Tag Archives: 2021 coronavirus news

US

L.A. County will reinstate mask mandate as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations rise

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People wear face masks at an outdoor mall in Los Angeles on June 11. (Damian Dovarganes/AP/File)

Los Angeles County will reinstate its mask mandate regardless of vaccination status starting 11:59 p.m. Saturday night amid a rise in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. 

The new health officer order will require masking indoors regardless of vaccination status, Los Angeles County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a news conference Thursday. 

The daily test positivity rate in Los Angeles County has risen to 3.75%, an increase from 1.2% on June 15. 

The county has seen more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases each day for the past seven days, an alarming new rise as the Delta variant spreads, Davis said.

“We’re at a substantial level of community transmission and we can’t wait for this to go higher,” Davis said Thursday, announcing a new mask mandate. “Once we’re at a higher level, that will be too late.”

He explained that the county was at a low level of transmission when it reopened last month. 

“We’re in a different situation,” Davis emphasized. “This is not the same situation as it was June 15.”

Los Angeles County reported 1,537 new cases on Thursday, an 83% increase over the last week.  

“Anything is on the table if things continue to get worse,” Davis said in response to a question about whether the county would consider more restrictions. 

The new health officer order, which requires the use of masks indoors regardless of vaccination status, will add that extra layer of protection where the risk is higher, he said.

The county is urging all residents to get vaccinated and has launched mobile clinics for easier access. 

Los Angeles County has administered more than 10.7 million doses of the vaccine and over five million residents are fully vaccinated, according to Davis.

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World

California will fully reopen June amid falling Covid-19 case rates

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California, the first state to implement a lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, plans to fully reopen the state’s activities and businesses beginning June 15, based on falling infection rates and low hospitalizations in the state, Health and Human Services Mark Ghaly announced Tuesday.

Given the large number Covid-19 vaccinations administered so far – which surpasses 20 million doses today – the state will stop using the four-tiered system, dubbed the “Blueprint for a Safer Economy,” which has been in place since last August. Ghaly cited a “stable and low burden of the disease,” along with “continued improvements and low level of hospitalizations” in the state as reasoning for the plan to reopen.

California reported the lowest positivity rate in the country at 1.7%, far from its peak of 17.1% in early January when the state was reeling from a post-holiday surge.

The entire state will reopen as a whole on June 15, rather than taking the county-by-county approach that has been used for the better part of a year to tighten and relax restrictions.

State health officials will continue to use science and data to guide the reopening and variants will be closely monitored, Ghaly promised, adding that “necessary precautions” will be taken if there are any concerning rise in Covid-19 hospitalizations. 

California’s mask mandate will remain in place, focused specifically on what Ghaly calls “high risk” indoor settings. “Masking is a key protective feature, protecting those that are not yet eligible for a vaccine,” Ghaly said.

California’s vaccination numbers: To date, California has administered over 7 million more vaccine doses than any other state, surpassing many other countries including France and Germany, according to Ghaly. About 70% of older Californians have received at least one dose of the vaccine and over 4 million doses have been administered in the state’s hardest hit communities.

“We’re looking at the supply and availability of vaccines. If the supply isn’t there, we may make some tweaks to that June 15 date. We need to make sure that all Californians interested in getting vaccinated, who are eligible, have a reasonable period of time to get that,” Ghaly said.

There is currently no plan to impose or have a vaccine passport plan system in California, but certain businesses are already exploring the option of verifying that their customers are vaccinated. 

“Part of the idea is that we can ramp up safely and it will also provide an incentive as people are allowed to do more activities because they’re vaccinated,” said the state’s economic adviser, Dee Dee Myers. 

Some sectors, like large conventions with more than 5,000 people will be required to demonstrate that all attendees are either vaccinated or tested. That restriction will remain in place until Oct. 1. Ghaly also addressed the multi-day Coachella music festival that draws thousands to the Southern California desert annually, noting that it may not be able to reopen at the same size and scope, but state officials are working with organizers and event planners to ensure the safety of all participants.

Since Covid-19 first began menacing the world, nearly 3.6 millions Californians have been infected and more than 58,000 died as a result.

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Health

FDA will allow plant to ship Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which should boost supply of the single-dose shot

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Workers carry out the burial of a Covid-19 victim at the Vila Formosa Cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 11. Fernando Bizerra/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

The State of Sao Paulo registered a total of 1,021 deaths in 24 hours, according to the state health secretary on Tuesday. The figure is the highest registered since the beginning of the pandemic.

The deadliest day for the state in terms of the pandemic was seven days ago, on March 16, when 679 people died in 24 hours. In total, 68,623 people in São Paulo have lost their lives to Covid-19.

