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Coronavirus Live News and Updates

Coronavirus Live News and Updates




A nearly empty international terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on Monday.
Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Countries are tightening their borders as a ban takes effect Saturday on noncitizens traveling to the United States from South Africa, amid warnings over the threat posed by a virus variant spreading rapidly there and signs that it can weaken the effectiveness of vaccines.

In recent days, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax have each announced that their vaccines provided strong protection against Covid-19, but the results came with a significant cautionary note: Their efficacy rate dropped in South Africa, where the highly contagious variant is driving most cases. Studies suggest that the variant also blunts the effectiveness of Covid vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax.

The variant, B.1.351, has spread to at least 31 countries, including two cases documented in the United States this week.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., said on Friday that virus variants should serve as a “wake-up call” to the public, warning vaccine companies they must be “nimble to be able to adjust readily to make versions of the vaccine that are actually, specifically directed to whatever mutation is actually prevalent at any given time.”

Other countries hoping to slow the spread of more contagious variants will soon be under new restrictions. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has announced some flights from Mexico and Caribbean nations will be suspended. International travelers must take coronavirus tests when they return to Canada and will have to wait up to three days for results in an approved hotel at their own expense.

Restrictions in France and Germany begin this weekend. Starting Sunday, France will ban most travel from all countries outside of the European Union. Except for cross-border workers, travelers from E.U. countries will be required to present a negative test before entering the country, said Jean Castex, the French prime minister.

In Germany, nonresidents from several countries — Portugal, Brazil, South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), Britain and Ireland — will be restricted from entering the country, even if they test negative for the virus.

The United States is also extending its ban on travel from Brazil, Britain and 27 European countries.

The first U.S. case of a Brazil-based variant, known as P.1, was confirmed in Minnesota on Monday. Scientists expect it to behave similarly to the South African-based variant because it shares genetic similarities.

Vaccines have proven effective in studies against the highly contagious Britain-based variant, called B.1.1.7, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned it could become the main source of U.S. infection by March and drive more cases and deaths.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new C.D.C. director, said Friday that the variant first identified in Britain has now been confirmed in 379 cases in 29 states. She said officials remained concerned about the variants and were “rapidly ramping up surveillance and sequencing activities” to closely monitor them. Unlike Britain, the United States has been conducting little of the genomic sequencing necessary to track the spread of the variants.

The spreading variants have added renewed urgency to speeding up vaccine distribution. The E.U. is grappling with disrupted vaccine deliveries, while the Biden administration is pushing to accelerate the slow, chaotic inoculation drive in the United States.


United States › United StatesOn Jan. 29 14-day change
New cases 165,489 –33%
New deaths 3,600 –2%

World › WorldOn Jan. 29 14-day change
New cases 595,430 –22%
New deaths 14,790 +3%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Where states are reporting vaccines given

Martin Kenyon, 91, outside a hospital in London after receiving his Covid-19 vaccine in December.
Credit…Mary Turner for The New York Times

With nearly eight million people, or 11.7 percent of the population, having already received their first shot, Britain’s pace of vaccination is the fastest of any large nation in the world. Only Israel and the United Arab Emirates are moving faster.

Britain has set up dozens of vaccination centers in sports stadiums, churches, mosques, even an open-air museum in the Midlands, familiar to television views as the set for the popular crime series “Peaky Blinders.”

“Vaccination is the one thing we’ve gotten right,” said Christina Pagel, a professor of operational research at University College London.

The rapid rollout is a rare success for a country whose response to the coronavirus has otherwise been bungled — plagued by delays, reversals and mixed messages. All of which have contributed to a death toll that recently surged past 100,000 and cemented Britain’s status as the worst-hit country in Europe.

But success has brought its own headaches: Doctors now worry about running short of supplies after a vaccine war erupted between Britain and the European Union. The E.U. imposed export restrictions on vaccines made in the bloc on Friday after accusing a British-based vaccine maker, AstraZeneca, of favoring its home market.

