
New U.S. COVID cases are down 20%. See how…

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COVID’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.
During the early months of COVID-19 vaccinations, several major demographic groups lagged in receiving shots, including Black Americans, Latino Americans and Republican voters.
More recently, the racial gaps — while still existing — have narrowed. The partisan gap, however, continues to be enormous. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 86% of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60% of Republican voters.
The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.
Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, COVID deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. COVID is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.
As is often the case, state-by-state numbers can understate the true pattern, because every state has both liberal and conservative areas. When you look at the county level, the gap can look even starker.
It’s worth remembering that COVID followed a different pattern for more than a year after its arrival in the United States.
Despite widespread differences in mask wearing — and scientific research suggesting that masks reduce the virus’s spread — the pandemic was if anything worse in blue regions. Masks evidently were not powerful enough to overcome other regional differences, like the amount of international travel that flows through major metro areas, which tend to be politically liberal.
Vaccination has changed the situation. The vaccines are powerful enough to overwhelm other differences between blue and red areas.
Some left-leaning communities — like many suburbs of New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., as well as much of New England — have such high vaccination rates that even the unvaccinated are partly protected by the low number of cases.
Conservative communities, on the other hand, have been walloped by the highly contagious delta variant.
Since delta began circulating widely in the United States, COVID has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70% of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst.
In counties where Trump won less than 32% of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.
And the gap will probably keep growing.
Some of the vaccination gap stems from the libertarian instincts of many Republicans. “They understand freedom as being left alone to make their own choices, and they resent being told what to do,” William Galston has written in The Wall Street Journal.
But philosophy is only a partial explanation. In much of the rest of the world, vaccine attitudes do not break down along right-left lines, and some conservative leaders have responded effectively to the pandemic. So have a few Republican governors in the United States. “It didn’t have to be this way,” German Lopez of Vox has written.
What distinguishes the United States is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.
“With very little resistance from party leaders,” my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote this summer, many Republicans “have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.”
With the death count rising, at least a few Republicans appear to be worried about what their party and its allies have sown.
In an article this month for Breitbart, the right-wing website formerly run by Steve Bannon, John Nolte argued that the partisan gap in vaccination rates was part of a liberal plot. Liberals like President Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Howard Stern have tried so hard to persuade people to get vaccinated, because they know that Republican voters will do the opposite of whatever they say, Nolte wrote.
His argument is certainly bizarre, given that Democratic politicians have been imploring all Americans to get vaccinated and many Republican politicians have not. But Nolte did offer a glimpse at a creeping political fear among some Republicans.
“Right now, a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a lifesaving vaccine,” he wrote. “In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?”
How might more conservative Americans be persuaded to get vaccinated?
One intriguing anecdote involves the football team at the University of Mississippi, which is entirely vaccinated even though the state has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. Coaches there emphasized the tangible, short-term costs of getting COVID, rather than the more remote chance of death: The players might have to miss a game, and the team might have to forfeit it, if they tested positive.
A related message is duty, Timothy Carney has written in The Washington Examiner. If Carney had refused to get vaccinated, he explained, he would have risked loading more work onto his wife, his colleagues and his partner in teaching Sunday school, as well as forced his children to miss school.
In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan has argued that fear remains the best motivator, based on her interviews with Tucker Carlson viewers who nonetheless have been vaccinated. And Daniel Darling, an evangelical author, has said that one-on-one conversations encouraging conservatives to talk with their doctors will have more success than any top-down campaign.
Then again, Darling’s message also shows why the vaccination gap exists in the first place. After he wrote an op-ed in USA Today about his decision to get vaccinated, Darling’s employer — NRB, an association of Christian broadcasters — fired him.
A Hong Kong government delegation met Chinese officials to discuss the possibility of resuming quarantine-free travel between the city and the mainland on Sunday.
The group was led by Hong Kong’s chief secretary for administration, John Lee, and also included the city’s secretary for food and health and members of the government’s scientific advisory group.
The delegation was hosted by China’s Hong Kong and Macau affairs office and took place in Shenzhen, according to a Hong Kong government statement released Sunday evening.
The statement said that Huang Liuquan, deputy director at the office, “attached great importance” to Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam’s request for quarantine-free travel with the mainland, but did not provide any further details on when or how that might resume.
The Hong Kong government has made a reopening with the mainland, which is a major source of tourism and retail revenue, a priority. It has eschewed any reopening of international borders for a tight zero-Covid strategy, which it hopes will convince mainland authorities to reopen its borders to arrivals from the city.
Hong Kong’s travel and quarantine measures, which are some of the strictest in the world, have kept cases to a minimum, with the city recording a total of just over 12,000 cases since the pandemic began.
Mainland experts attending the meeting acknowledged Hong Kong’s efforts to keep locally-acquired Covid cases at or close to zero. The statement added that the two sides would hold a second meeting as soon as possible to further discuss “the resumption of quarantine-free travel in a gradual and orderly manner”.
Earlier this month, the Hong Kong government announced that it would allow 2,000 mainland arrivals each day to enter the city without having to undergo quarantine. Most arrivals to the city must spend at least 14 days in a designated hotel on arrival, rising to 21 days for arrivals from areas deemed high risk.
Those travelling to the mainland from Hong Kong, however, must still undergo quarantine, which in most cases lasts at least 14 days.
The number of people dying from Covid-19 is still increasing in the United States—at more than 2,000 fatalities per day—though there are some signs of reprieve as cases and hospitalizations continue to trend downwards from their peaks in early September.
A nurse wearing protective gloves holds the hand of a patient.
AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. hit a 7-day average of over 2,000 deaths for the first time since March on September 18 and has since seen that number rise to 2,031 Americans dead from Covid-19 each day, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
The death rate has risen 23% since two weeks ago, when the country was tallying just over 1,650 deaths per day, and 65% from the 1,234 deaths reported each day at this time in August.
Leading the country in recent mortalities are Alabama, which is clocking 2.37 deaths per 100,000 residents after seeing deaths rise 211% over the past two weeks, Florida (1.56 per 100,000), South Carolina (1.29), Alaska (1.23) and West Virginia (1.22).
While deaths are rising nationwide due to surges in states with low vaccination rates, new cases and hospitalizations have been decreasing steadily since earlier this month, The Times data show.
At 119,883 per day, new cases have decreased by about a third since the country’s peak of 175,822 on September 13.
Meanwhile, after hovering at more than 100,000 for the first two weeks of September, coronavirus-linked hospitalizations have dropped about 15% to 86,043.
