British and American officials sparred on Thursday morning over how Britain had beaten the United States to authorizing a coronavirus vaccine, a debate encompassing regulatory standards and politics that has heated up as wealthy countries vie to receive the first shipments of vaccines.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that British regulators had not scrutinized the data as carefully as their American counterparts in the Food and Drug Administration.
“We have the gold standard of a regulatory approach with the F.D.A.,” Dr. Fauci said on Thursday. “The U.K. did not do it as carefully and they got a couple of days ahead.”
Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education secretary, said on Thursday that Britain had won the race to authorize the first fully tested coronavirus vaccine because its regulators were superior.
“We’ve obviously got the best medical regulators,” Mr. Williamson said.
“Much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we.”
Those remarks drew eye rolls from British scientists, but also provoked more serious concerns that any chest-beating by government ministers since Britain became the first Western country to authorize a coronavirus vaccine risked undermining the public’s faith in one.
Several top lawmakers in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government have incorrectly cast Britain’s split with the European Union as the reason it authorized a vaccine first. In fact, Britain remains under the bloc’s regulatory umbrella when it comes to drug and vaccine approvals, and was able to move more quickly because of an old law enabling it to make determinations on its own in public health emergencies.
“Vaccine nationalism has no place in Covid or other public health matters of global significance,” said Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a scientific adviser to the British government. “Science has always been the exit strategy from this horrendous pandemic — that science has been global.”
The day was still young when Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took the virtual stage at a business group gathering and offered the starkest of warnings about the months of pandemic ahead.
“I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation,” Dr. Redfield declared to the Chamber of Commerce Foundation on Wednesday morning.
As the day unfolded, the numbers did nothing to undercut him.
First, Americans learned in the afternoon that the number of people in the hospital for Covid-19 was more than 100,000. That was nearly double the high point in spring, when the pandemic hit its first peak, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Then, not long after evening fell, the daily death toll in the U.S. surpassed the record set in April, when the pandemic hit its first peak in the country. By the time all the figures were in, 2,885 Covid-19 deaths had been reported Wednesday, with no sign of a letup. And with hospitals filling, the prospects for the days ahead seemed all too clear.
“If you tell me the hospitalizations are up this week, I’ll tell you that several weeks down the road, the deaths will be up,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Redfield told the Chamber of Commerce Foundation that the winter might prove devastating, and that perhaps by February, 450,000 Americans might be dead. (The number now is about 273,000.)
But the C.D.C. head seeded his caution with a grain of hope. Americans, he said, could reduce their losses through simple measures like wearing a mask.
“It’s not a fait accompli,” he said. “We’re not defenseless. The truth is that mitigation works. But it’s not going to work if half of us do what we need to do. Probably not even if three-quarters do.”
For all the similarities to the spring pandemic peak, there are some profound differences.
In April, the virus and the deaths were concentrated in New York and New England. Today, the pandemic’s toll is being felt across the country, with more than 14 million cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
Still more sobering: The April peak represented the worst moment of spring. It was followed by a decline in deaths as lockdowns were imposed and many Americans altered their behavior.
As staggering as it is, the death toll reported Wednesday appears likely only to worsen, experts say, as the delayed effects of Thanksgiving travel are felt. And many Americans are now weighing how to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s.
“This is a much worse situation,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Summer is not going to bail us out. Things are not shut down.”
There are other differences from the spring, some more hopeful.
Though coronavirus cases have exploded recently, with new infections topping one million a week, a far smaller proportion of people who get the virus these days are dying from it. National data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the share of cases resulting in death dropped from 6.7 percent in April to 1.9 percent in September.
But over all, deaths in the United States are still climbing.
“It’s terrible, because it was avoidable,” said Dr. Leora Horwitz, an associate professor of population health and medicine at the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. “We are a world outlier in this regard.”
As coronavirus hospitalizations soar to record heights across California, the city of Los Angeles is ordering residents to stay home and stop gathering with anyone outside their household.
The new restrictions, issued Wednesday night, follow on the heels of a modified stay-at-home order that Los Angeles County issued last week. They are among the latest examples of states and municipalities reimposing limits on public life that had been lifted after the first wave of the pandemic ebbed.