The health system is also close to collapse, with 91.9% of the intensive care unit beds in the state occupied. On Monday, there were 29,039 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in Sao Paulo, 12,168 of them in intensive care unit beds. On March 1, the number of hospitalized patients was 15,977, almost half the current number.

On Monday, the Council of Municipal Health Secretariats of Sao Paulo warned that 54 cities only have enough oxygen for the rest of the week.

In a news conference on the same day, governor João Doria announced a partnership with a private beverage company to build an oxygen plant in Ribeirao Preto, one of Sao Paulo state’s biggest cities.

In an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley on Monday, Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Governor Joao Doria called Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro a “psychopathic leader” and criticized the president’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We are in one of those tragic moments in history when millions of people pay a high price for having an unprepared and psychopathic leader in charge of a nation,” he said on CNN’s First Move.

Doria said much of the deaths from the virus in Brazil could have been avoided if Bolsonaro had “acted with the responsibility that the position gives him.” He added that Bolsonaro made “unbelievable mistakes, the biggest one was having a political dispute with the governors who are trying to protect the population.”

Some more background: Bolsonaro has repeatedly opposed lockdowns and restrictive measures and has criticized governors and mayors for implementing them. He has also been seen greeting crowds of his supporters during the pandemic, without wearing a mask, and has advocated for drugs like hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus — a drug which has no proven effectiveness in combatting Covid-19.

Brazil now has over 12 million cases of coronavirus in the country, according to data from the health ministry.

CNN’s Julia Chatterley and Hira Humayun contributed reporting to this post.

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World

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta answers your questions as the world marks a year of the Covid-19 pandemic

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CNN

More than 529,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic one year ago — with up to a projected 571,000 to die by early April — a number that Dr. Sanjay Gupta calls “numbing.”

“This should not feel normal,” Gupta told CNN’s John King. “… So many of these deaths were preventable.”

Gupta said that vaccines are not solely responsible for the downward trend in coronavirus cases.

“As wonderful as the vaccines are, what ends up bringing these things down, what has worked in the United States at various times — what has worked in so many places around the world — are basic public health measures. I think that’s one of the biggest lessons of all this. We want science to rescue us, understandably, but that shouldn’t mean we lean away from public health measures,” Gupta said. 

He used the example of South Africa, which experienced a large surge in cases from a variant in the winter, but has since flattened the curve. Less than 1% of the country has been vaccinated so far, according to Gupta.

“That steep decline is not because of vaccines, that is another reminder, even with one of these concerning variants, that basic public health measures work. So we want the vaccine, we want science to rescue us, but South Africa should remind us of what is possible even without those vaccines,” he said. 

Gupta is optimistic as the US moves ahead through the spring and summer, he said. 

“Going into summer, we’ll have a lot of people vaccinated, and we’ll get to that herd immunity,” he said.

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World

McConnell criticizes Covid-19 relief bill, calling it “purely partisan”

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Medical lab scientists, Glenda Daza, left, and Emily Degli-Angeli, work on samples collected in the Novavax Phase 3 Covid-19 clinical vaccine trial at the UW Medicine Retrovirology Lab at Harborview Medical Center on February 12, in Seattle, Washington. Karen Ducey/Getty Images

Biotechnology company Novavax still expects to see results from its PREVENT-19 trial, a Phase 3 study of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, sometime in April. The trial has enrolled 30,000 volunteers across more than 100 locations.

“Everybody’s enrolled and now we’re watching for cases,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, told CNN on Tuesday.

“I think sometime in the April timeframe we’ll have finished that trial. So, we’ll have three pivotal trials testing our vaccine — that’s extremely important for evidence that your vaccine is safe and can work,” Glenn said.

In January, the American biotech firm announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was found to have an overall efficacy of 89.3% in a Phase 3 clinical trial conducted in the United Kingdom, where it was found to have 95.6% efficacy against the original coronavirus strain and 85.6% against the variant strain first identified in the UK.

The coronavirus vaccine was not among the first authorized in the United States because the company faced some challenges in building the staff needed to develop such a new vaccine, Glenn said.

“We were a small company,” Glenn said. 

In January of last year, around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland-based company recruited more staff to work on developing its Covid-19 vaccine in response to the health crisis, Glenn said.

“We had to recruit people, and our funding was kind of low,” Glenn said. “In addition to all the challenges of developing the vaccine, which is really complicated, we had the challenge to build a company.”

Glenn added that Novavax has “reached a really good point now” with building the company and developing the vaccine. The company still expects to apply for emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine sometime in the second quarter of this year.

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