A Bloomberg analysis of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data indicated the number of people dying from Covid-19 in U.S. hospitals may have reached its peak. Hospital deaths have accounted for about 70% of all Covid-19 deaths throughout the pandemic and are typically a good indicator of the direction this statistic is moving, Bloomberg explained. Deaths were down 8.9% from the recent peak on September 16 as of Friday, signaling overall deaths—which lag behind cases and deaths—may be moving in this direction too.
Cases and hospitalizations began surging in late July and early August due to the increasing prevalence of the more infectious delta variant. Despite the widespread availability of vaccines, many states have struggled to get their populations inoculated, and it is those states that have battled the most severe outbreaks this fall. Experts are warning Americans to remain vigilant even if Covid-19 appears to be subsiding in their communities.
688,157. That’s how many Americans have died from Covid-19, making it the deadliest pandemic in American history.
“675,000 American Deaths: Coronavirus Now Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu” (Forbes)
A Hong Kong government delegation met Chinese officials to discuss the possibility of resuming quarantine-free travel between the city and the mainland on Sunday.
The group was led by Hong Kong’s chief secretary for administration, John Lee, and also included the city’s secretary for food and health and members of the government’s scientific advisory group.
The delegation was hosted by China’s Hong Kong and Macau affairs office and took place in Shenzhen, according to a Hong Kong government statement released Sunday evening.
The statement said that Huang Liuquan, deputy director at the office, “attached great importance” to Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam’s request for quarantine-free travel with the mainland, but did not provide any further details on when or how that might resume.
The Hong Kong government has made a reopening with the mainland, which is a major source of tourism and retail revenue, a priority. It has eschewed any reopening of international borders for a tight zero-Covid strategy, which it hopes will convince mainland authorities to reopen its borders to arrivals from the city.
Hong Kong’s travel and quarantine measures, which are some of the strictest in the world, have kept cases to a minimum, with the city recording a total of just over 12,000 cases since the pandemic began.
Mainland experts attending the meeting acknowledged Hong Kong’s efforts to keep locally-acquired Covid cases at or close to zero. The statement added that the two sides would hold a second meeting as soon as possible to further discuss “the resumption of quarantine-free travel in a gradual and orderly manner”.
Earlier this month, the Hong Kong government announced that it would allow 2,000 mainland arrivals each day to enter the city without having to undergo quarantine. Most arrivals to the city must spend at least 14 days in a designated hotel on arrival, rising to 21 days for arrivals from areas deemed high risk.
Those travelling to the mainland from Hong Kong, however, must still undergo quarantine, which in most cases lasts at least 14 days.
Alaska, once a leader in vaccinating its citizens, is now in the throes of its worst coronavirus surge of the pandemic, as the Delta variant rips through the state, swamping hospitals with patients.
As of Thursday, the state was averaging 125 new cases a day for every 100,000 people, more than any other in the nation, according to recent data trends collected by The New York Times. That figure has shot up by 42 percent in the last two weeks, and by more than twentyfold since early July.
200 hospitalized
7–day average
212
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data. Currently hospitalized is the most recent number of patients with Covid-19 reported by hospitals in the state for the four days prior. Dips and spikes could be due to inconsistent reporting by hospitals. Hospitalization numbers early in the pandemic are undercounts due to incomplete reporting by hospitals to the federal government.
On Wednesday, the state said it had activated “crisis standards of care,” giving hospitals legal protections for triage decisions that force them to give some patients substandard care. The state also announced an $87 million contract to bring in hundreds of temporary health care workers.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said that while hospitals were strained, he did not see a need to implement restrictions aimed at curbing transmission. Still, he encouraged people who had not yet received a vaccination to seriously consider it.
“We have the tools available to us for individuals to be able to take care of themselves,” Mr. Dunleavy said. While the state led the nation in vaccinations early in the year, it has been lagging in recent months, with under half of its population fully vaccinated, compared with 55 percent nationally, according to federal data.
Jared Kosin, the head of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association, called the surge “crippling” in an interview on Tuesday. He added that hospitals were full, and health care workers were emotionally depleted. Patients recently were kept waiting for care in their cars outside overwhelmed emergency rooms.
There is growing anxiety in outlying communities that depend on transferring seriously ill patients to hospitals in Anchorage, Mr. Kosin said. Transfers are getting harder to arrange and are often delayed, he said.
“We are all wondering where this goes, and whether that transfer will be available, even tomorrow,” Mr. Kosin said.
Critically ill people in rural areas, where many Alaska Natives reside, often have to be taken by plane to a hospital that can provide the treatment they need, said Dr. Philippe Amstislavski, an associate professor of public health at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
“Unlike in the lower 48, you don’t have that ability to move people quickly, because of the distances and remoteness,” said Dr. Amstislavski, who was formerly the public health manager for the Interior Region of Alaska, focusing on rural and predominantly Alaska Native communities.
Mr. Kosin said that if hospitalizations rise much further, hospitals and clinics around the state could be forced to apply crisis standards of care and more extreme triage decisions. “That is the worst-case scenario we could be heading to,” he said.
Alaska Natives, who have historically suffered from health disparities in the state, are disproportionately struggling during the latest virus wave, Dr. Amstislavski said.
Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, said several factors may be contributing to the surge, including summer tourists bringing in and spreading the virus.
“We’re hoping that as the snow falls and we have less people visiting, those numbers will settle down,” Dr. Zink said in an interview Tuesday night.
On the other hand, she noted that cooling weather drives residents indoors, where the virus spreads more readily.
The state’s Canadian neighbors to the east, Yukon and British Columbia, have not suffered such severe outbreaks, Dr. Amstislavski said, possibly because of that country’s stricter travel restrictions and less strained health care system.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday overruled a recommendation by an agency advisory panel that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for frontline workers. It was a highly unusual move for the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, but aligned C.D.C. policy with the Food and Drug Administration’s endorsements over her own agency’s advisers.
The C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday recommended the boosters for a wide range of Americans, including tens of millions of older adults and younger people at high risk for the disease. But they excluded health care workers, teachers and others whose jobs put them at risk. That put their recommendations at odds with the F.D.A.’s authorization of booster shots for all adults with a high occupational risk.
Dr. Walensky’s decision was a boost for President Biden’s campaign to give a broad swathe of Americans access to boosters. The White House had come under criticism for getting ahead of the regulatory process.
The C.D.C.’s statement arrived well past midnight, a sign of the complicated and confusing decision-making surrounding the boosters. The C.D.C. advisers similarly spent two days debating who should get boosters and when, and could not agree on whether occupational risk should qualify as a criterion.
“I am surprised that Dr. Walensky overturned one of the four A.C.I.P. votes today, and I believe others will be as well,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford and the American Academy of Pediatrics liaison to the committee.