But it is still unclear how strictly the new round of orders will be enforced, or whether people who have grown weary of months of shifting restrictions will abide by them.
“My message couldn’t be simpler: It’s time to hunker down,” Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles said. “It’s time to cancel everything. And if it isn’t essential, don’t do it.”
The city’s stay-at-home order comes with pages of exceptions and fine print. Retailers and other businesses can still operate. People are allowed to leave the house for walks, to play golf, to attend outdoor church services or take part in socially distanced protests. Movie, music and television production can continue.
Violating the new order is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine and jail time, and Mr. Garcetti urged the Los Angeles Police Department and city attorney to “vigorously enforce” the order. Over the summer, the city cut off the utilities at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills where two TikTok stars threw huge parties, and brought criminal charges against the two, accusing them of violating the city’s ban on large gatherings.
But there has been pushback against the latest restrictions around Los Angeles since the county issued its order last week. The Los Angeles Times reported that angry parents objected to measures that closed down playgrounds while allowing malls and indoor businesses to stay open.
Restaurants and some cities within Los Angeles County recoiled at new prohibitions on outdoor dining. Pasadena decided to continue to allow limited outdoor dining. The Beverly Hills City Council passed a resolution on Tuesday saying that the county’s ban on outdoor dining would cripple restaurants and demanded that it be repealed.
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Second Wave ‘Is Right Upon Us,’ New York Mayor Warns
Mayor Bill de Blasio urged vigilance as New York faced a second wave of coronavirus cases, but said the city was more equipped to address rising cases than in the spring.
So let’s go over to indicators; No. 1, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected Covid-19, threshold is 200 patients. Today’s report, 174 patients. So we see a serious increase there, confirmed positivity level of 49.7 percent. I’m going to talk about all three indicators, and then I want to give a summary. The No. 2 is new reported cases; our seven-day average threshold, 550 cases, today, 1,962. And No. 3, percentage of people testing citywide positive for Covid-19; threshold 5 percent, today’s report, the daily 3.9 percent, but the seven-day rolling average has really increased to 5.19 percent. It’s quite clear at this point that this second wave, unfortunately, is right upon us. We are seeing a different reality in the hospitals for sure than in the spring. This is a very, very important point. Even though that number has gone up, it’s still a very different reality in our hospitals than what we experienced in the spring. The ability of our hospitals to deal with patients is greatly improved, the ability of patients to survive this disease is greatly improved. We are not seeing the kind of stress on our I.C.U.s anywhere near what we saw in the past. But we’re extremely concerned and vigilant to make sure that we protect our hospitals, and we can protect people’s lives. If you’re over 65, if you’re someone with one of those pre-existing conditions like diabetes or heart disease, you need to stay in to the maximum extent possible except for the most essential needs. And everyone has to do the hard work of continuing to distance and wear masks and take all precautions. This is a very serious situation. We all have to be part of the solution.
With New York City seeing sustained increases in coronavirus-related hospital admissions, case counts and the positive test rate, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned on Thursday that a second wave of the virus “unfortunately, is right upon us.”
The city’s seven-day average daily positive test rate rose above 5 percent, to 5.19, for the first time since May 28, when nonessential businesses remained shut down and the city was a center of the pandemic in the United States. (New York State, which compiles testing data and calculates statistics differently from the city, most recently reported the city’s seven-day average positive test result at 3.34 percent.)
Despite an increase in cases, Mr. de Blasio stressed his belief that the city was more prepared to address the virus than it was in the spring, when hospitals were crowded and resources were relatively scarce.
“The ability of our hospitals to deal with patients is greatly improved,” he said at a news conference. “The ability of patients to survive this disease is greatly improved. We are not seeing the kind of stress on our I.C.U.s anywhere near what we saw in the past.”
Still, the mayor repeated his pleas that people stay home when possible — particularly those at a high risk of severe illness from Covid-19 — and that city residents continue to adhere to social-distancing guidelines.
