{20}{20}Covid-19 Live Updates: Japan, Spain and France Find Cases of the New Virus Variant, Most Linked to U.K. Travel//..
Surveys show a clear majority of Americans now embrace coronavirus vaccines. The truck logjam at a British port is easing. Africa struggles with its second wave.
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The E.U.’s vaccinations are set to begin Sunday, but a few places have jumped the gun.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Japan, Spain, France and Canada find cases of the new coronavirus variant.
- Thanksgiving travel swelled caseloads less than expected. Could a Christmas surge also be muted?
- In a shift, more Americans say they are eager to get vaccinated.
- Unemployment aid set to lapse Saturday as Trump’s plans for relief bill remain unclear.
- Even as health workers receive the vaccine, their family members must wait.
- ‘The second wave is here,’ and African doctors fear it will hit the continent harder than the first.
- The pandemic’s blow to performing artists may create a ‘great cultural depression.’
Japan, Spain, France and Canada find cases of the new coronavirus variant.
The discovery of the virus variant in Japan prompted the country to close its borders to all new entry by nonresident foreigners. Credit…Kyodo News via Getty Images
Japan, Spain, France and Canada have found small numbers of infections involving a new, potentially more transmissible variant of the coronavirus, most linked to travel from the U.K., where it was first detected.
The rapid spread of the variant led to the lockdown of London and southern England this week, prompted a temporary French blockade of the English Channel and resulted in countries around the world barring travelers from the U.K. Because few countries have the level of genomic surveillance that Britain does, there is concern that the variant may have been traveling across the world undetected for weeks.
A recent study by British scientists found no evidence that the variant is more deadly than others but estimated that it is 56 percent more contagious.
So far, the British variant has been diagnosed in seven people in Japan, the country’s health ministry said. All had either recently traveled to the U.K. or been in contact with someone who had.
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The discovery in Japan prompted the country to close its borders to all new entry by nonresident foreigners. The ban will go into effect at midnight on Monday and last through the end of January, the public broadcaster NHK reported.
In Spain, the variant was found in the capital region, local authorities said on Saturday. Antonio Zapatero, a regional health official, said that four cases had been confirmed in Madrid, while another three were being treated as suspicious. At least two of the cases involve people who had recently been to Britain and then tested positive in Madrid, as well as some of their relatives.
The first case of the new fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus was identified in France on Friday, according to the French health ministry. Officials said that the patient was a French citizen living in Britain who had traveled from London to Tours, a city in central France, on Dec. 19, a day before the British government imposed a lockdown following the emergence of the variant.
Health officials in Ontario, Canada, said on Saturday that they had confirmed two cases of the mutated virus in the province. The two cases included a couple from Durham, about 90 miles northwest of Toronto. The couple had no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts, the province’s health ministry said.
It is normal for viruses to mutate, and most of the mutations of the coronavirus have proved minor. The British variant has a constellation of 23 mutations, several of which might alter its transmissibility. Vaccine experts are confident that the available vaccines will be able to block the new variant, although that has to be confirmed by laboratory experiments that are now underway.
The European Union’s member nations are scheduled to begin vaccinating against the virus on Sunday with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Hungary began administering the vaccine a day early, on Saturday.
A few other concerning variants have also been identified, including one in South Africa and another in Nigeria. The U.K. said on Thursday that it would ban travel from South Africa after the British health secretary, Matt Hancock, said two people were confirmed to have been infected with the variant that emerged there.
Germany and Singapore have identified infections with the new variant. And Denmark, which has wider genomic surveillance than many other countries, detected 33 cases of the variant from Nov. 14 to Dec. 14, according to the Danish health authorities.
The U.S. has not yet reported any cases of the U.K. variant. But the country will require all airline passengers arriving from Britain to test negative for the coronavirus within 72 hours of their departure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The rule will take effect on Monday.
Hisako Uenoand Mike Ives contributed reporting.
— Ben Dooley, Raphael Minder, Marc Santora, Isabella Kwai and Norimitsu Onishi
Tracking the Coronavirus ›
United StatesOn Dec. 2514-day changeNew cases91,922*–11%New deaths1,129*–1%
WorldOn Dec. 2514-day change467,358–5%8,084–1%
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Calif.Tenn.Ariz.Ala.Okla.Ark.Ind.W.Va.Del.Miss.Nev.Pa.Ga.UtahN.M.
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The E.U.’s vaccinations are set to begin Sunday, but a few places have jumped the gun.
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3 European Countries Begin Coronavirus Vaccinations Early
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia began administering the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Saturday, one day ahead of the European Union’s official rollout.