But the vote on boosters for occupational risk “was close,” Dr. Maldonado said, and agreed with Dr. Walensky’s decision.
“This addresses not only waning immunity but those at high risk of exposure,” Dr. Maldonado added.
Minutes before Dr. Walensky’s statement, Dr. Amanda Cohn, who oversaw the two-day meeting of the panel, tried to prepare the advisers for the director’s decision.
“Dr. Walensky is reversing the decision to not recommend use of a booster dose in persons at high risk for occupational or institutional exposure,” Dr. Cohn wrote in the email. “I am hoping to share this news with you before you see it in the press.”
Dr. Walensky’s decision to go against her own agency’s advisers came as a surprise to at least some of her staff members: The C.D.C. director’s endorsement of the advisory committee’s recommendations is typically just a formality. Hours before her statement, agency insiders predicted she would stick with the usual protocol because doing otherwise would undermine the process and upset the advisers as well as her own staff.
But experts outside the C.D.C. said Dr. Walensky may have had no choice but to align herself with the F.D.A.’s decision. “There’s a complexity here, because Dr. Walensky was part of the White House announcement” on boosters, noted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Dr. Walensky said providing booster shots to health care workers and others who risk contracting the disease on the job would “best serve the nation’s public health needs.”
A committee of scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted on Thursday to recommend booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to many Americans who were fully inoculated with the same vaccine. The panel advised that those booster shots go to older Americans and people with certain medical conditions, but excluded those at risk because of their jobs.
But the panel was not asked to judge whether people who received the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines should receive Pfizer boosters. The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing data for a Moderna booster, but has not received an application from Johnson & Johnson for a booster of its vaccine.
Several experts nevertheless supported a mix-and-match strategy, and signaled that they would revisit the issue as new data emerge.
The advisers wrestled with the practicalities of endorsing a booster shot of Pfizer’s vaccine, but not the other two. Recipients of those vaccines may rightly feel resentful of being asked to wait if the evidence suggests they need boosters, they noted.
“I just don’t understand how, later this afternoon, we can say to people 65 and older, ‘You’re at risk for severe disease and death, but only half of you can protect yourselves right now,’” said Dr. Sarah Long, a pediatrician and infectious diseases expert at Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.
“It might be the right thing to do,” she said. “It just doesn’t sound like a good public health policy.”
Some experts seemed to suggest on Wednesday that it might be better to hold off on recommending any booster shots until recipients of all three vaccines could qualify for them.
Moderna’s authorization may arrive in a few days, or weeks. The company has applied for authorization of a booster carrying half the dosage given in the first two shots, which has delayed the F.D.A.’s deliberations.
Federal regulators have indicated that there was insufficient evidence for mixing first shots of the Moderna vaccine with a Pfizer booster, or vice versa.
A committee of scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted on Thursday to recommend booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to many Americans, including older people and those with certain underlying medical conditions, but excluded those at risk because of their jobs. The panel debated a number of thorny questions before reaching a decision that will shape the federal government’s guidance.
But who exactly are those experts on the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices?
According to the agency, the committee includes 15 voting members who are responsible for making recommendations on all kinds of vaccines. Their recommendations are very likely to influence who gets the booster shots in practice. Members are selected by the Secretary of Health and Human Services after a lengthy nomination process.
Fourteen members are medical practitioners and scientists with expertise in fields like vaccinology, immunology, pediatrics and public health. The 15th is a consumer representative who provides perspectives on the social and community aspects of vaccination.
Dr. Grace M. Lee is the chair of the committee. She is associate chief medical officer at the Stanford Children’s Health system, and a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Here are the other voting members:
Dr. Kevin A. Ault is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist.
Lynn Bahta, a registered nurse and public health expert, is the immunization program consultant for the Minnesota Department of Health.
Dr. Beth P. Bell is a clinical professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where she leads efforts to improve work in the areas of pandemic preparedness and global health security.
Dr. Oliver Brooks is the chief medical officer at Watts Healthcare Corp. in Los Angeles, and served as co-chair of the California working group that oversaw Covid-19 vaccine allocation in the state.
Dr. Wilbur H. Chen is a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of the university’s travel medicine practice.
Dr. Sybil Cineas is an internal medicine and pediatric expert and the associate program director for the Brown Combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program in Providence, R.I.
Dr. Matthew Daley is a practicing pediatrician and a vaccine safety investigator at the Institute for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, in Aurora, Colo. He is also an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Dr. Camille N. Kotton is an infectious disease clinician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. James Loehr is a practicing family physician in Rochester and Ithaca, N.Y.
Dr. Sarah S. Long is a professor of pediatrics at Drexel University College of Medicine, and a practicing physician in Philadelphia specializing in infectious diseases in children.
Veronica V. McNally is the chief executive officer of the Franny Strong Foundation in East Lansing, Mich., which promotes vaccinations and education about vaccines. The foundation is named for her daughter, who died of whooping cough.
Dr. Katherine A. Poehling is a professor of pediatrics and of epidemiology and prevention at the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Dr. Pablo J. Sanchez is a professor of pediatrics with expertise in neonatal and perinatal infections at The Ohio State University — Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot is an internist and infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.
African public health experts on Thursday hailed President Biden’s plan to expand global coronavirus vaccine donations, but warned that his ambitious goals would not be met without timelier deliveries and greater transparency about when and how many doses were coming.
Africa, the continent with the lowest Covid-19 vaccination rate, has suffered not only from a shortage of vaccine doses but also from delayed and inconsistent deliveries. Although supplies have been increasing — four million doses arrived over the past week from Covax, the global vaccine-sharing facility — African countries have still received only one-third of the doses they were promised for this year, experts said at a virtual briefing held by the World Health Organization.
“The first thing to say is, we appreciate all the donations that were pledged by the rich countries and those who have doses to offer,” said Githinji Gitahi, chief executive of Amref Health Africa, a charity. “But we call for a commitment to deliver on those, and deliver in a timely manner.”
Anger over the rich-poor divide in vaccine access was a consistent theme among the leaders of African countries speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
“Unfortunately, the global rollout of the vaccine has not been impervious to the scourge of inequality,” said President Hage G. Geingob of Namibia. He called the situation “vaccine apartheid.”
President João Lourenço of Angola said it was “shocking to see the disparity between some nations and others with respect to availability of vaccines.”
At a summit on Wednesday, Mr. Biden pledged to donate an additional 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, nearly doubling the United States’ total committed donations to 1.1 billion doses, more than any other country. But only 300 million of the doses are expected to be shipped this year, leaving poorer nations with the prospect of a longer wait.