Mr. de Blasio discussed the city’s plan to distribute the first doses of vaccines, saying New York would prioritize health care workers and staff at nursing homes. He said that he also expected the city to focus on 27 city neighborhoods that have been most deeply affected by the virus and residents of the city’s cramped public housing projects.
A series of cyberattacks is underway aimed at the companies and government organizations that will be distributing coronavirus vaccines around the world, IBM’s cybersecurity division has found, though it is unclear whether the goal is to steal the technology for keeping the vaccines refrigerated in transit or to sabotage the movements.
The findings are alarming enough that the Department of Homeland Security plans to issue its own warning on Thursday to Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to develop and distribute coronavirus vaccines, federal officials said.
Both the IBM researchers and the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the attacks appear intended to steal the network credentials of corporate executives and officials at global organizations involved in the refrigeration process necessary to protect vaccine doses, or what the industry calls the cold chain.
Josh Corman, a coronavirus strategist at the cybersecurity agency, said in a statement that the IBM report was a reminder of the need for “cybersecurity diligence at each step in the vaccine supply chain.” He urged organizations “involved in vaccine storage and transport to harden attack surfaces, particularly in cold storage operation.”
The cyberattackers “were working to get access to how the vaccine is shipped, stored, kept cold and delivered,” said Nick Rossmann, who heads IBM’s global threat intelligence team. “We think whoever is behind this wanted to be able to understand the entire cold chain process.”
Many of the approaches came in the form of “spear phishing” emails that impersonated an executive at a major Chinese company, Haier Biomedical, which is a legitimate participant in the distribution chain.
Researchers for IBM Security X-Force, the company’s cybersecurity arm, said they believed that the attacks were sophisticated enough that they pointed to a government-sponsored initiative, not a rogue criminal operation aimed purely at monetary gain. But they could not identify which country might be behind them.
Outside experts said they doubted it was China, which left hackers in Russia and North Korea as the lead suspects.
As the United States tore past previous peaks in coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations this week, the virus, ever fluid, has been surging in some places even as it has begun to ebb in others.
For much of the fall, North Dakota has topped the hardest-hit states list, with more new cases relative to its population than anywhere else, hospitals filled to capacity and doctors growing increasingly overwhelmed. Its neighbor South Dakota was usually right behind.
But in the last few days, Minnesota has equaled them, and even briefly exceeded them, a sign of the constantly shifting geography of the pandemic and one of the reasons it has been so difficult to contain.
In the tiny town of Plato, Minn., population 300, an entire 20-person fire department went out of service last month when three-quarters of its members had either tested positive for the virus or been exposed to someone who had. Hundreds of health care workers at the Mayo Clinic, whose flagship hospital is in Rochester, Minn., have been sidelined by positive tests. Most caught the virus in the community, not at work.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, warned on Wednesday that Covid-19 was ravaging public safety services like fire and police departments in the state.
About 20 percent of fire departments in the state have had “major” Covid-19 outbreaks, said John Harrington, the state public safety commissioner, including the one in Plato.
“Just like we preach about fire safety, one little spark can cause a fire,” said Jay Wood, a Plato firefighter. “And that’s exactly what happened to us.”
Mr. Wood said the department, which serves about 500 households, was back up and running again, but he added, “Fire departments throughout Minnesota are facing this.”
Like much of the Upper Midwest, Minnesota made it through the spring and summer relatively unscathed. But the state has had a catastrophic autumn, with new coronavirus cases up as much as thirteenfold and deaths rising substantially.
As a result, by Wednesday Minnesota was averaging 96.7 new cases a day for every 100,000 people, second-worst in the nation behind South Dakota with 97.9, according to a New York Times database. Wyoming and Nebraska are up in the 90s, too. North Dakota, meanwhile, has improved substantially and is now averaging a lower, though still brutal, 87.3 new cases per 100,000.
St. Cloud, Minn., has the third-highest rate of new cases of any American metropolitan area. Mayor Dave Kleis said in an interview that the virus had swept in fairly suddenly in the fall after being almost nonexistent in the area over the summer.
“It hits home, I think, to a larger percentage of people when those cases rise,” he said. “It’s a complete difference than what you saw earlier.”