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1:003 European Countries Begin Coronavirus Vaccinations Early
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia began administering the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Saturday, one day ahead of the European Union’s official rollout.CreditCredit…Zsolt Czegledi/EPA, via Shutterstock
A 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in eastern Germany became the country’s first recipient of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine on Saturday, a day ahead of the European Union’s planned immunization campaign, an ambitious effort to eventually inoculate more than 450 million people across the 27 nations in the European Union against the coronavirus.
Vaccinations also began in Hungary, where photographs showed health care workers getting the shot at the Southern Pest Central Hospital in Budapest. The authorities in Slovakia also began administering their first doses on Saturday, Reuters reported.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, released a video in advance of the official rollout on Sunday, calling the campaign “a touching moment of unity.”
Roughly two-thirds of all Germans are willing to be vaccinated against coronavirus, according to a survey conducted by YouGov for the German news agency D.P.A., but more than half of respondents said they were concerned about possible side effects.
The doses for Europe are being produced at BioNTech’s manufacturing sites in Germany, and Pfizer’s site in Puurs, Belgium, according to the two companies, and countries across the bloc have begun receiving their first deliveries.
In Germany, all 16 states received 9,750 doses of the vaccine on Saturday. Each state is to send them to regional immunization centers, and then teams of drivers are to distribute them to nursing homes and care centers for the elderly across the country.
Karsten Fischer, who is responsible for managing the response to the pandemic in the Harz district of Saxony-Anhalt, said the logistics in his region made it possible to begin vaccinations within hours of receiving the doses, and he saw no reason to wait.
“We did not want to waste a day, as the stability of the vaccine decreases over time,” Mr. Fischer told the public broadcaster M.D.R. “We wanted to begin administering immediately.”
The first inoculation was administered in the city of Halberstadt, to 101-year-old Edith Kwoizalla; 40 other residents and 11 members of the staff at the nursing home also received doses, M.D.R. reported.
“Every day we wait is one day too many,” Tobias Krüger, the director of the home, told reporters.
Germany’s eastern states have been hardest hit by the second wave of the virus. More than 1.6 million people have been infected in the country, and more than 29,400 have died, many of them older citizens, especially those living in nursing homes.
Residents of nursing homes and their caregivers, as well as emergency medical staff and individuals 80 years and older, are set to be among the first vaccinated in Germany, based on a plan that was drawn up by leaders, medical advisers and members of the national Ethics Council. Members of the government do not plan to receive inoculations before their peers, Jens Spahn, the country’s health minister, said on Saturday.
“We have deliberately said that we will begin offering the vaccine to the most fragile,” Mr. Spahn said. “If there comes a time when it makes sense, say to bolster confidence, each one of us is ready to be vaccinated.”
Thanksgiving travel swelled caseloads less than expected. Could a Christmas surge also be muted?
Saying goodbye at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on Wednesday.Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images
With bubble-enclosed Santas and Zoom-enhanced family gatherings, much of the United States played it safe over Christmas while the coronavirus rampaged across the country. But, as during Thanksgiving, a significant number of Americans traveled, raising the prospect of a spike in infections on top of the current surge.
Many European countries are under restrictions, but Christmas is celebrated so broadly — and New Year’s festivities will follow shortly — that the concern of a post-holiday spike reaches far beyond a single country.
Case numbers remain about as high as they have ever been, both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Total U.S. infections are about to reach 19 million, while the world total surpassed 80 million on Saturday afternoon, according to a New York Times database.
For now, the U.S. is no longer seeing overall explosive growth, although California’s worsening outbreak has canceled out progress in other parts of the country. The state has added more than 300,000 cases in the seven-day period ending Dec. 22. And six Southern states have seen sustained case increases in the last week: Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Texas.
The country’s virus-related deaths in general have continued to climb. And hospitalizations are hovering at a pandemic height of about 120,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
More than 330,000 people in the United States have died since the pandemic began, and two of the four worst days for deaths so far have been during the past week. A number of states set death records on Dec. 22 or Dec. 23, including Alabama, Wisconsin, Arizona and West Virginia, according to The Times’s data.
Holiday reporting anomalies may obscure any post-Christmas spike until the second week of January. Testing was expected to decrease around Christmas, and many states have said they would not report data on certain days. For Dec. 25, numbers for both new infections, 91,922, and deaths, 1,129, were significantly lower than the seven-day averages.
The lessons learned from Thanksgiving are mixed. Case numbers and deaths have continued to rise since, but the patterns look more like a plethora of microspreads than a mass superspreader event.
Over all, experts have told The Times, areas of the U.S. that were improving pre-Thanksgiving — like the Midwest — continued to do well afterward, while regions that were seeing higher numbers before the holiday continued to worsen.
Only time will tell whether new infections will result from increased exposure during the late-December holidays — from seeing family, passing through airports or buying food for celebrations. More than one million people passed through Transportation Safety Administration travel checkpoints on each of four recent days — Dec. 18, 19, 20 and 23 — but that was less than half the number for those days last year, according to the agency’s data. Only a quarter of the number who flew on the day after Christmas last year did so on Friday, and Christmas Eve travel was down by one-third from 2019.
