thats the way Ms. Clark, 76, was feeling in March. But nine months later, she and her husband, 82, are itching to travel again.

The couple has been strict about social distancing during the pandemic. When they take walks outside their home in Oakdale, Calif., at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, they give neighbors and fellow pandemic hikers a wide berth. Ms. Clark lamented that they werent able to attend her granddaughters graduation from the University of California, Berkeley. And they have sworn off visits to the mall for the duration. But they are getting antsy.

Were older and were retired, and its just like weve lost the whole year, Ms. Clark said by telephone from her home.

Another cruise?

We would do it again, she said. Im sure.

One of the World Health Organizations senior officials warned on Monday that although the coronavirus pandemic has been very severe, it is not necessarily the big one.

Reflecting on the year in the W.H.O.s final media briefing of 2020, the head of the emergencies program, Michael Ryan, said that his words may come as a shock.

More than 1.7 million people worldwide have died this year from Covid-19, more than 81 million cases have been recorded and the spread of the coronavirus has been unrelenting in many countries.

These threats will continue, Dr. Ryan said. If theres one thing we need to take from this pandemic with all the tragedy and loss is that we need to get our act together. We need to get ready for something that may even be more severe in the future.

Dr. Ryan acknowledged that much progress has been made on improving how we communicate and govern during this pandemic, but, he said, this year was a wake up call and we must honor those weve lost by getting better at what we do every day.

Striking a similarly solemn tone, David Heymann, the chair of the W.H.O.s strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards, predicted that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, would become endemic, like the other human coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS that have spread in recent years.

Coronavirus vaccination programs, the W.H.O. said, would be integral to saving lives and protecting vulnerable people.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.s director general, promised that the organization would not rest until those in need everywhere, in all countries, have access to vaccines and are protected.

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Covid-19 Live Updates: Latest News on Vaccine and Cases - The New York Times