Public health officials have warned that the recent surge across the country is not expected to abate soon, because travel and gatherings over Thanksgiving and for the December holidays will spawn many new infections. Even in states like North Dakota, where daily case reports have started to trend downward, residents said they were bracing for the next few weeks.
In Minot, N.D., the Thompson-Larson Funeral Home went from handling one death a day to four or five, and had to convert a storage room into space to hold more bodies. Ben Slind, the funeral director, said he and his staff often worked late into the night, and added that he even pressed his teenage daughters into service to fold memorial pamphlets.
“Obviously, we’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mr. Slind, who has been a licensed funeral director for 20 years. He said on Thursday that he had four families to meet with.
Though the virus’s spread appears have slowed slightly in North Dakota, Mr. Slind said things could still easily take a turn for the worse during the holidays.
“I sure hope not,” he said. “I’m praying not.”
The post-Thanksgiving rush for Covid-19 testing is on: Pharmacies in the Southern California suburbs are advising customers lucky enough to score appointments that it could be four days before they receive results. In Chelsea, Mass., a line of people who hoped for testing was pelted by rain and wind early this week. In Atlanta, people have idled in cars, sometimes for hours, to get swabbed at drive-throughs.
Testing has long been one of the keys to controlling the spread of the virus. Yet securing a test has become enough of an ordeal that many people have been dissuaded from even trying.
That has begun to change in recent weeks as a handful of communities across the country have rolled out the first do-it-yourself home saliva tests, which require users to simply dribble into a test tube, seal it and send it to a lab.
“This is the best thing for my parents’ safety,” said Sandra Reyes-Aceves, 48, who lives in Anaheim, Calif., with her two teenage children and aging parents. “I don’t have to make them leave the house to get tested.”
In Minnesota, once a testing kit is ordered, it is typically shipped within 24 hours. During sample collection, users are supervised via Zoom by a health worker at Vault Health, the company contracted by the state health department to manage the tests. Results are available in 24 to 48 hours.
Public health officials have long hoped that combining the ease of saliva sampling with at-home collection would open important new windows into the spread of the virus and help persuade those who did not know they were infected to stay home and limit further transmission.
A test people can do at home and mail in “really helps,” said Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at the U.C.LA. Fielding School of Public Health. “It isn’t going to end the pandemic, but it is certainly a major step toward making testing more accessible and widespread.”
Facebook on Thursday said it would remove posts that contain claims about Covid-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, as the social network acts more aggressively to bat down coronavirus misinformation while falsehoods run rampant.
The move goes a step beyond how Facebook had handled misinformation about other kinds of vaccines. The company had previously made it more difficult to find vaccine misinformation that was not related to the coronavirus by “downranking” it, essentially making it less visible in people’s news feeds.
But Facebook said it planned to take down Covid-19 vaccine falsehoods entirely if the claims had been discredited or contradicted by health groups including the World Health Organization, the United States Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm,” the company said in a blog post. “This could include false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccines.”
Facebook added that it would also take down “false claims that Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips, or anything else that isn’t on the official vaccine ingredient list.”
The social network has long been hesitant to wade into the fraught space of determining what is true or false information on its platform. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has made it clear he “does not want to be the arbiter of truth” of what is posted on the site.
But Mr. Zuckerberg has also taken an active role in combating the spread of coronavirus misinformation. Facebook has created new products and tools to inform the public about the potential dangers of the virus. Mr. Zuckerberg emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infection disease expert, as early as March to offer his help in fighting the virus. Dr. Fauci has since appeared on multiple live-streamed interviews on Facebook with Mr. Zuckerberg.
Because of the novelty of Covid-19 vaccines, not all false claims may be taken down immediately, Facebook said. The social network said it also plans to continue sending people to its Covid-19 Information Center, which contains verified and up-to-date information about the virus.
Facebook’s decision to remove vaccine-related misinformation is not without precedent. The company previously removed misinformation about the polio vaccine in Pakistan, as well as misinformation on the measles vaccine in Samoa during outbreaks of the illnesses.