Mr. Biden embraced the target of vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s people by the end of 2022. But that would require raising the pace of vaccinations in Africa sevenfold, to about 150 million doses a month, said Benido Impouma, a program director with the World Health Organization’s Africa program.
“It is in every country’s interest that this happen quickly,” Dr. Impouma said of speeding up the continent’s vaccination campaign. “The longer the delay in rolling out the vaccine, the greater the risk of other challenges emerging,” he added, including the rise of more troubling coronavirus variants.
To date, he and others said, vaccine deliveries to Africa have been not only slow and scant, but also unpredictable. Many shipments have arrived with little notice, hampering health systems’ ability to administer them, and with doses soon to expire.
Richard Mihigo, coordinator of the W.H.O. immunizations program in Africa, said that the agency had analyzed the vaccine shipments and found that the average shelf life of doses that reached Africa was two to three months. That wasn’t long enough for health systems to get the doses to people who needed them, many of whom lived far from health facilities, he said.
“Most of time the news about donations comes on short notice, within a couple of days,” Dr. Mihigo said. “Countries do not have time to prepare. To change this paradigm, we need a bit more predictability on doses, how many doses, when they are coming.”
The surfeit of soon-to-expire doses has also contributed to vaccine hesitancy in parts of Africa, said Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the National Institute for Biomedical Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“People consider that a short shelf life, such as three months, is a synonym for bad quality,” he said.
Rick Gladstone contributed reporting.
Cuba expects to reach “full immunization” against Covid-19 with its own vaccines by the end of the year, the president of the island nation told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, whose 11 million citizens have long been isolated by the American embargo, devoted much of his recorded address to fulminating against the United States for what he called its policies of economic coercion and deprivation, which he said were meant “to erase the Cuban revolution from the political map to the world.”
But he also extolled Cuba’s medical and scientific communities for what he described as their heroic achievements in creating vaccines to combat the pandemic. More than one-third of the Cuban population has been fully vaccinated with them, he said.
“We expect to achieve full immunization by the end of 2021, which will make it possible for us to advance in the struggle against the new outbreak of the pandemic,” Mr. Diaz-Canel said.
Cuba has been especially hard hit recently by the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which sent new case reports soaring over the summer and worsened shortages of basic medical supplies in Cuba. A lack of medicines, medical oxygen and coronavirus tests increased social tensions and prompted anti-government protests in July. Mexico shipped supplies of oxygen to Cuba last month, and activists in the United States sent two million syringes to the island.
As proud as the Cuban government is of its vaccines, the shots have yet to receive approval from the World Health Organization. Data from clinical trials of the vaccines have yet to be published in international peer-reviewed journals.
Even so, Cuba’s claimed self-sufficiency in vaccinating against Covid-19 is conspicuous in the landscape of vaccination inequality around the world, where most of the vaccine doses made so far have gone to the most affluent nations, while many people in poorer countries have yet to get their first doses.
This month Cuba began vaccinating children as young as 2 against the coronavirus, making it the only country so far to immunize children that young.
The move came against the backdrop of prolonged closures of Cuba’s schools through most of the pandemic, which has generated enormous frustration among parents. Online learning is not a practical option in Cuba because of the high cost of internet access there.
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Over the past 20 years, significant health gains have been made in Afghanistan in reducing maternal and child mortality, moving towards polio eradication, and more. Those gains are now at severe risk with the country’s health system on the brink of collapse. There has been a surge in cases of measles and diarrhea. Almost 50 percent of children are at high — at risk of malnutrition. The resurgence of polio is a major risk, and 2.1 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine remain unused. Unless urgent action is taken, Afghanistan faces an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. Health workers are leaving, creating a brain drain that will have consequences for years to come. We visited a hospital where we met some nurses who have stayed. My heart broke when they told me they have not been paid in three months. The focus of our efforts now is to support and sustain the Sehatmandi Project, which is the backbone of Afghanistan’s health system, providing care for millions of people through 2,300 health facilities, including in remote areas. But a funding pause by major donors — only 17 percent of these facilities are fully functional. And two-thirds have stockouts of essential medicines.
Nearly one-quarter of the hospitals treating Covid-19 in Afghanistan have closed in recent weeks, and the country’s efforts to respond to the pandemic have declined, World Health Organization officials said Wednesday.
The W.H.O. issued an urgent warning on Wednesday, saying that Afghanistan is on the brink of “an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.”
The notice followed a recent visit to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where W.H.O. leaders met with the leadership of the Taliban, which is now in control of the country. The W.H.O. officials also met with United Nations partners, health care workers and patients.
“Cuts in donor support to the country’s largest health project, Sehatmandi, has left thousands of health facilities without funding for medical supplies and salaries for health staff,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the W.H.O., and Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the organization’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Roughly two-thirds of the country’s health facilities are part of Sehatmandi, a three-year, $600 million project administered by the World Bank and financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the European Union, the World Bank and other donors.
Because funds for the project were funneled through the Ministry of Public Health, donors withdrew their support after the Taliban seized power. Now, only one-sixth of all Sehatmandi facilities are fully functional, according to the W.H.O.
“Many of these facilities have now reduced operations or shut down, forcing health providers to make hard decisions on who to save and who to let die,” the statement said.
Officials also said that nine of the 37 hospitals treating Covid-19 in Afghanistan have closed, and coronavirus surveillance, testing and vaccination efforts have contracted.
Afghanistan, which emerged from a surge in virus infections at the end of June, is starting to see cases rise again, this time involving the highly contagious Delta variant.
Before last month, the W.H.O. said, about 2.2 million people, or about 6 percent of Afghanistan’s population, had been vaccinated against Covid-19. But in recent weeks, the organization said, vaccination rates have slowed markedly, and some 1.8 million vaccine doses in the country remain unused.
The country’s acting health minister and last remaining holdover from the pre-Taliban Cabinet, Dr. Wahid Majrooh, stepped down on Tuesday.
Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s under secretary for emergency relief, said on Wednesday that he was releasing $45 million to help prevent Afghanistan’s health care system from collapsing.
“Medicines, medical supplies and fuel are running out in Afghanistan,” Mr. Griffiths said in a statement. “Cold chains are compromised. Essential health care workers are not being paid.”
On top of the threat of a public health crisis, new figures released by the World Food Program suggest that 95 percent of Afghans lack secure access to adequate food, a situation that could worsen in the winter, when many remote communities are likely to be cut off from outside support for several months.
— Lauren Katzenberg
Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the New York State health commissioner, has submitted his resignation, following political pressure for his removal over his role in the state’s pandemic response under former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who announced Dr. Zucker’s resignation on Thursday, said that she agreed with his decision and that he would “stay on board” until she found a replacement.
