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Biden to Announce Military Help for Hospitals in 6 States

Biden to Announce Military Help for Hospitals in 6 States

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A National Guard member administering a coronavirus test last week in Ohio, one of six states to which the Biden administration will deploy military medical personnel.
Credit…Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — President Biden plans to announce on Thursday the deployment of 1,000 military medical personnel to six states to help hospitals deal with a surge in cases from the Omicron variant, White House officials said.

Mr. Biden is scheduled to appear alongside Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, and Deanne Criswell, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, at the White House to detail the teams heading to hard-hit communities across the country. Mr. Biden said late last month that he would be tapping the military to help hospitals early in January.

Officials said the new teams of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel would begin arriving at hospitals in Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio and Rhode Island. They said the teams would help triage patients arriving at hospitals, allowing short-staffed emergency departments to free up space.

The deployments are part of the Biden administration’s efforts to tackle the latest surge of cases caused by the highly contagious Omicron variant. As it has surged, so have new cases, reaching more than 780,000 a day across the country. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has hit a record high of about 142,000.

Mr. Biden is also expected to make additional announcements on Thursday about the administration’s efforts to handle the pandemic.

For Mr. Biden, the inability to get control of the pandemic has helped drag down his approval ratings as he enters his second year in office. His aides are intent on publicly communicating their efforts to deal with the virus.

Since Thanksgiving, when Omicron was first discovered in South Africa, the administration has sent over 800 military and emergency personnel to 24 states, tribes and territories, officials said, not counting the personnel Mr. Biden is set to announce on Thursday.

In addition, more than 14,000 National Guard members have been activated in 49 states to help at hospitals with vaccinations, testing and other medical services, officials said. Those deployments have been paid for by the American Rescue Plan, a law that Mr. Biden championed at the beginning of his term.

Officials said there would likely be further deployments of military medical personnel in the days ahead as the country continues to struggle with the pandemic.

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Credit…China Daily, via Reuters

The police in a city in central China have detained the manager of a regional coronavirus testing laboratory on suspicion of “committing acts that caused the spread of the coronavirus or seriously increased the danger of spreading it.”

In a brief statement, the police in Xuchang, a city in Henan Province, also said that the authorities in the nearby city of Yuzhou were investigating the man, identified only by his surname, Zhang, for “serious criminal offenses,” but they did not provide more details.

The detention, announced on Wednesday, comes as China faces its largest surge in coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, an effort that has relied heavily on mass testing to ferret out cases. More than 20 million people across at least five Chinese cities are under lockdown as officials seek to tamp down outbreaks before the start of the Beijing Olympics in three weeks.

Guangzhou KingMed Diagnostics Group, the parent company of the testing laboratory, said in a statement on Wednesday that the employee had been working with local health departments in Yuzhou to assist with the logistics of the city’s mass-testing campaign. The company said the employee had not been involved in any of the laboratory testing and called reports that he had purposely spread the virus, lost samples and fabricated and withheld data “rumors and false information.”

Founded in 2003, KingMed Diagnostics Group is one of the largest third-party coronavirus testing providers in China, with 37 laboratories around the country, according to the company’s website. Zhong Nanshan, one of China’s top medical advisers, is a member of its academic advisory committee, according to an article posted on the company’s website.

Yuzhou, a city of 1.1 million in Henan, has been in lockdown for more than a week after the discovery of three asymptomatic cases this month. Since then, the authorities have carried out at least seven rounds of mass testing as part of a broader effort to realize China’s “zero Covid” strategy. As of Wednesday, Yuzhou had reported 275 confirmed cases in the recent outbreak.

There have been several incidents involving testing companies in China since the start of the pandemic. In January 2021, a testing company employee was detained in the northern province of Hebei for reporting a sample of hundreds of thousands of residents as negative before the testing was completed.

The sample was later discovered to include several positive cases, according to the Chinese state media.

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Credit…Kelly Defina/Reuters

MELBOURNE, Australia — The Australian Open will operate at significantly reduced spectator capacity, the Victorian state government said on Thursday.

The Grand Slam tennis tournament, which begins on Monday in Melbourne, set out to be held at full capacity, but those plans were scuttled because of rising numbers of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Victoria.