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transcript
‘Compromise Is Within Reach,’ McConnell Says of Stimulus Talks
Senator Mitch McConnell said negotiations on a new round of coronavirus relief were closer to agreement, but did not endorse a $908 billion compromise measure embraced by Democratic leaders.
“It has always been about policy differences. We have two sides with two different visions for the best way to support our nation through what we hope will be the last chapter of the pandemic. Now that isn’t new. We have disagreements all the time. Our system can handle disagreements. But both sides have to be willing to compile their commonalities and make law here. Our people are hurting. But they’re ready to finish this fight. Congress should not keep them waiting for reinforcements that should have arrived, literally, months ago. So compromise is within reach. We know where we agree, we can do this. Let me say it again, we can do this and we need to do this. So let’s be about actually making a law.” “Speaker Pelosi and I made a new offer to Leader McConnell and Leader McCarthy on Monday in hopes of jumpstarting serious negotiations, and Leader McConnell responded by circulating another version of a partisan Republican-only draft. So in the spirit of compromise, Speaker Pelosi and I believe the bipartisan framework introduced by a group of eight senators on Tuesday should be used as the basis, the framework, for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations. The need to act is urgent, and we believe that with good faith negotiations we could very well come to an agreement. We are already much closer to an agreement because of the bipartisan talks these eight senators have done — have created. And we can build off their momentum.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, talked on Thursday about reaching agreement on must-pass government funding legislation and on another coronavirus relief package, amid pressure from rank and file members for a bipartisan compromise.
A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, Drew Hammill, said the conversation early Thursday afternoon focused on “their shared commitment to completing an omnibus and Covid relief as soon as possible.”
Mr. McConnell has been largely removed from discussions with Ms. Pelosi over another stimulus bill since the two chambers enacted a sweeping $2.2 trillion stimulus law in March. Instead, as he has worked to wrangle Republican support behind a series of targeted bills, Trump administration officials have led discussions with Ms. Pelosi over a possible deal.
The phone call between the two congressional leaders came after Mr. McConnell left the door open to reaching a deal on a new round of stimulus to address the pandemic, but stopped short of endorsing a $908 billion compromise plan Democrats embraced on Wednesday, saying it did not represent a genuine concession.
Mr. McConnell said it had been “heartening to see a few hopeful signs” this week in stimulus relief negotiations.
“Compromise is within reach,” Mr. McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “We know where we agree. We can do this. Let me say it again: We can do this, and we need to do this. So let’s be about actually making a law.”
But Mr. McConnell appeared to be referring to a much smaller stimulus proposal he began circulating earlier this week that he said would be able to secure President Trump’s signature, not the compromise measure being developed by a group of moderate senators in both parties.
Mr. McConnell admonished lawmakers to focus on policy provisions where there was substantial agreement, signaling that he would not be quick to move off his targeted proposal.
Mr. Trump, asked Thursday whether he agreed with Mr. McConnell that pandemic relief was “in sight” and whether he would support “this bill,” answered affirmatively. While it was initially unclear which bill Mr. Trump was willing to sign, the White House later clarified that it was the smaller Republican bill, which Mr. McConnell is backing.
“I will, and I think we are getting very close,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
Mr. McConnell’s plan is a nonstarter for Democrats, given that it would not provide funding for state and local governments or a revival of lapsed federal unemployment payments and would include a sweeping liability shield they have long resisted.
Democrats, who initially unveiled a $3.4 trillion proposal in May but later scaled back their proposal by about $1 trillion, argued that Mr. McConnell must drop his demand for a narrow package and consider the compromise plan centrists in both parties have proposed.
The bipartisan framework would restore lapsed federal jobless benefits, providing $300 a week for 18 weeks; would include $288 billion for struggling small businesses, restaurants and theaters and $160 billion for fiscally strapped cities and states; and would create a temporary liability shield for businesses operating amid the pandemic.
Global roundup
Vaccination for Covid-19 in France will be free, and focused first on those who are most at-risk, French authorities said on Thursday as they geared up for a three-phase rollout of a widespread vaccination campaign next year.