Dr. Zucker, whom Mr. Cuomo appointed to the position in 2015, came under fire for his possible involvement in helping obscure the coronavirus death toll in the state’s nursing homes, and in withholding health data from the Legislature last year.
Since Mr. Cuomo resigned last month, Ms. Hochul has been pressed by Republicans, and even some Democrats, to dismiss Dr. Zucker. Urging patience, Ms. Hochul had said she would take up to 45 days, or until early October, to decide whether to retain Dr. Zucker and other cabinet officials from the Cuomo era.
“I thank Dr. Zucker for his willingness to stay on board, so we don’t have a gap in leadership until a person is identified,” Governor Hochul said on Thursday. “I think I made it very clear on my first day in office that I’d be looking to build a new team.”
The state’s response to the pandemic’s ravaging of nursing homes, and the handling of death data from the facilities, is the subject of a federal investigation, as well as an inquiry being led by the State Assembly.
Australia’s second most populous state announced that some residents stranded in surrounding regions because of the pandemic would be able to travel back home starting Sept. 30.
On Thursday, the state premier, Daniel Andrews, said that people who had been stuck in New South Wales for “a lengthy period of time” could return to Victoria, if they were fully vaccinated and tested negative for the coronavirus. They must quarantine for 14 days.
“We have on numerous occasions sent our apologies to them and made it clear we understand just how challenging it is and we wish things were different,” he said.
Australia has imposed some of the harshest restrictions in the world to help contain the spread of the virus, with individual states employing lockdowns that have prevented people from returning to their cities.
The daily average of new cases has dropped 13 percent in the past two weeks in Australia, which has lived through several lockdowns since the start of the pandemic. While its vaccination kickoff had a slow start, the nation has to date fully vaccinated 39 percent of its population. Recently the country began vaccinating children as young as 12.
While travel restrictions have eased for many Australians, and the tourism ministry has even announced a possible reopening of its borders by Christmas, the country is still facing setbacks with new infections breaking out.
A makeup artist working on an Australian reality television program tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this week, sending over 130,000 Australians into yet another lockdown, according to Chris Cherry, the mayor of Tweed Shire, part of the area in northern New South Wales that has been placed under restrictions for seven days.
According to ABC News, the 31-year-old woman visited various businesses like restaurants and cafes without checking in via QR code. The police have charged her with breaching several public health regulations, including her work travel exemption guidelines.
Michael Lyon, the mayor of neighboring Byron Shire, shared his frustration over going back into lockdown in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
“It is so devastating to be in lockdown again and it is clear the ‘honour’ system relied on by the state government is deeply flawed,” he wrote. “Perhaps our calls for a tightening of restrictions will now finally be heeded.”
When the Biden administration announced a mandate that employees be vaccinated or tested regularly at companies with 100 or more employees, business leaders responded with a barrage of questions. Among smaller companies, one loomed especially large: Why 100?
It’s an appealingly round, easy-to-remember number, and it captures a broad section of the American work force. President Biden estimated that his order would apply to 80 million employees and cover two-thirds of all workers.
But as a dividing line between a “big” business and a “small” one, it’s a threshold not found in any other major federal or state law. There was no explanation for how or why the number was chosen. And for entrepreneurs who employ a smattering of workers, that’s an increasingly common challenge: Every time lawmakers invent a new regulation, they also make up a new definition of which businesses count as small.
The Affordable Care Act set 50 as the number of workers after which employers would be required to offer health insurance. That edict, which took full effect in 2016, led to an intense, vocal backlash from owners who feared that the requirement would bankrupt them, with some even paring back their business to keep their employee roster under the limit.
The mandate’s actual costs turned out to be fairly muted for most — the law helped stabilize insurance prices in the notoriously erratic market for small-group plans — and, after surviving many legal and political efforts to dismantle it, the health care law has become a bedrock piece of federal policy. So why not use 50 employees as the boundary for the vaccination mandate?
The White House isn’t saying; officials did not respond to repeated questions about the 100-person criterion. The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for drawing up the rules, has not yet explained how and when the mandate will be enforced.
The fate of unvaccinated employees in New York City’s largest private hospital system was uncertain Wednesday night, as the deadline to get a first shot of a Covid-19 vaccine drew near.
New York State’s vaccination mandate for workers at hospitals and nursing homes doesn’t require a first shot until Monday, Sept. 27. But NewYork-Presbyterian, the city’s largest private hospital network, has ordered its 48,000 employees to get vaccinated on a faster timeline, requiring a first dose no later than Wednesday.
In recent weeks, the hospital had warned employees that those who remained unvaccinated without a legitimate exemption “will be deemed to have opted to resign,” according to an email sent to some employees.
A hospital spokeswoman, Alexandra Langan, declined to comment on Wednesday afternoon about how many employees faced the loss of their jobs.
More than 90 percent of NewYork-Presbyterian employees had gotten a first dose by early last week, according to a court affidavit by Shaun E. Smith, NewYork-Presbyterian’s chief human resources officer. In recent days, more holdouts have gotten vaccinated, according to interviews. But that still left hundreds, if not thousands, of employees unvaccinated.
About 200 employees have valid medical exemptions, according to Mr. Smith’s affidavit. And at least 1,364 employees had sought religious exemptions, Mr. Smith said. The hospital had granted about 129 of those requests before the state’s Department of Health reversed course in late August and said religious beliefs no longer qualified for an exemption.
A federal judge has since temporarily ordered the state to refrain from enforcing that policy. For now, NewYork-Presbyterian has said it will not take action against unvaccinated employees who had previously received a religious exemption or had a request pending, according to court filings.
One nurse in an intensive care unit, Maureen A. Buckley, said in a lawsuit that NewYork-Presbyterian suspended her without pay last week because she remained unvaccinated against Covid-19. In court papers, she said that the hospital system denied her a medical exemption and ignored her efforts to obtain a religious exemption. Reached by phone Wednesday evening, she declined to comment further, explaining that she was “still in the middle of negotiating with the hospital.”
At more than 90 percent, the vaccination rate within the NewYork-Presbyterian system is higher than at many other hospitals. At St. Barnabas Hospital, an independent safety-net hospital in the Bronx, just under 80 percent of staff are vaccinated against Covid-19, the hospital’s chief medical officer, Eric Appelbaum, said. He expressed hope the rate would climb as Monday — the state-mandated deadline — approached. “Some folks are like that: ‘If the deadline is Friday morning, I’ll do it Friday morning,’” he said.
