The U.S. vaccination program has shown signs of slowing in recent days even as the numbers of new cases remain flat or are increasing in places. Vaccination rates vary from 31.5 percent of people in Alabama having received at least one dose up to 52 percent in Maine.
Men behind women in getting vaccinations, especially among Black communities
DJ Quicksilva was on the fence about getting vaccinated. The radio host, who lives in Prince George’s County, Md., had been eligible since January because he teaches at his DJ school in person. His doctor was pushing him to get the shot. But he did not trust a medical system he felt had too often failed Black men like him.
When his wife got vaccinated in March, the pressure mounted.
“It is creating that separation in the house,” he said during a forum he hosted with doctors. “Like: ‘Okay, baby, I’m vaccinated. What you going to do?’ I’m like: ‘Ugh. Jesus Christ.’”
Across the country, more women than men have been getting vaccinated, data shows, even though more men have been hospitalized for or died of covid-19. In the D.C. area, the gap appears especially wide among Black residents.
With India at breaking point, U.S. and other countries offer help
LONDON — With India continuing to report escalating coronavirus deaths and infection figures, countries including the Britain and United States have pledged urgent help to a nation where at least one person is dying every four minutes in the capital, New Delhi, and hospitals are running out of oxygen and beds for patients.
Some 352,991 new cases of the virus were recorded in India on Monday — setting a new infection record in the country for the fifth consecutive day. There are now more than 17.3 million cases across the nation — the second-highest total in the world after the United States.
Britain confirmed Sunday that it had sent its first batch of emergency aid to India, which includes 600 items of equipment including oxygen concentrators and ventilators. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain stands “side by side” with India.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab promised further support in the form of several shipments. “We need this kind of international collaboration if we’re going to get through the pandemic,” he told British media.
France, Germany and the European Union also pledged their support, promising medicine and crucial respiratory equipment, while the United States said it was “determined” to help the country during the outbreak.
Since last year, experts have warned that the official figures being cited by the Indian government may be incomplete because many people who live in remote locations where death tolls are high do not have access to testing and infections go undetected.
‘We were so close’: Catching covid between vaccine doses
Abbey Quinn regrets the Easter dinner.
The 29-year-old celebrated the holiday with her roommate’s family five days after nabbing her first Moderna vaccine shot. Later that week Quinn, a restaurant worker in Asheville, N.C., woke up feeling her shirt hurt against her skin and knew it wasn’t a typical cold.
Everyone at the meal tested positive for the coronavirus, she said.
Quinn falls into an unlucky group of Americans exposed to the virus before their vaccine doses could offer them full protection. Their stories offer a reminder of the danger of people letting their guard down while highly transmissible virus variants circulate and a spring wave drives up hospitalizations across the country.
South Africa to resume Johnson & Johnson vaccine rollout following suspension over health concerns
South Africa is set to resume its Johnson & Johnson vaccine drive among health-care workers this week after the inoculation effort was suspended following a U.S.-recommended pause to review reports about rare blood clots among those vaccinated.
At the time, South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said the country had halted the vaccination study “out of an abundance of caution.” He added that of the 289,000 doses given to health-care staff, no reports of blood clots have been recorded.
“I wish to reassure you all, fellow South Africans, that it is much better to have the vaccine than to avoid taking it for fear of getting a blood clot,” Mkhize said in a statement announcing the resumed trial.
In South Africa, the vaccine has not yet been distributed among the wider community and is now available only to an estimated 1.2 million front-line workers. The early trial, which is helping researchers evaluate the vaccine, is set to resume Wednesday.
Following a meeting last week and a review of the health concerns, the European Medicines Agency said it had found a possible link to extremely rare cases of blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets. Experts say the clots usually occur within three weeks of being vaccinated.
The committee advised that a warning about the small but serious risk be added to the vaccine side effects list and given to those receiving a shot.
The United States recommended the resumed use of the vaccine on Friday.
Oxygen runs fatally short inside a Delhi hospital as covid cases mount
NEW DELHI — As night fell, the full desperation of the hospital’s plight became clear. Its oxygen supply was running out, and no help was coming.
Ravinder Kumar has worked at Jaipur Golden Hospital in India’s capital for nearly three decades. All through Friday, he and the other members of the staff called everyone they could think of — oxygen vendors, other hospitals, the police, city officials — in a frantic search for a fresh supply.
“It was as if the entire city was looking for oxygen,” said Kumar, 55. Within a couple of hours, 26 of the hospital’s severely ill patients died, Kumar said.
The deaths marked a grim new turn in India’s battle with a devastating second wave of coronavirus cases. The country reported more than 346,786 new cases on Saturday, the third consecutive day of record-breaking infections. More than 2,600 people died, although experts say that figure is a vast undercount.
British media claim Boris Johnson said he ‘would rather let bodies pile high’ than enforce a third lockdown. Officials deny it.
LONDON — British media alleged on Monday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson said last year he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than order a third lockdown to curb coronavirus infections.
“No more [expletive] lockdowns — let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” Johnson is alleged to have said as he came under growing pressure in October to impose tighter restrictions in England as cases in the country climbed once again, according to the reports.
According to the Daily Mail, the comment came after Johnson was told that if the crisis continued to worsen on British soil, soldiers may be needed to guard overburdened hospitals treating covid-19 patients.
Johnson’s Downing Street office denied the reports Monday. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace branded the claim “just another lie.”
