In the United States, deaths have fallen by about 10 percent in the past week. New deaths worldwide have also decreased in recent weeks, although the number of new cases has increased slightly.
Here are some significant developments:
Almost everyone I know was infected in India’s devastating coronavirus surge. Not all survived.
NEW DELHI — “I’m helpless,” my mother said to me during a tense phone call in April.
She had tested positive for the coronavirus, battling dropping oxygen levels. My younger sisters were positive, coughing viciously. My father was positive, fending off death in an ICU in another city. My mother’s 89-year-old father was positive and slipping away.
“I’m helpless” is a phrase I’ve heard countless times as a journalist — from families torn apart by the civil war in Sri Lanka, from mothers who lost their sons to the conflict in Kashmir, from migrant workers forced to walk hundreds of miles without food or water to reach home in the midst of India’s harsh pandemic lockdown. Each time, I would either offer words of empathy or probe a little more.
This time, I ran out of words when my mother said there was nothing much she could do to save her father.
Analysis: Vaccine reluctance makes no sense in a nation of patriots
The coronavirus vaccine seems to be making our nation weirder.
No, not like a side effect after the injection. I mean, our behavior around the vaccine is making some Americans act in bizarre and irrational ways, whether it is even in our bodies.
The nation stopped to give a Memorial Day salute and to honor the Americans who sacrificed their lives for our country this week. Yet nearly half of their fellow citizens won’t get a needle in their arms — for our country.
Just two months ago, we were road-tripping, lying, cheating, flying and conspiring to get appointments for a shot of a coronavirus vaccine.
Now, we’re giving away doughnuts, dinners, a pound of crawfish (Louisiana, of course), baseball and theater tickets, a college scholarship or even a chance to win a million bucks to try to get the unvaccinated parts of the nation to please, please, pretty please get the shot.
How older adults can get back into physical exercise following months of pandemic rules
Alice Herb, 88, an intrepid New Yorker, is used to walking miles around Manhattan. But after this year of being shut inside, trying to avoid covid-19, she has noticed a big difference in how she feels.
“Physically, I’m out of shape,” she told me. “The other day, I took the subway for the first time, and I was out of breath climbing two flights of stairs to the street. That’s just not me.”
Emotionally, Herb, a retired lawyer and journalist, is hesitant about resuming activities even though she’s fully vaccinated.
“You wonder: What if something happens?” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing that. Maybe that’s dangerous.”
Millions of older Americans are similarly struggling with physical, emotional and cognitive challenges following a year of being cooped up inside, stopping usual activities and seeing few, if any, people.
Bolsonaro says Brazil, a virus hot spot with growing political unrest, to host Copa América
A day after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s chief of staff cast doubt on the country’s ability to host the Copa América soccer tournament, Bolsonaro reaffirmed the nation’s intent to host the continental event.
“As far as it is up to me, and all the ministers, including the health minister, it is all decided,” Bolsonaro said Tuesday, speaking to supporters in the capital, Brasília.
CONMEBOL, the South American soccer body, announced Monday its plans to move the tournament from Argentina to Brazil two weeks before the start of the event. Luiz Eduardo Ramos, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, said those plans were not finalized later that evening. He added that fans would be barred from games in host cities, which are yet to be announced.
The event’s original co-hosts, Colombia and Argentina, were ruled out in recent weeks after domestic political protests and an increase in coronavirus cases in those countries. But as the competition nears, Brazil faces its own protests as it braces for a new wave of infections.
Everything’s becoming a subscription, and the pandemic is partly to blame
Six restaurants in Washington, D.C., joined together earlier this year to sell a subscription supper club. They offered home delivery of a gourmet meal from a different chef each week for six weeks for $360. It sold out in six days.
Subscriptions boomed during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans largely stuck in shutdown mode flocked to digital entertainment and signed up for regular home delivery of boxes of items such as clothes and chocolate. But what really set the past year apart was the increase in subscriptions in the hard-hit services sector. Owners of restaurants, hotels, home-repair companies and others upended their traditional business models to try subscriptions and often found more interest — and revenue — than they anticipated.