And Britain’s aggressive approach is not without risks: To reach more people quickly, it opted to delay giving them second doses for up to 12 weeks after the first, rather than the three or four weeks tested in clinical trials.

Britain’s divorce from the European Union helped give it the political leeway to authorize multiple vaccines before the bloc and to swiftly lock up its own production of the vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. Much of the success is also a result of back-to-basics decisions by the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

A woman walks along the East Battery sea wall in Charleston, S.C., on Friday.
Credit…Cameron Pollack for The New York Times

South Carolina was already experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation when officials got word this week of an alarming development: A new, more concerning variant of the virus, originally identified in South Africa, had been detected in the state.

Not long after, a second case was discovered with no known connection to the first, state officials announced on Thursday.

Neither patient had a history of travel, officials said, suggesting that what many public health experts had feared had come to pass: The new variant of the virus had taken root in the United States.

The arrival of the variant — believed to be highly contagious and less responsive to vaccines — underscores the shaky progress the country has made in its battle against the virus. Even as millions of people have gotten vaccinated, and the country teeters on a downward slope of more than 150,000 new coronavirus cases a day, new mutations of the virus are threatening to undermine what little headway the country has made.

“It is a pivotal moment,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, who studies immunity against infectious diseases. “It is a race with the new variants to get a large number of people vaccinated before those variants spread.”

The variant from South Africa, known as B.1.351, is one of several mutations that have emerged as the pandemic has dragged on. Others include a variant from Brazil, which was detected in Minnesota this week, and one from Britain, which is spreading more widely in the United States.

The variants are believed to be more contagious, and the one from South Africa is among the most worrisome because preliminary research suggests that vaccines may be less effective against it.

Nine nuns in southern Michigan have died in a month during a coronavirus outbreak at their nursing home.
Credit…Mike Dickie/The Daily Telegram, via Associated Press

The religious sisters who lived in retired seclusion at the Dominican Life Center in Michigan followed strict rules to avoid an outbreak of coronavirus infection: They were kept in isolation, visitors were prohibited and masks were required by everyone on campus.

But after months after being kept at bay, it found its way in.

On Friday, the Adrian Dominican Sisters said nine sisters died in January from Covid-19 complications at the campus in Adrian, about 75 miles southwest of Detroit.

“It’s numbing,” said Sister Patricia Siemen, leader of the religious order. “We had six women die in 48 hours.”

The deaths of the sisters in Michigan have added to what is becoming a familiar trend in the spread of the virus, as it devastates religious congregate communities by infecting retired, aging populations of sisters and nuns who had quietly devoted their lives to others.

Now some of these sisters have been thrust into the public eye, as details about their names, ages and lifetimes of work are being highlighted as part of the national discourse about Americans lost to the coronavirus.

“It is a moment of reckoning with the place that they have in our culture now,” said Kathleen Holscher, a professor who holds the endowed chair of Roman Catholic studies at the University of New Mexico. “Fifty or 60 years ago, they were the face of American Catholicism, in schools and in hospitals.”

Several of the women who died at the Adrian Dominican Sisters campus had been nurses or teachers. Others had dedicated decades of their lives to religious service.

“Americans are being reminded they are older, and still there,” Dr. Holscher said. “But now they are living in these community situations and caring for one another.”

The accounting of the deaths in the nation’s religious congregate communities started in the first half of 2020 as the country broadly began to take note of the deadly transmission of the virus and the lives it took.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was last held in 2019.
Credit…Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which draws more than a hundred thousand fans daily from around the world to Southern California, is off for a third time.

A county health order canceled the event, as well as the country music festival, Stagecoach, on Friday, citing the recent virus surge that has plagued California for months, despite some recent progress. Both were to begin in April.

In the order, Dr. Cameron Kaiser, a public health officer for Riverside County, said both events are “gatherings of an international scope” that were too risky amid the surge and appearance of more contagious variants.