There could still be full, or nearly full, arenas for some matches. The Victorian government said that no previously sold tickets would be canceled or changed, but that further ticket sales would be “paused at 50 percent capacity.”

The tournament has long been one of the best-attended sports events in the world. It attracted 812,174 spectators in 2020 during its two-week run in late January and early February. But crowds were significantly reduced last year, when the tournament was delayed because of the pandemic. The Open did not host spectators for five of its 14 days after a lockdown took effect during the event.

The Australian Open is set to open on Monday even as coronavirus cases, fueled by the Omicron variant, are rising in a country that said it would try to live with the virus after imposing some of the world’s longest lockdowns on residents.

Even the tournament has not escaped outbreaks. On Thursday, Bernard Tomic, an Australian player who had a first-round exit from the qualifiers, confirmed to reporters that he had Covid-19. Tomic, 29 received a positive test result 48 hours after he faced Roman Safiullin of Russia on Tuesday and lost in straight sets.

After the game, Tomic posted on Instagram: “Feeling really sick, I’m now back in my hotel room. Just spoke to the doctors on site and they’ve asked me to isolate.”

On Thursday, he told Australian news outlets, “I still feel pretty sick.”

The tournament has also been overshadowed by the vaccine exemption controversy surrounding the No. 1 men’s player, Novak Djokovic, who was cleared by a judge to play after he was initially denied entry to the country.

On Thursday, Tennis Australia, which is hosting the tournament, listed him as the top seed to play. But the world is still awaiting a decision by Australia’s immigration minister about whether to cancel his visa for a second time.

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Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The enrollment crisis at U.S. institutions of higher learning continued a second year into the pandemic, even as coronavirus vaccines became widely available for students last fall, according to the latest numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Total undergraduate enrollment dropped 3.1 percent from the fall of 2020 to the fall of 2021, bringing the total decline since the fall of 2019 to 6.6 percent — or 1,205,600 students.

“Our final look at fall 2021 enrollment shows undergraduates continuing to sit out in droves as colleges navigate yet another year of Covid-19,” said Doug Shapiro, the executive director of the research center, which collects and analyzes data from 3,600 postsecondary institutions.

Even before the pandemic, college enrollment was declining nationally as the number of college-age students leveled off. At the same time, high tuition costs discouraged prospective domestic students, and the highly polarizing immigration debate drove away international students.

That decline then accelerated steeply when Covid-19 forced many classes online and restricted campus life. The economic disruption caused by the pandemic also forced many prospective college students into the workplace.

The new figures show that undergraduate enrollment declined at every type of college, but public two-year colleges remain the hardest-hit, with U.S. community colleges disproportionately hurt.

Tens of thousands of students, many of them low-income, were forced to delay school or drop out because of the pandemic and the economic crisis it has created. The new data showed that enrollment in community colleges was down 13.2 percent, or 706,000 students, compared with 2019.

The number of students seeking associate degrees at four-year institutions also fell, as did the number of students aged 24 and over.

“Without a dramatic re-engagement in their education, the potential loss to these students’ earnings and futures is significant, which will greatly impact the nation as a whole in years to come,” Mr. Shapiro said in a news release.

There was one bright spot in the data: The enrollment of first-year students stabilized, up about 0.4 percent, or 8,100 students, from 2020 to 2021.

Even so, first-year enrollment is 9.2 percent lower than prepandemic levels in fall 2019.

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Credit…Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press

As the highly infectious Omicron variant surged recently, a high-stakes battle played out between Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and the city’s teachers’ union about how to keep schools open and safe.

The union called for more testing and better masks, with 73 percent of its members voting to move to remote learning. When teachers stopped reporting to their classrooms, Ms. Lightfoot accused them of an illegal work stoppage before the two sides finally reached a compromise.

This episode of “The Daily” charts the battle on the ground in Chicago, speaking with teachers, parents and students about the standoff.

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: ‘The Kids Are Casualties in a War’

How students, teachers and parents were caught in the middle of a standoff between Chicago’s mayor and its teachers’ union.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/13/world/omicron-covid-testing-vaccines