“The arrival of the vaccine is a real reason for hope,” Jean Castex, the French prime minister, said at a news conference on Thursday evening. But he warned that vaccination was a “new weapon that will add on to existing tools, not replace them.”
Mr. Castex said that once European and French health authorities greenlight the first vaccines — likely in late December or early January — retirement and nursing home residents would be vaccinated first, along with at-risk staffers in those establishments, for a total of roughly one million people. Vaccination will not be mandatory.
“Everyone will not be able to get vaccinated immediately,” Mr. Castex cautioned. Deploying the vaccine would be a logistical feat of “great complexity,” he said, and France will do a test-run of its distribution strategy in December.
A second wave of vaccinations starting in February will target 14 million more people, mainly health workers and at-risk populations like the elderly or those with chronic health conditions. A third and final vaccination campaign in the spring and summer will focus on the wider adult population, but not minors.
Olivier Véran, the health minister, said at the news conference that the main goal of the vaccination campaign is to decrease mortality rates and prevent patients from developing severe cases of Covid-19, as it is still unclear whether the vaccines will prevent transmitting the coronavirus.
He also said that regardless of vaccination plans, people should not become complacent anytime soon.
“Over the next few months, the vaccine will not fundamentally change the course of the epidemic,” Mr. Véran said, noting that vaccinating millions of people will take time and that restrictions on gatherings and rules like mask-wearing would continue for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Castex said the current outlook in France was positive, with fewer daily cases and less pressure on hospitals, and that the French needed to keep up their efforts to prevent another virus wave. Still, he encouraged people to limit holiday season family gatherings to six adults maximum.
Here’s what else is happening around the world.
The Russian capital will open 70 vaccination centers on Saturday with teachers, doctors and social workers the first in line to receive the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine, Moscow’s mayor said on Thursday. City residents will have to register online in advance for time slots to avoid overcrowding. On Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a voluntary vaccination program to begin by the end of next week across the country. But several hospitals near Moscow already began administering the vaccine last week. Russian authorities rushed to offer it, and drew criticism for not waiting for large-scale efficacy tests to conclude.
Germany extended its lockdown, which includes the closure of bars and restaurants, to Jan. 10, three weeks after its restrictions were scheduled to expire on Dec. 20. Infection rates remain at over 50 cases per 100,000 people in a week, a goal that Chancellor Angela Merkel said allows health authority to trace individual infections. Health authorities registered 22,046 new cases on Wednesday, roughly the same as three weeks ago.
Greece is also extending its national lockdown, which was set to end on Dec. 7, by one week, a decision the government said was unavoidable with new daily infections steadily rising and a sharp spike in deaths. The rising number of new cases has stretched hospitals to the limit, particularly in northern Greece where the majority of infections are being recorded. As of Wednesday, it had a total of 109,655 confirmed cases and 2,604 deaths, most of which have been recorded over the past month.
Austria will loosen its lockdown beginning Monday, but bars and restaurants will remain closed until at least Jan. 7 and quarantines will extend to 10 days for arriving travelers. Those in quarantine will be allowed to take a free test after five days and can leave isolation early if it comes back negative. While announcing the changes, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz appeared to blame people with family abroad for reintroducing the virus to Austria when returning from visits at the end of the summer, prompting criticism in the country.
The former president of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a modern-minded conservative who on his election in 1974 vowed to transform his tradition-bound, politically polarized country, only to lose his office seven years later after failing to accomplish his goals, died on Wednesday. His foundation said the cause was complications of Covid-19. He was 94.
OPEC and other oil-producing nations headed by Russia reached a compromise on Thursday to modestly increase production, buoyed by the prospect of vaccines to ward off the virus, which caused oil prices to crash in April. The increase, representing less than 1 percent of the global oil market, comes at a time when demand is still under strain from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
The global economy could suffer significant damage if lower-income countries do not have enough access to coronavirus vaccines, according to a new report from the Eurasia Group, a political research and consulting firm.
That damage would hurt advanced and developing economies alike, putting decades of economic progress at risk, according to a statement from the World Health Organization on Thursday.