“If Covid-19 were detected at these festivals, the scope and number of attendees and the nature of the venue would make it infeasible, if not impossible, to track those who may be placed at risk,” the order said.

The Coachella festival, founded in 1999 and held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, draws up to 125,000 people a day and has come to be a bellwether for the multibillion-dollar touring business.

The festivals were some of the first major events canceled back in April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic. They were rescheduled for October, and in the fall were again postponed for April 2021.

New dates have not been announced.

On Friday night, Stagecoach’s homepage had its refund policy from 2020 posted on the landing page, but had not yet issued a statement. Coachella’s website did not mention the cancellation of the festival but highlighted its new clothing line released late last year.

While Coachella is one of the country’s biggest and most celebrated music events, Stagecoach is a smaller country music festival presented by the same promoter, Goldenvoice.

Last year’s Coachella was initially set to be headlined by the rapper Travis Scott, the singer Frank Ocean and a reunited Rage Against the Machine, along with dozens of other acts from across genres. Stagecoach was scheduled to feature Carrie Underwood, Eric Church, ZZ Top and more.

The concert industry has been essentially frozen since mid-March, when AEG and Live Nation, the corporations that dominate the live-music sphere, suspended all touring in North America in response to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving artists — as well as their crews and all other affiliated workers — unsure of when such large-scale events will return. Other major music festivals, including Lollapalooza in Chicago, Levitation in Austin and Summerfest in Milwaukee, have also been called off for the year.

The student recreation center at University of California, Davis was turned into a mass testing site.
Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times

The coronavirus test center on A Street in Davis, Calif., was bustling on a recent morning. Michael Duey was in line, as usual, with his teenage son. Margery Hayes waited for her wife in the parking lot. Dr. Elizabeth Pham hustled her children in for a quick pit stop.

Inside, each received a five-minute screening for the virus, administered and paid for by the University of California, Davis. Yet none of them is associated with the school.

All last fall, universities across the country were accused of enabling the pandemic’s spread by bringing back students who then endangered local residents, mingling with them in bars, stores and apartments. So U.C. Davis is trying something different.

Rather than turning the campus into a protective bubble for students and staff, as some schools have attempted, it has quietly spent the past six months making its campus bubble bigger — big enough, in fact, to encompass the entire city.

Public health experts say the initiative is the most ambitious program of its type in the country and could be a model for other universities. U.C. Davis has made free coronavirus tests — twice weekly, with overnight results — available to all 69,500 people in the city of Davis and hundreds of nonresidents who just work there.

It has also trained dozens of graduate students to help with contact tracing; recruited hotel and apartment owners to provide free isolation and quarantine housing to anyone in town exposed to the virus; and hired some 275 undergraduate ambassadors to combat health disinformation and hand out free masks.

Australian Open players at Melbourne Park on Wednesday.
Credit…Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

When the Australian Open begins next month, the grandstands may offer the closest thing to sports normalcy that the world has seen in nearly a year.

Up to 30,000 spectators a day will be allowed to attend the tennis tournament in Melbourne when it begins on Feb. 8, the sports minister of the state of Victoria said on Saturday. Melbourne is Victoria’s capital.

While a crowd of 30,000 is a rarity in international sports these days, overall attendance figures at the Australian Open will ultimately be down by about half from a normal year. Some 820,000 spectators attended the two-week tournament in 2020.

This year, organizers have created an intricate system in which spectators will only be allowed to travel within one of three zones at Melbourne Park, a move aimed at limiting social contact.

Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia, has been negotiating for months with health officials about letting spectators into the event. He said Friday that the tournament would begin at 50 percent capacity. That could grow to 75 percent in the final week, he added, when action is limited to stadium courts.

The announcement by Victoria’s sports minister, Martin Pakula, came as hundreds of players who had traveled from overseas for the tournament entered their final days of quarantine. Most of them were allowed out of their hotel rooms for five hours a day for training and practice.

