A senior UK scientist warned on Thursday that the variant of the disease transmitted by the coronavirus COVID-19, which first appeared there and is far more infectious than the original virus, could “sweep the world” and complicate the effort. to contain the pandemic.
In an interview for the BBC Newscast podcast, Professor Sharon Peacock, head of the UK’s genetic surveillance program, said the new variant has already spread across the UK and is likely to spread widely across the globe.
The news comes when California Governor Gavin Newsom confirms that the variant that first appeared in South Africa has already been detected in two cases at the Golden State. This variant worries experts, as it is also highly contagious and appears more resistant to vaccines that have received emergency use authorization in the United States and elsewhere.
Earlier this week, South Africa said it would stop using the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC AZN,
AZN,
and the University of Oxford because it seemed less effective in dealing with tension and, on Wednesday, the authorities said they would start giving frontline health care professionals Johnson & Johnson JNJ,
instead of the vaccine. This vaccine has not yet received emergency use authorization – a request from the USA has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration – but there are high hopes for it being a single dose regimen, unlike other authorized vaccines, which require two jabs, weeks apart.
The World Health Organization evaluated the AstraZeneca vaccine on Thursday and said it was “highly effective and safe”, although less effective in dealing with the South African variant.
“The AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19 is 63.09% effective against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the WHO Strategic Advisory Group on Immunization Specialists (SAGE) said in a statement. “Longer dose ranges in the 8 to 12 week interval are associated with greater vaccine effectiveness”.
AstraZeneca, which released its annual earnings on Thursday, said it was correcting problems with the manufacture of its vaccine and expects to double monthly production to 200 million doses by April, while seeking to overcome a difficult start to the vaccine’s launch, as reported by Dow Jones Newswires.
Last year, AstraZeneca stumbled upon reporting clinical trial results and, more recently, suffered a deficit in the doses promised to the European Union. Chief Executive Pascal Soriot and other executives said they are solving production problems and will meet targets to deliver more than 400 million doses to rich and poor countries in the coming months. This follows green signals in the UK, Europe and beyond for the use of the vaccine, which has not yet been approved for use in the United States.
The company also said it would take six to nine months to create a modified version of the vaccine to target new variants.
Meanwhile, the vaccine tracker at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is showing that as of 6 am on Wednesday morning, 44.8 million vaccines have been administered and about 66 million doses distributed to the states. The tracker shows that 33.8 million people received one or more doses, equivalent to about 10% of the population.
The United States added another 94,855 new COVID cases on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, and at least 3,252 people died. Cases continue to fall and had an average of 104,554 new cases per day last week, 36% below the two-week average.
There was bad news for California, which on Wednesday overtook New York as the state with the highest number of COVID deaths, according to the Times. Los Angeles is temporarily closing five vaccination sites due to a lack of vaccines, the newspaper reported.
In other news:
• The United States could have prevented 40% of the deaths it suffered from COVID-19 if the rates were in line with those of other high-income members from the G-7 countries, a Lancet commission reported on Thursday after examining the history of former President Donald Trump. Trump “brought misfortunes to the US and the planet” during his four years in office, the commission concluded, but he also noted that the US public health infrastructure was in a poor state when the country entered the pandemic. “While his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, it weakened his coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2.3 million, even before the massive displacement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and accelerated the privatization of programs government health care, ”said the report. The United States leads the world in case numbers, with 27.4 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University, or about a quarter of the global count. It is by far the largest number of fatalities, 471,765, or about one fifth of the global total. The second highest number of cases is India, with 10.9 million, or less than half of the total of the USA. Brazil has the second highest number of deaths, 234,850, also less than half the number in the USA.
• Federal health officials again reminded Americans to continue wearing masks, even as the number of new cases and hospitalizations has declined since the peak in early January, reported Jaimy Lee of MarketWatch. A report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday found that wearing two masks (such as a surgical mask and a cloth mask together) and ensuring that a medical mask fits tightly against the face helped prevent exposure to particles in an experiment. The CDC recommends that the masks “have two or more layers, completely cover the nose and mouth and fit comfortably to the walls and the side of the face”.
• President Joe Biden created a new task force focused on health equity and COVID-19. He summoned 12 experts, who are expected to issue a series of recommendations on the country’s response and recovery to COVID-19. In December, MarketWatch spoke with Dr. James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry College, one of four historically black medical schools in the United States, and a member of Biden’s new COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. Read the full interview.
• US employers may be allowed to require workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but new research suggests that most are still not following the mandatory route, reported Meera Jagannathan of MarketWatch. Only 0.5% of companies currently require coronavirus vaccination for all employees, and only 6% plan to make it mandatory for all workers, once vaccines are readily available and / or fully approved by US Food and Drug Administration, according to a survey of 1,802 C- executives, HR professionals and in-house lawyers from a variety of sectors headed by the labor law firm Littler. Another 3% said they plan to require vaccination for only a few workers, such as those in customer service roles.
Read too: Target, Tractor Supply joins the list of companies that pay workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine
• A Texas doctor who inoculated 10 people with doses of the vaccine that were about to expire, instead of letting them go to waste, was fired and charged with theft, the New York Times reported. Dr. Hasan Gokal attended at home and directed people to his home, including strangers, in an effort to make doses matter. His last patient was his own wife, who suffers from lung disease. The doses in each vial of Moderna Inc. MRNA,
Vaccines are only viable for six hours after the seal is broken, and it is urgent that they be administered before expiration.
Latest counts
The global count of confirmed cases of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 rose to more than 107.4 million on Thursday, while the death toll rose to 2.35 million.
Brazil has the second highest number of deaths with 234,850 and is the third in cases with 9.7 million.
India is the second world in cases with 10.9 million, and now the fourth in deaths with 155,360.
Mexico has the third highest number of deaths with 169,670 and the 13th highest number of cases with 1.9 million.
The UK has 3.9 million cases and 115,070 deaths, the highest number in Europe and the fifth largest in the world.
China, where the virus was first discovered last year, had 100,515 confirmed cases and 4,827 deaths, according to its official figures.
What is the economy saying?
Nearly 800,000 people signed up for unemployment benefits in the United States in early February, signaling that many workers are still losing their jobs, despite the launch of coronavirus vaccines and a decline in Covid-19 cases, reported Jeffry Bartash of MarketWatch.
Initial claims for unemployment benefits traditionally registered in the states dropped from 19,000 to 793,000 in the seven days ending February 6, the government said on Thursday. Economists polled by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal predicted new claims totaling 760,000 seasonally adjusted.
The decline was basically a mirage, however. The new claims from two weeks ago increased to 812,000 from the 779,000 originally reported, an unusually large review that likely reflects ongoing problems in collecting unemployment data.
Another 334,524 requests were filed through a temporary federal aid program.
Adding to the new state and federal claims, the government received 1.15 million applications last week for unemployment benefits, based on actual or unadjusted figures. The combined claims have not yet dropped to less than 1 million a week since last May.
Before the pandemic, new claims were reaching 200,000 and had never gone up by more than 695,000 in a week.
To see: A visual view of how an unfair pandemic reshaped work and home
The “numbers are somewhat misleading, reflecting various records and some degree of fraud,” said Raymond James chief economist Scott Brown. “However, this data reflects a continuing high level of job destruction.”
“An extraordinarily high number of people remains dependent on government support, which indicates the ongoing tensions in the labor market,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at High Frequency Economics for the United States.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
and S&P 500 SPX,
were higher in Thursday’s negotiations.