The subscription economy was on the rise before the pandemic, but its wider and deeper reach in nearly every industry is expected to last, even after the pandemic subsides in the United States. The UBS financial services firm predicts that this “subscription economy” will grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025, more than double the $650 billion it’s estimated to be worth now.
Why Ohio’s vaccine lottery scheme bothers people — even though it’s working
Last Wednesday, 22-year-old Abbigail Bugenske became a millionaire thanks to Ohio’s new lottery scheme aimed at boosting coronavirus vaccination rates. Gov. Mike DeWine (R) enacted the program, which enters all vaccinated adults in weekly lottery drawings for $1 million and awards five lucky vaccinated teenagers full scholarships at an Ohio public university of their choice. The plan seems to have worked: In the program’s first week, the state recorded “a 28 percent increase in the vaccination rate of those 16 and older.”
Yet DeWine has faced pushback from critics on all sides.
Although a favorable editorial in the Toledo Blade called the scheme “shocking and quirky,” in the not-so-distant past, Colonial and early state legislatures routinely used lottery drawings to promote the public good. The history of these lotteries — and the critiques that slowly made them morally suspect — help explain both DeWine’s decision to create them and the pushback he is receiving.
D.C. mayor says students will be back in classroom full time in fall — with a caveat
With a year of mostly virtual learning winding down, and fewer than a third of D.C.’s public school students in classrooms part of the week, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) made an ambitious assertion: School buildings are to open full time in the fall with all students attending in person. All teachers must report to their classrooms. And students will be required to return unless — and the mayor delivered a big caveat — they demonstrate a need to continue with virtual learning, she said at a news conference last month.
Her administration later announced that students would need to provide a doctor’s note giving a medical reason to remain home.
Bowser did not go as far as New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D), who said he would eliminate virtual learning in the fall and that every child will be back in the classroom five days a week in September. In Los Angeles, school district leaders said they expect most students, teachers and staff to be present every day, but an online option will be available.
Canada becomes the latest country to green-light mixing coronavirus vaccines
A Canadian panel of scientists said Tuesday that people who received a first dose of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine can choose to receive their second dose from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, joining several European countries that have adopted similar guidance.
Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization said it considered the risk of rare but serious blood clots associated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine when making the decision. Howard Njoo, the nation’s deputy chief public health officer, said officials wanted to give people enough information to “make an informed decision.”
As of May 12, roughly 1 in 83,000 people in Canada who had received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine experienced clotting, according to the country’s public health agency, though it said the rate could be as high as 1 in 55,000.
The scientific panel, whose advice is nonbinding, also said people who received an mRNA vaccine, including those from Pfizer and Moderna, should be offered a vaccine from the same company for their second doses unless it’s not readily available.
Nearly 58 percent of Canadians have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, but only 5.5 percent of people have been fully vaccinated.
Doctors prepare to ration care as covid surge leaves Malaysia in ‘total lockdown’
Coronavirus cases are soaring. Hospitals are growing crowded. And officials are warning that doctors may soon have to decide who lives.
While India’s covid-19 crisis is far from over, the number of new coronavirus infections per million people in Malaysia has overtaken that of the more populous South Asian country. Malaysia, with its roughly 32 million people, now registers more new cases per capita than any medium- or large-sized country in Asia, according to Our World in Data, which tracks publicly available figures.
Facing a record number of new cases, Malaysia’s prime minister announced a two-week “total lockdown” starting Tuesday.
“There is no time to lose,” wrote one local columnist. “We are staring at the abyss.”
U.K. reports no new covid-19 deaths for first time since March 2020
Britain on Tuesday announced no new deaths from covid-19 within 28 days of a positive test for the first time since March 2020 amid an aggressive national vaccination campaign.
The news comes with the caveat that Monday was a British bank holiday, which may have delayed reporting new fatalities. The country’s number of reported infections also has risen in the past few weeks, and health officials urged continued caution.
“The vaccines are clearly working — protecting you, those around you and your loved ones,” U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told reporters. “But despite this undoubtedly good news, we know we haven’t beaten this virus yet, and with cases continuing to rise please remember hands, face, space and let in fresh air when indoors, and of course make sure when you can you get both jabs.”