But 72 players who were forced to endure a hard 14-day lockdown were only able to begin practicing this weekend. That lockdown was imposed after testing revealed 10 acute positive cases among more than 1,000 people who traveled to Australia for the event, including one player.

Tiley said that ticket sales had begun to pick up in recent days, after coming to a standstill following the handful of positive tests and a backlash in the community against players who complained about having to stay in quarantine even though they continued to test negative.

Teachers working outside a Chicago elementary school this month, in solidarity with other teachers who had been ordered to work inside.
Credit…Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press

Teachers in Chicago moved closer on Friday to striking over the city’s plan for reopening the nation’s third largest school district.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the city had not yet reached a reopening deal with the Chicago Teachers Union and that it planned to welcome tens of thousands of students back to in-person classes on Monday.

The union has directed its members to work remotely until a deal is reached. It has vowed to strike if the district locks teachers out of its electronic systems or otherwise retaliates against them for staying home.

The battle over reopening Chicago’s schools has complex racial undercurrents. The mayor, who is Black, has argued that schools should open to prevent racial achievement gaps from widening. But the union says reopening now would be unsafe, and it claims that the majority of the district’s mostly Black and Hispanic families agree.

Only a third of Chicago families have decided to send their children back to school in person.

Prekindergarten and some special education students returned to in-person instruction on Jan. 11 and continued until last week, when the union directed their teachers to stay home. Students in kindergarten through eighth grade are expected to return on Monday.

Ms. Lightfoot said on Friday that the district expected teachers to be there for both groups of students. But given the current state of negotiations, she said, “we owe it to our students and families” to prepare for the possibility that the teachers could stay home.

Each side blames the other for the impasse.

Ms. Lightfoot said on Friday that the union’s leadership had refused to put areas of agreement in writing and purposefully disrupted some in-person instruction.

“We had three weeks of success, which is precisely why the C.T.U. leadership blew it up and created chaos,” she said.

But the union said it had been close to reaching a deal on reopening when Ms. Lightfoot stepped in “at the 11th hour and blew it to pieces.”

Boys prepared to skate in Manila on Friday. The government has restricted anyone under the age of 15 from leaving home. 
Credit…Aaron Favila/Associated Press

The government of the Philippines has extended a contentious policy that bars children under 15 from leaving their homes.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration this week overruled advice from a government task force on infectious diseases that had questioned the policy.

“They can glue their attention to TV the whole day,” Mr. Duterte told reporters, referring to children under lockdown. He added that the measure was a precaution to protect children from the coronavirus variant that was first detected in Britain and has been circulating in northern towns in the Philippines.

Parents whose children who violate the lockdown can face prison time if convicted.

The government said on Friday that the policy would remain in place until at least the end of February. It also placed metropolitan Manila, the capital, and several other parts of the country under a “general community quarantine.” That means schools are closed and only businesses that are deemed essential — including malls — can remain open.

The new restrictions were announced on the same day that the government’s top official in charge of contact tracing, Benjamin Magalong, resigned under public pressure. He had been photographed without a mask at a party in the northern mountain resort town of Baguio.

The Philippines has reported more than half a million infections, the second highest caseload in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, and more than 10,000 deaths, according to a New York Times database.

Mr. Duterte’s concerns about the virus variant are understandable, said Richard Dy, a spokesman for the Child Rights Network, an advocacy group in the Philippines. But children can be relatively safe from Covid-19 in public places if health and safety protocols are observed, he added.

“Banning children from public places and confining them in their homes 24/7 can be detrimental to their physical and mental health,” Mr. Dy said.

Ida May Talic, who cares for her 7-year-old sister and 6-year-old niece in a Manila suburb, said that fighting boredom in the household was a daily challenge. She said the children were busy with online classes but complained about missing their friends.

“It also does not help that the internet connection can be intermittent at times,” Ms. Talic said. “Sometimes, they have to compete with the adults who are working from home who hog the signal.”





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