Britain was ravaged by the coronavirus, which has claimed at least 127,681 lives since the start of the pandemic. The government has been repeatedly condemned for its handling of the crisis, with critics saying that officials acted too slowly to contain the outbreak and that access to testing and protective wear for front-line health-care workers was inadequate.
In October, the government implemented a three-tier covid-19 system, which placed Britons under different restrictions depending on where they lived and what cases of infection were like in each area.
In mid-December, Johnson was forced to scrap plans that allowed people to mix over the holiday season after a new variant was detected that had “significantly faster” transmission rates. On Jan. 4, Johnson announced a third national lockdown and asked residents to stay home, citing a “drastic jump” in cases linked to the newly identified variant.
England is slowly emerging from its third lockdown. Restaurants and pubs are allowed to serve customers outside, and gyms and nonessential shops have reopened in recent weeks.
Experts warn U.S. rate of infection still ‘precarious’ amid efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy
Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, warned Americans that the country’s level of 50,000 new infections a day is still too high and urged people to get vaccinated, even as rates of new doses administered have dropped 14 percent in the past week.
“That’s a precarious level, and we don’t want that to go up,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, as he urged Americans to get vaccinated. Public attitudes to vaccinations have been breaking down along party lines, with many more Republicans expressing reluctance to get doses.
In a poll by NBC News, 24 percent of respondents who identified as Republican said they would not get vaccinated, compared with just 4 percent of respondents who identified as Democrat. Rates of vaccination in predominantly Republican-voting states have been substantially lower than in Democratic states as well.
Vaccination rates vary from just 31.5 percent of people in Alabama having received at least one dose up to 52 percent in Maine.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, warned, however, that the constant criticism of those who are vaccine-hesitant can be counterproductive, and more must be done to convince people of the benefits.
“One thing we need to do is change the conversation a little bit; maybe there has been too much finger-wagging. I’ve done some of that, and I’m going to try and stop,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He urged more effort to listen to people’s concerns while relating to them the benefits of being vaccinated.
The U.S. vaccination program has shown signs of slowing in recent days, even as the numbers of new cases remain flat or are increasing in places. Collins noted that 90 percent of the country lives just five miles from a vaccination site.
Global envy and anger over U.S. vaccine abundance as pandemic surges anew
As India announced grim records — the highest daily coronavirus infection tallies in a single country — Americans were enjoying a spring of vaccine abundance.
In India, just 1.4 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, and overwhelmed hospitals have been running short of oxygen. Meanwhile, in the United States — where 1 in 4 Americans are fully vaccinated and more than 40 percent have gotten at least the first dose — a major Miami hospital, Jackson Memorial, said it would begin winding down vaccinations because of excess supply and weakening demand.
A long-simmering debate over the glaring gap in vaccine access — largely between rich and poor countries, but among some developed nations, too — is now boiling over, with global figures and national leaders decrying the vaccine plenty in a few nations and the relative drought almost everywhere else.
The troubled Hong Kong-Singapore bubble ready to try again
The Hong Kong-Singapore travel bubble will resume May 26, after it was canceled last year because of a rise in the number of confirmed cases. The initiative, which will allow travelers to cross borders free from quarantine, will emerge as a test of future reopening plans for the two places.
Edward Yau, Hong Kong’s secretary for commerce and economic development, announced Monday the latest plans for the travel bubble. Because Hong Kong has observed a few cases of a variant, he stressed that Hong Kong travelers will have to be fully vaccinated for 14 days to be able to travel, although this will not be required for Singapore travelers entering Hong Kong.
Hong Kong residents under the age of 16 will be exempted from this mandate. Singaporeans coming into Hong Kong have to download the Hong Kong government’s “LeaveHomeSafe” app, and vice versa for Singapore’s “TraceTogether” app, to strengthen contact tracing. The initiative will benefit both places as both Hong Kong and Singapore are extremely dependent on tourism and their roles as aviation hubs.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong government will further expand the quarantine-free “return2hk” travel plan, which now only covers Hong Kong residents based in Guangdong province and Shenzhen to the rest of China. There will be a quota per day to control the number of people crossing borders.
Vaccine maker chief sold $10 million in stock before company ruined Johnson & Johnson doses
The stock price of government contractor Emergent BioSolutions has fallen sharply since the disclosure at the end of March that production problems at the firm’s plant in Baltimore had ruined 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine. Since then, AstraZeneca moved production of its own vaccine out of the facility, and Emergent temporarily halted new production there altogether.
Those developments came after Emergent’s stock price had tumbled on Feb. 19, following the company’s published financial results. Emergent stock has fallen since mid-February to about $62 a share from $125 a share, or just more than 50 percent.
But the decline has had less of an impact than it might have on the personal finances of Emergent’s chief executive, Robert G. Kramer, who sold more than $10 million worth of his stock in the company in January and early February, securities filings show.
U.S. pledges help to India as it breaks records in deaths and new cases
The Biden administration, under growing pressure to offer more assistance to India as it struggles to contain a devastating coronavirus outbreak, promised Sunday to provide new aid, including the materials for making vaccines.
The pledge came hours after Indian authorities announced another global record in new daily cases Sunday and the most covid-19 deaths the country has suffered in a 24-hour period.
The National Security Council said the United States would provide vaccine materials, drugs, test kits, ventilators and personal protective equipment.
“Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” President Biden tweeted Sunday.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement Sunday that the department will assist with delivering supplies, including “oxygen-related equipment,” to India in the next days.
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