Holdouts at New York hospitals have cited a range of reasons for not getting vaccinated: some say they distrust the safety of the vaccine, or worry about fertility, while others object to the use of cell lines derived from aborted fetuses in the development or production or testing of Covid-19 vaccines, according to interviews and court records.
Another major New York hospital network, Mount Sinai Health System, had told employees to get vaccinated by Sept. 13, but a spokeswoman said she did not know if anyone had yet been placed on leave or fired for not complying.
Because of an editing error, a caption for a photograph in an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the number of employees in the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital network. There are 48,000, not 36,000.
It was a tailgate unlike any other on Sunday morning, as a strange truck circled the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.
“Don’t get vaccinated,” the side of the truck said, much to the bewilderment of the Carolina Panthers fans who were there to watch a game against the New Orleans Saints.
Underneath that text was the name of the apparent sponsor, Wilmore Funeral Home, with a link to its website and a phone number.
Images of the mobile advertising truck quickly drew widespread attention on Twitter, as people who were in on the joke applauded the advertisement. “Dope ad campaign,” one tweet said.
The twist was that Wilmore Funeral Home was a fictional business, and its website sent visitors to a vaccine registration page. The phone number belonged to Crenshaw Visions, the advertising agency that owned the truck.
“My voice mail is filled up,” said Garrett Crenshaw, the president of the agency. People have been calling him for days to criticize or compliment the ad, or simply to ask questions about the Covid vaccine.
That discourse is exactly why BooneOakley, a North Carolina advertising agency, created and funded the ad, said David Oakley, the president of the agency.
“A lot of the advertising that’s out there right now is just, ‘Get the shot,’” he said. “We wanted something that made people think.”
The advertisement was created as government officials across the country struggle to vaccinate people who are hesitant about the vaccine’s origins and side effects, among other things. In North Carolina, just under half of all people are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
Mr. Oakley said that the company didn’t realize how much the message would resonate with people.
An hour after the truck left the company’s parking lot on Sunday, pictures of the ad were already drawing attention on social media.
“Clearly, it has hit a chord,” he said. “For every penny that we spent for the board, if one person got vaccinated for it, it would have been worthwhile.”
Sunday’s ad wasn’t the agency’s first to draw widespread attention. In October 2000, just weeks before the presidential election, BooneOakley ran a billboard advertisement for a job-listing site that said “Gore 2000” next to a picture of George W. Bush.
A few days later, it added a banner at the bottom of the ad that said, “Today’s job opening: proofreader.”
SYDNEY, Australia — In the war against the coronavirus’s Delta variant, few if any democracies have demanded as much of their people as Australia.
In the middle of the latest lockdowns, the police in Sydney gave hefty fines to three mothers with strollers chatting in a park. Melbourne’s playgrounds were wrapped in police tape, and traveling from a state with Covid restrictions to one without — for the lucky few granted permission by the authorities — requires two-week stints in quarantine at a hotel or a remote former mining camp.
There are now two Australias. In Perth, offices, pubs and stadiums are crammed and normal as ever — the payoff for a closed-border approach that has made Western Australia an island within an island. In Sydney, residents are approaching their 14th week of lockdown. The working-class areas with the highest infection rates have faced a heavy police presence, and, until recently, a 9 p.m. curfew and just an hour of outdoor exercise per day.
Is the sacrifice worth it?
Australia is at a crossroads with Covid. The confidence and pride of 2020, when lockdowns and isolation brought outbreaks to heel, have been replaced by doubt, fatigue and a bitter battle over how much freedom or risk should be allowed in a Delta-defined future.
Some states are trying desperately to hold on to what worked before, while New South Wales and Victoria, home to the country’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are being forced by Delta outbreaks to find a more nuanced path forward. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind a plan to reopen when 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated. But the road ahead may not be smooth — as shown by protests this week over a vaccine mandate — and state leaders are still insisting that they will go it alone.
“We might be looking at the country turning the clock back on itself,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a political theorist at the University of Sydney. “There is an explicit insularity and parochialism that now dictates debate.”
Hospitals near a grocery store shooting in Collierville, Tenn., were already struggling to keep up with Covid-19 patients when those injured in the attack arrived in emergency rooms on Thursday.
National Guard troops had been stationed at medical centers to help cope with the influx of Covid-19 patients, and emergency medical providers had recently issued a dire warning to local officials about the strain on hospitals.
3,000 hospitalized
7–day average
3,192
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data. Currently hospitalized is the most recent number of patients with Covid-19 reported by hospitals in the state for the four days prior. Dips and spikes could be due to inconsistent reporting by hospitals. Hospitalization numbers early in the pandemic are undercounts due to incomplete reporting by hospitals to the federal government.
“Currently our system emergency departments are operating dangerously over capacity,” the medical providers wrote on Aug. 16. They added, “We may be unable to provide timely care to everyone and will have to make choices about delivering care to patients based on their probability of survival.”
They expressed particular concern about what could happen in the event of a disaster, given that “the city has no surge capacity to accommodate any additional disaster or unplanned events.”
An average of 96 percent of I.C.U. beds were occupied in Shelby County, Tenn., on Thursday, according to New York Times data. One nearby facility, St. Francis Hospital, reported that its I.C.U. was 100 percent full; another said its I.C.U. was 97 percent full. There were 15 I.C.U. beds available in the five counties in and around Memphis as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Shelby County Health Department.
Officials said at least a dozen people were hurt and one killed inside the Kroger store in Collierville, about 30 miles east of Memphis in Shelby County.
Regional One Health, a hospital in Memphis, had received nine patients injured in the shooting, according to a spokeswoman. She said the hospital had the capacity to accommodate those patients. Baptist Memorial Hospital in Collierville received one patient, who was discharged, and Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis received two, according to a spokeswoman.
Shelby County reported its highest number of Covid-19 cases during the pandemic last month. Those numbers have decreased slightly in recent weeks but remain high, with a seven-day average of 409 cases.
Only 44 percent of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated. Governor Bill Lee recently signed an executive order overruling attempts by local officials to require masks in schools. A federal judge blocked the governor’s order from taking effect in Shelby County on Friday after opponents fought it in court.
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The US is shipping another 2.5 million Covid vaccine doses to Bangladesh, a White House official told AFP on Thursday, after the Biden administration announced a ramping up of global donations.
The latest shipment – 2,508,480 Pfizer doses – brings the total of US shots to the country above nine million.
Packing was underway and first deliveries, made through the World Health Organization’s Covax program, will arrive Monday, the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
Doctors in the US are using cutting-edge lung scans to better understand the effects of ‘long Covid’ among patients who suffer severe symptoms months after their initial bout of infection.
