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The winter storm that has blanketed large parts of the U.S. in snow and ice has disrupted the COVID-19 vaccine program, forcing clinics and sites across the South and North to close temporarily and reschedule appointments.
Power outages that are currently affecting millions in Oregon, Texas and Kentucky are adding to the confusion and slowing shipments of doses in some regions. In Houston, doctors were scrambling to distribute 8,400 doses that were affected by a power cut at a storage center and the failure of a backup generator.
The vaccine program had largely got on track in recent weeks after a slow start.
“The past year has felt like a long and winding road,” said Chris Meekins, analyst at Raymond James in a weekly update on the virus. “Yet, the road is looking more promising as we observe continued improvements in cases and hospitalizations and increasing vaccinations. Case levels are the lowest they have been since early November, and more than 11.6% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine tracker is showing that as of 6.00 a.m. Sunday, 38.3 million people had received one or more doses out of a total of 52.9 million doses administered and 70 million doses had been delivered to states. The U.S. dosed about 11.5 million people last week alone, said Meekins, and President Jone Biden is planning to distribute at least 11 million doses a week after securing more supplies from Moderna Inc. MRNA, -2.26% and Pfizer Inc. PFE, -0.22% and its German partner BioNTech SE. BNTX, -3.11%
The U.S. added 55,552 new cases on Monday and at least 994 new deaths, according to a New York Times tracker. The U.S. has averaged 85,812 cases a day over the past week, falling below 100,000 for the first time in months and well below the peak of about 250,000 in January.
Globally, trends are improving too, according to the World Health Organization. The number of new cases has declined for a fifth consecutive week, according to the WHO, which on Monday, granted emergency use authorization to the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC AZN, -1.25% AZN, -0.98% and Oxford University, which will now become part of its Covax program that aims to ensure vaccines are delivered to lower-income countries.
“We now have all the pieces in place for the rapid distribution of vaccines,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “But we still need to scale-up production, and we continue to call for vaccine developers to submit their dossiers to WHO for review at the same time as they submit them to regulators in high-income countries.”
Dr. Paul Offit, an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology, told MSNBC that the good news for now is that the current vaccines seem to be sufficiently effective in dealing with new variants of the virus to prevent hospitalizations and death.
“A line hasn’t been crossed yet,” he said, which would force experts to rethink strategy. Offitt said he “really likes” the CDC’s plan for reopening schools announced late last week. The plan offers a tiered approach that is directly tied to community transmission.
Only communities with low or moderate transmission — defined as having fewer than 49 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days and a 7.9% positive test rate in the past seven days — should open their K-12 schools fully in-person, according to the information released by the agency.
In other news:
• Hong Kong will start to ease restrictions on Feb. 18 that will allow sports and entertainment facilities to reopen and extend dining hours, Reuters reported. Health Secretary Sophia Chan said daily cases in the city have dropped into single digits. Chan told reporters at a briefing that catering businesses would be able to operate until 10 p.m., from 6 p.m. now. Beauty salons, theme parks, cinemas and sports facilities would be allowed to resume, with conditions in place.
- The Australian medicine regulator gave provisional approval for the AstraZeneca–Oxford COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday, ahead of a national vaccination campaign due to start next week. The Canberra government said it had ordered enough doses of the vaccine, to be manufactured in Australia, to cover the country’s entire population. AstraZeneca has pledged not to profit from sales of the vaccine, which is sold at the cheapest price of available vaccine — at €1.80 ($2.20) a dose, for example, in the European Union, according to the Belgian health minister, compared with €18 a dose for the Moderna vaccine and €12 for the Pfizer/BioNtech one.
• Under fire over his management of the coronavirus’s lethal path through New York’s nursing homes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted Monday the state didn’t cover up deaths but acknowledged that officials should have moved faster to release some information sought by lawmakers, the public and the press, the Associated Press reported. “All the deaths in the nursing homes and hospitals were always fully, publicly and accurately reported,” the Democratic governor said, weeks after the state was forced to acknowledge that its count of nursing home deaths excluded thousands of residents who perished after being taken to hospitals. He explained the matter as a difference of “categorization,” with the state counting where deaths occurred and others seeking total deaths of nursing home residents, regardless of the location.
• The first guests checked in to government-sanctioned accommodation in the U.K. on Monday, as part of tough new quarantine measures aimed at preventing new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus from entering the country, MarketWatch’s Lina Saigol reported. Under the new rules, U.K. nationals arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries, including South Africa and Brazil, will have to quarantine in select hotels for 10 days at a cost of £1,750 ($2,433) per adult. The government has struck deals with 16 hotels so far, providing 4,963 rooms, and a further 58,000 rooms are on standby, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
• A rare heavy snowstorm in Athens, Greece has caused officials to halt its vaccine program, the AP reported. The snow has covered the Acropolis and other ancient monuments and halted services across the country. The snow, an unusual sight in the city of more than 3 million residents, also stopped most public transport services, while toppled trees caused blackouts in several mountainside suburbs. The snow arrived as Athens and several other parts of Greece remain in lockdown to curb coronavirus infections. Schools and most stores are closed, and residents must stay indoors during a nightly curfew.
Latest tallies
The global tally for confirmed cases of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 climbed above 109 million on Tuesday, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University, while the death toll rose above 2.40 million. About 61 million people have recovered.
The U.S. has the highest case tally in the world at 27.69 million and the highest death toll at 486,332.
Brazil has the second highest death toll at 239,773 and is third by cases at 9.8 million.
India is second worldwide in cases with 10.9 million, and now fourth in deaths at 155,813.
Mexico has the third highest death toll at 174,657and 13th highest case tally at 1.9 million.
The U.K. has 4 million cases and 117,622 deaths, the highest in Europe and fifth highest in the world.
China, where the virus was first discovered late last year, has had 100,624 confirmed cases and 4,829 deaths, according to its official numbers.