Britain has one of the world’s highest coronavirus vaccination rates, with about 59 percent of its population at least partially vaccinated. By comparison, roughly 51 percent of the U.S. population has gotten at least one dose of a vaccine.
WHO renames coronavirus variants with ‘non-stigmatizing’ Greek letters
Say goodbye to the “Indian,” “South African” and “British” coronavirus variants.
According to the World Health Organization, they’re the Delta, Beta and Alpha variants now.
The global health body unveiled its new naming system Monday, saying that it would use letters from the Greek alphabet as “non-stigmatizing labels” for new variants.
The WHO’s guidance is intended for the general public: Scientists will continue using traditional (and highly technical) naming conventions. Those names haven’t fully caught on in the wider discourse because nonscientists can easily get tripped up when trying to remember the difference between the B.1.1.7 strand, which was first detected in Britain, or the B.1.617.2 variant initially documented in India.
Greek letters are easier to pronounce and “more practical to be discussed by non-scientific audiences,” the WHO said in its announcement.
All White House staff to return to work on campus in July
All White House staff will return to work on campus in July as the Biden administration continues to phase out remote working prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The timeline was outlined in an email sent to White House personnel Tuesday morning from the White House Office of Management and Administration. According to the email, obtained by The Washington Post, all aides at the White House and in the Office of the Vice President currently working remotely will return to the White House campus between July 6 and July 23.
The directive does not apply to employees who work elsewhere in the Executive Office of the President, who will return at an undetermined later time, according to the email, which was first reported by Axios.
The White House is making exceptions for personnel with “an extenuating circumstance that makes working in person not possible” and allowing them to work remotely “until those circumstances change,” according to the email. The transition for staff also require some shuffling for White House aides who have already been reporting to work in-person. The email notes that personnel working out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building may be asked to move to a new permanent seat.
“In order to welcome all staff back to campus, we must maximize our EEOB office space, and this requires rearranging some offices and desk assignments,” the email read.
Sinovac earns WHO approval as vaccine gets boost from Brazilian study
The WHO announced Tuesday that it had authorized the China-developed Sinovac vaccine for emergency use as a new study suggests that the vaccine may be more effective at preventing symptomatic infection and death from covid-19 than expected.
Deaths fell by 95 percent in Serrana, a town in the covid-ravaged São Paulo state, in the five weeks after most of its adult residents were given Sinovac shots, according to a study by Brazil’s Butantan Institute. Meanwhile, symptomatic infections in the town, which has a population of about 45,000, dropped by 80 percent and hospitalizations decreased by 86 percent.
The pandemic was not successfully managed in Serrana until the Sinovac doses were widely administered.
The death and case figures in neighboring localities were significantly higher, said Butantan Institute Director Dimas Covas, according to Bloomberg News. São Paulo has been badly affected by the coronavirus variant that emerged in Brazil, which the World Health Organization has since named “Gamma.”
Previous trials had given the vaccine an efficacy rate ranging from 50.4 percent in Brazil — barely above the 50 percent threshold that governments find usable — to more than 80 percent in Turkey. Singapore has received doses of the vaccine but not approved it for use, citing limited data.
The vaccine is largely used by developing economies and the study will be a big boost to vaccination efforts in Brazil, which has the third-highest case rate in the world. On Sunday, it reported more than 43,000 new infections, taking its case total to about 16.5 million.
Amid coronavirus crisis, China finds possible first human case of H10N3 bird flu strain
A man in China’s Jiangsu province, northwest of Shanghai, has become the first person known to have been infected with the H10N3 strain of bird flu, the Chinese government announced Tuesday.
China’s National Health Commission emphasized in a statement that there was no evidence that the strain can spread from human to human, adding that the risk of a significant outbreak was “very low.”
The patient, a 41-year-old man who lives in the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized April 28 after having a fever, the National Health Commission said. He was diagnosed with H10N3 a month later. Though the man remains under medical supervision, his condition was described as stable and meeting the standards for discharge. It was not clear from the statement how he caught the virus.
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