So, as with Thanksgiving, Christmas will produce “a continuing ramification” of whoever is infected over the winter holidays, said Catherine L. Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas’ School of Public Health in Houston, so it is crucial to keep up protective measures.
What the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come will bring, Dr. Troisi said, “is up to us.”
— Lauren Wolfe
In a shift, more Americans say they are eager to get vaccinated.
A health care worker at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., took a selfie of his vaccination.Credit…Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot.
The time frame was dangerously accelerated, many people warned. The vaccine was a scam from Big Pharma, others said. A political ploy by the Trump administration, many Democrats charged. The internet pulsed with apocalyptic predictions from longtime vaccine opponents, who decried the new shot as the epitome of every concern they’d ever put forth.
But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated.
In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent this summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent — a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity.
Resistance to the vaccine is certainly not vanishing. Misinformation and dire warnings are gathering force across social media. At a meeting on December 20, members of an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited strong indications that vaccine denouncements as well as acceptance are growing, so they could not predict whether the public would gobble up limited supplies or take a pass.
But the attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 percent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes.
The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 percent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths.
VACCINE PERCEPTIONS
Read more about Americans’ growing embrace of the vaccine.
Unemployment aid set to lapse Saturday as Trump’s plans for relief bill remain unclear.
Many coronavirus relief measures are set to expire if President Trump does not sign the bill by Saturday evening.Credit…Erin Scott for The New York Times
Expanded unemployment benefits were set to lapse for millions of struggling Americans on Saturday, a day after President Trump expressed more criticism of a $900 billion pandemic relief bill that was awaiting his signature and would extend them.
The sprawling economic relief package that Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support would extend the amount of time that people can collect unemployment benefits until March and revive supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of Americans at $300 a week on top of the usual state benefit.
If Mr. Trump signs the bill on Saturday, states will still need time to reprogram their computer systems to account for the new law, according to Michele Evermore of the National Employment Law Project, but unemployed workers would still be able to claim the benefits.
Further delays could prove more costly. States cannot pay out benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, meaning that if the president does not sign the bill by Saturday, benefits will not restart until the first week of January. But they will still end in mid-March, effectively trimming the extension to 10 weeks from 11.
Mr. Trump blindsided lawmakers on Tuesday when he hinted he may veto the measure, which he decided at the last minute was unsatisfactory. The most pressing issue prompted by the president’s delay was the fate of unemployment benefits. At least a temporary lapse in those benefits is now inevitable.
The country is also facing a looming government shutdown on Tuesday and the expiration of a moratorium on evictions at the end of the year because of the president’s refusal to sign the bill.
PANDEMIC RELIEF BILL
A temporary lapse in expanded unemployment benefits for millions of Americans is now inevitable because of President Trump’s delay in signing the relief bill.
Even as health workers receive the vaccine, their family members must wait.
Dr. Taison Bell and his wife Kristen with family at home in Charlottesville, Va. Unanswered questions about how well the vaccine prevents the spread of Covid-19 means that safety precautions must stay in place among the vaccinated.Credit…Eze Amos for The New York Times
Shortly after 2 p.m. on Dec. 15, Dr. Taison Bell became the second person in his hospital, UVA Health in Charlottesville, to receive a dose of Pfizer’s new coronavirus vaccine. “I feel fine,” he said. “But my right arm, if you were to interview it, is probably not excited about what’s happened to it.”
His limb experienced a bit of swelling and soreness, nothing out of the ordinary for a vaccine. It was a sign that the injection was doing its job: instructing Dr. Bell’s cells to churn out a protein called spike, which will teach his immune system to recognize and thwart the new coronavirus, should he ever encounter it. His second dose, scheduled for early January, will clinch the process.
The shot introduced a microscopic shift that will have an outsize impact on his risk of getting Covid-19. But, Dr. Bell said, little else in his life will change until more of his community joins the vaccinated pool.
Dr. Bell, 37, remains a relative rarity among the people he sees both inside and outside of work. His wife, Kristen, and their children, Alain and Ruby, are unlikely to be vaccinated before the spring or summer. They, like many others, will soon live in a home divided by the splinter-thin prick of a needle — one person vaccinated, three not. They represent a liminal state that will persist for months nationwide, as the first people to be injected navigate a new coexistence with the vulnerable at home.
Although the new vaccines have been shown to be highly effective at preventing people from developing symptomatic cases of Covid-19, little data exists on how well they can stop the spread of the virus, raising the possibility that vaccinated people, despite being much safer individually, could still pose a threat to those they love.
For that reason, “we’re still going to be taking all the same precautions,” Ms. Bell said. “Our day-to-day isn’t going to change for months, as the vaccines continue to get rolled out.