The scans by 4DMedical allow physicians to detect areas of high and low lung ventilation using existing equipment in hospitals, said founder and chief executive Andreas Fouras.
The ‘four dimensions’ refers to the scan’s ability to measure the phases of breath as it passes into and out of the lungs.
The hospital in California is one of several across the US where the technology is being tested, Reuters reports.
A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel recommended a booster shot of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for Americans aged 65 and older and some adults with underlying medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease.
The panel by a vote of 9-6 declined to recommend boosters for adults ages 18 to 64 who live or work in institutions with high risk of contracting the virus, based on individual risk, such as healthcare workers, teachers and residents of homeless shelters and prisons. Some panel members cited the difficulty of implementing such a proposal.
Panel member Lynn Bahta, who works with the Minnesota Department of Health, voted against that measure, which would have broadly increased availability. “I don’t think we have the data,” to support boosters in that group yet, she said.
The guidelines voted on by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices still need to be signed off on by agency Director Rochelle Walensky, Reuters reports.
The recommendations are not binding, and states and other jurisdictions could disregard them and use other approaches to administering the booster shots.
The latest Covid developments in Australia:
Stormont ministers have made no changes to current Covid rules in Northern Ireland but have agreed a date when some regulations could be eased.
Following a marathon meeting of the Executive, first minister Paul Givan said ministers were looking towards October 14 as a “significant date” but added that this would be subject to final decisions made the week before. Deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill said it was too early to say they were looking at any date as an “endpoint”. Remaining restrictions in Northern Ireland include social distancing and mask wearing in some indoor hospitality and retail settings, PA reports.
U.S. vice president Kamala Harris has welcomed India’s announcement that it will resume Covid-19 vaccine exports.
India announced this week that it resume exports of vaccines later this year.
India, the world’s biggest maker of vaccines, stopped exports of jabs in April to focus on inoculating its own population as infections soared, Reuters reports.
Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong said he will begin transferring technology to make Covid-19 and cancer vaccines in South Africa.
The US-based doctor, provided details of the plan that will see coronavirus vaccine production starting next year in an online press conference with president Cyril Ramaphosa, AFP reports.
Soon-Shiong’s company NantWorks will transfer the technology within the next three months and vaccine production is expected to begin in 2022.
In addition to the vaccines, the NantWorks initiative will work on cell-based immunotherapies that could lead to new cancer treatments.
The California-based physician Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa, said: “We are now set with the knowledge, technology to manufacture vaccines in Africa.
“It is my goal and hope that Africa will benefit from this technology.”
Delta Air Lines wants other U.S. airlines to share lists of passengers who have been banned during the Covid-19 pandemic for disruptive behavior to help deter the rising number of incidents, according to a memo seen on Thursday by Reuters.
Delta said since the Covid-19 pandemic it has put more than 1,600 people on its “no fly” list. “We’ve also asked other airlines to share their ‘no fly’ list to further protect airline employees across the industry,” the memo seen by Reuters said. “A list of banned customers doesn’t work as well if that customer can fly with another airline.”
Life expectancy for men in the UK has fallen for the first time since current records began 40 years ago because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, figures show.
A boy born between 2018 and 2020 is expected to live until he is 79 years old, down from 79.2 for the period of 2015-17, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It is the first time there has been a decline when comparing non-overlapping time periods since the research began in the early 1980s.
Pamela Cobb, of the ONS centre for ageing and demography, said: “Life expectancy has increased in the UK over the last 40 years, albeit at a slower pace in the last decade. However, the coronavirus pandemic led to a greater number of deaths than normal in 2020.”
Here’s a round up of the latest key developments:
That’s it from me. I’m handing over to my colleague Nadeem Badshah now. Thanks so much for joining me today.
The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized a booster dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for those ages 65 and older and some high-risk Americans, paving the way for a quick rollout of the shots, Reuters reports.
The booster dose is to be administered at least six months after completion of the second dose, and the authorization would include people most susceptible to severe disease and those in jobs that left them at risk, the FDA said.
Those people include “healthcare workers, teachers and daycare staff, grocery workers and those in homeless shelters or prisons, among others,” said Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA.
This pandemic is dynamic and evolving, with new data about vaccine safety and effectiveness becoming available every day.
Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said the agency will “continue to analyze data submitted to the FDA pertaining to the use of booster doses of Covid-19 vaccines and we will make further decisions as appropriate based on the data”.
A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel could vote on Thursday on the use of a third shot of the vaccine, an agency official said at a public meeting of the panel on Wednesday. The CDC will have to approve any booster shot before it can be given.
Joe Biden announced in August the government’s intention to roll out booster shots for people ages 16 and older this week, pending approval by the FDA and CDC.
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Portugal will lift almost all remaining Covid-19 restrictions, allowing full occupancy in restaurants and cultural venues from 1 October, the prime minister, Antonio Costa, said on Thursday.
Costa told a news conference:
As most of the restrictions imposed by law disappear, we are going to enter a phase that is based on the responsibility of everyone.
We must not forget that the pandemic is not over.
Among the few measures that remain in place, mask-wearing is compulsory in public transport, at large events, in nursing homes, hospitals, shopping malls and hypermarkets. Masks ceased being compulsory outdoors last week, Reuters reports.
As Portugal has now fully vaccinated more than 8.5 million people – or 83.4% of its population – nightclubs and bars will be allowed to reopen, after having been shut since March 2020, Costa said.
However, customers will have to show a digital vaccination certificate or a negative Covid-19 test.
Portugal reported 885 new coronavirus cases on Thursday and five deaths. That brings the total tally of cases to 1,064,876 – or around one in 10 Portuguese – and 17,938 deaths.
Covid is unlikely to mutate into a deadlier, vaccine-evading, variant because it’s run out of “places to go” , the creator of the Oxford jab has said.
Dame Sarah Gilbert said coronavirus is likely to become less severe in its effects. Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine webinar on Wednesday, she said: “We normally see that viruses become less virulent as they circulate more easily and there is no reason to think we will have a more virulent version of Sars-CoV-2.”
Dame Sarah said that some variations were to be expected but predicted that coronavirus would eventually become like the flu virus, saying: “What tends to happen over time is there’s just a slow drift, that’s what happens with flu viruses. You see small changes accumulating over a period of time and then we have the opportunity to react to that.”
Dame Sarah explained why she thought it wasn’t likely that a new vaccine-evading variant of coronavirus would emerge. She said: “The virus can’t completely mutate because its spike protein has to interact with the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the human cell, in order to get inside that cell.
“If it changes its spike protein so much that it can’t interact with that receptor, then it’s not going to be able to get inside the cell. So there aren’t very many places for the virus to go to have something that will evade immunity but still be a really infectious virus.”