If vaccine access is equitable, the Eurasia Group’s analysis found, it would generate at least $466 billion in economic benefits by 2025 for 10 of the world’s largest donor countries.
The World Health Organization shared the report to spur investment in its Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, an initiative promoting global collaboration to develop tests, treatments and vaccines. It includes a global vaccine allocation plan, known as Covax, to pool the resources needed for doses to be distributed equitably. Officials hope to deliver about two billion doses worldwide by the end of 2021.
The coronavirus pandemic has affected more than 64 million people globally, and at least 1.4 million people have died. Latin America has suffered a third of the world’s deaths. Africa has now surpassed two million cases. Shutdowns and quarantines have hit poor countries especially hard, where not working often means not eating.
“There is a clear humanitarian and ethical case for supporting the ACT Accelerator and the Covax facility, along with the obvious economic gains it would bring to developing countries,” said Alexander Kazan, a director with Eurasia Group and one of the authors of the report. “Doing nothing risks reversing years if not decades of economic progress. But our analysis shows that the program is likely to yield economic and other returns for major donor countries as well.”
U.S. roundup
As hospitals fill with virus patients, the biggest need has been finding enough staff to tend to the critically ill. Demand for travel nurses has increased by more than 40 percent in the last month, according to Aya Healthcare, an agency based in California that dispatches them to hospitals. At least 25,000 nurses work in travel nursing, taking up temporary contracts for higher fees and moving from city to city, and hospitals have depended on them for decades.
Laura Liffiton, 32, one of those travel nurses, found herself racing along behind the pandemic as the coronavirus cut a devastating path around the country.
She arrived in New York City in April, on one of the worst days of the pandemic, for a stint as a nurse in the overrun intensive-care unit of a crowded hospital. After her contract there ended, she flew in July to another hot spot with an urgent need for nurses: a hospital in Arizona where four of her patients died of the coronavirus on her first day. In October, Ms. Liffiton traveled on, to Green Bay, Wis., just as the virus was surging uncontrollably throughout the Midwest.
“When the pandemic began, I thought, ‘I’m going to go help, I can do some good, I can make some good money,’” she said. But on the first day of treating coronavirus patients, Ms. Liffiton remembered, “I was like Dorothy landing in Oz. I was totally unprepared for the reality.”
As the coronavirus has spiked across the country, leaving a record 100,226 Americans hospitalized on Wednesday, travel nurses, have become more urgently needed than ever.
Here is what else is happening across the U.S.
In Puerto Rico, Gov. Wanda Vázquez ordered a new, partial lockdown on Thursday that will force most businesses to close on Sundays and ban weekend alcohol sales from Dec. 7 to Jan. 7. Only pharmacies, supermarkets, gas stations, hardware stores and food delivery and pickup will be allowed on Sundays. The rest of the week, businesses must close at 8:30 p.m. ahead of a 9 p.m. nightly curfew. (That would include Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.) Case numbers have been persistently high in Puerto Rico in recent weeks, with an average of more than 700 new infections announced each day. Ninety-two deaths were reported in the seven-day period ending Wednesday, the most in the territory in any weeklong stretch.
Delta Air Lines said Thursday that it will assist federal coronavirus contact tracing efforts, becoming the first airline to do so after the industry spent years resisting government requests for help.
Starting Dec. 15, Delta will ask all passengers flying into the United States to voluntarily provide their names, email addresses, destination addresses and phone numbers — information that it will share with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We want customers to feel safe when they return to travel, and this voluntary program is another way we can provide additional reassurance to customers and employees alike,” Bill Lentsch, Delta’s chief customer experience officer, said in a statement.
For more than a decade, the U.S. government has pressured airlines to collect such information to help contain contagious viruses. But the industry has consistently rebuffed those requests, saying that it would be too expensive and time-consuming. Earlier this year, airlines helped to thwart a Trump administration effort to require such collection even as Congress approved $50 billion in aid for passenger airlines.
At the start of the pandemic, the United States had few known cases and government officials were most focused on keeping the virus from getting into the country. But with millions infected and the virus spreading widely, it’s unclear how useful the information collected voluntarily, only from international arrivals and by a single airline will be.