Dame Sarah said that, as Covid-19 transitions to a more seasonal virus, there will be a general immunity building up in the population. She said: “We tend to see slow genetic drift of the virus and there will be gradual immunity developing in the population as there is to all the other seasonal coronaviruses.
“There are four of them and they’ve been circulating for decades and we’re not even aware of them.
“So we already live with four different human coronaviruses that we don’t really ever think about very much and eventually Sars-CoV-2 will become one of those. The question of how long it’s going to take to get there and what measures we’re going to have to take to manage it in the meantime.”
So far the coronavirus variants that are better at evading the vaccine have not been able to make much impact as the highly-infectious Delta variant continues to dominate the number of cases.
Professor Sharon Peacock, the executive director of the Covid-19 UK Genomics Consortium, also told the webinar: “It’s watch and wait, but Delta is top of the list and other variants are not particularly concerning at the moment.
“It has been pretty quiet since Delta emerged and it would be nice to think there won’t be any new variants of concern. If I was pushed to predict, I think there will be new variants emerging over time and I think there is still quite a lot of road to travel down with this virus.”
This week, trials began in Manchester on a Covid booster jab that is designed to offer increased immunity against a wider range of variants.
The number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States seems to have peaked, with cases in states hit hard by the delta variant earlier edging downward over the last week, according to an analysis by NBC News. It’s the longest sustained decline in cases in nearly three months, giving hope to some leading pandemic forecasters.
Some hospitals in areas of the country with low vaccination rates are still in crisis mode, but overall the hospitalization rate in the U.S. has dropped, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This week, Covid deaths in the U.S. topped 685,027, more than the estimated 675,000 people who died during the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic. On Thursday, Florida, a delta variant hot spot, tied its seven-day reported deaths average set two days before, with 376 lives lost.
Further drop in the number of new Covid cases will be stubbornly slow, experts warn. Yet, there are glimmers of light.
New Covid cases reached a high point Sept. 13, with a seven-day average of cases at 166,807, NBC News data finds. Since then, cases have been gradually dropping nationwide for seven of the last eight days. It’s the most consistent decline since June 23, a time period before the delta variant took hold in the U.S.
“There’s pretty decent agreement that we’re at the peak in cases nationally,” said Shaun Truelove, assistant scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There’s quite a bit of variability between states, but as a whole, it seems that we’re at or near the peak of this thing.”
It will not be a sharp decline like we saw a sharp rise.
Truelove is part of a team that works on the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, a series of models that estimates the trajectory of the virus at both national and local levels. Based on Johns Hopkins projections, cases will continue to decline nationally until at least January 2022, the end point of its current estimates.
Truelove is cautiously optimistic about the coming months. “Barring any rapid new change to the virus, that’s kind of the direction we’re going to continue to go — downward,” he said.
Ali Mokdad, chief strategy officer at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, is also hopeful that — although there may be increases in cases in areas of low vaccination — cases nationally should continue to decline in the near future.
However, he projects a “slow burn” of relatively high case counts.
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“It will not be a sharp decline like we saw a sharp rise,” Mokdad warned.There could be a bump around the December holidays due to seasonality of the virus, potential relaxation of physical distancing measures, and any waning immunity from the vaccines, he said.
The current surge of cases, driven by the delta variant, took off rapidly earlier this summer to the surprise of many infectious disease modelers.
“The delta variant has been really challenging to predict,” Truelove said. “Initially we didn’t think [cases] were going to go as high as they did.”
He is hopeful that although there may be increases in cases in areas of low vaccination, nationally cases should continue to decline in the near future. According to the CDC, more than 182 million people, about 55 percent of the U.S. population, are fully vaccinated against Covid.
Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University, agreed that for the current surge, the peak in cases appears to be over. However, he cautioned that because death counts tend to lag case counts by weeks, the U.S. could still see deaths rise in the next few days before peaking.
“I would imagine that it’s going to be next week that we’re probably going to see the peak of deaths nationally,” he said. “There may be some wiggle room there, but generally I’d say two to four weeks after the peak of cases, you can expect to see the peaks of deaths.”
Shaman is hopeful that despite the lifting of public health measures in certain areas, the U.S. will follow the path of his models and continue to see a downward trajectory in cases over the coming weeks and months.
“We have some governors and officials who are doing what seems to be their best to create conditions that are conducive for the spread of the virus,” he said, referring to the lack of mask mandates and even the outlawing of school mask mandates in certain states.
The Covid forecasters are very careful about saying whether the end of the pandemic in the U.S. is near. The ferocious spread of the delta variant in the country over the summer caught many by surprise.
“It was quite shocking,” Truelove said. “That’s just the nature of this pandemic. It just keeps throwing us curve balls that we wouldn’t have expected and they continue to challenge us.”
He warned that projections could be thrown off by colder weather and the ever present potential for a new variant to emerge.
“Who knows what other variants are going to come around, or if we’re going to have some surge for other reasons that we’re really not anticipating at this point,” Truelove said.
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TOKYO – The fifth wave of COVID-19 in Japan’s capital city subsided Wednesday to levels not seen since July.
Tokyo reported 537 newly infected people, 515 fewer than one week prior, according to public broadcaster NHK and metropolitan government data online. The city has confirmed fewer than 1,000 new infections for seven consecutive days, according to metro data.
The most recent coronavirus surge in Tokyo, which began in July and continued through the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, peaked at 5,773 new cases on Aug. 13. The previous daily record stood at 2,520 on Jan. 7
Tokyo, with an estimated population of 13.4 million, has reported more than 373,000 COVID-19 cases during the pandemic, and more than 2,800 deaths, according to metro data.
Also Wednesday, U.S. Army Japan reported 12 new coronavirus cases since Sept. 15. Eleven are close contacts of another infected person and one tested positive prior to travel outside of Japan, according to an Army news release Wednesday.
At Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo, the principal at Joan K. Mendel Elementary School notified families and staff Wednesday that someone at the school had tested positive for the coronavirus respiratory disease.
The letter from principal Justin Treisch did not indicate that the school would close temporarily or that a class or classes would be canceled. He wrote that contact tracing had been complete and families of individuals who were potential close contacts were notified.
“If you are not contacted by public health officials, your student is not considered to be a close contact,” Treisch wrote.
Okinawa prefecture, where the bulk of U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, reported 162 new infections, according to the prefectural Department of Public Health and Medical Care.
More than half of Japan’s population, 54.5%, or 69 million people, are fully vaccinated, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Japan reported 1,761 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday, and 47 deaths.
Stars and Stripes reporter Mari Higa contributed to this report.
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