Covid-19: U.S. Vaccination Pace Increases to 2 Million Doses a Day – The New York Times

Heres what you need to know:People line up early at the Jacob Javits Convention Center Covid-19 vaccination hub on March 4, 2021.Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse Getty Images

The average number of vaccine doses being administered across the United States per day topped two million for the first time on Wednesday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A month ago, the average was about 1.3 million.

President Biden set a goal for the country shortly after taking office to administer more than 1.5 million doses a day, which the nation has now comfortably exceeded.

Mr. Biden has also promised to administer 100 million vaccines by his 100th day in office, which is April 30. As of Thursday, 54 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. Johnson & Johnsons one-shot vaccine was authorized for emergency use on Saturday, but those doses do not appear yet in the C.D.C. data.

The milestone was yet another sign of momentum in the nations effort to vaccinate every willing adult, even as state and city governments face several challenges, from current supply to logistics to hesitancy, of getting all of those doses into peoples arms.

Mass vaccination sites across the country are opening up or increasing their capacity, in part to respond to the new influx of doses from Johnson & Johnson. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday that three short-term mass vaccination sites will open in the state on Friday. Three other state-run sites, including one at Yankee Stadium, will begin administering shots around the clock. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp announced five new sites will open on March 17.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has recently helped open seven mega-sites in California, New York and Texas, that are staffed with active-duty troops. In Chicago, a vaccination site at the United Center will open next week, with a capacity of 6,000 shots a day. Many more such sites are planned.

There have been some hiccups in the massive logistical challenge of distributing millions of doses across the country, with special requirements for storage and handling. In Texas, more than 2,000 doses went to waste over the past two weeks, according to an analysis by The Houston Chronicle. A majority of those losses were blamed on blackouts that swept the state in February, leaving millions of homes and businesses without power, some for multiple days.

And Mr. Biden has made equity a major focus of his pandemic response, saying he wants pharmacies, mobile vaccination units and community clinics that help underserved communities to help increase the pace of vaccinations. Experts say that Black and Latino Americans are being vaccinated at lower rates because they face obstacles like language barriers and inadequate access to digital technology, medical facilities and transportation. But mistrust in government officials and doctors also plays a role and is fed by misinformation that is spread on social media. In cities across the country, wealthy white residents are lining up to be vaccinated in low-income Latino and Black communities.

The president said on Tuesday that the country would have enough doses available for every American adult by the end of May, though he said it would take longer to inoculate everyone and he urged people to remain vigilant by wearing masks.

The administration also announced it had brokered a deal in which the drug giant Merck & Co. will help manufacture the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The unusual agreement between two rivals in the pharmaceutical industry was historic, Mr. Biden said on Tuesday. This is a type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II.

Mr. Biden was also going to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, to give Johnson & Johnson access to supplies for manufacturing and packaging vaccines.

Connecticut will later this month end capacity limits in restaurants, offices and several other businesses, Ned Lamont, the states governor, said on Thursday, following moves by other states that have eased some virus-related restrictions.

But Mr. Lamont, a Democrat, will not lift his states mask mandate, drawing a distinction between his announcement and moves made by the Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi this week.

This is not Texas, this is not Mississippi this is Connecticut, Mr. Lamont said at a news conference.

Starting on March 19, restaurants, retail stores, libraries, personal care services, gyms, offices and houses of worship will no longer have their capacity restricted.

But businesses will be required to enforce rules on face coverings and to ensure six feet of space or plexiglass barriers between those inside customers and employees which will effectively limit capacity at several businesses.

Several other limits will remain in place, including safety and cleaning protocols at gyms and personal care services like salons and spas. Bars that do not serve food will remain closed. Unlike neighboring Massachusetts, Connecticut will not lift a curfew that requires restaurants and entertainment venues to close by 11 p.m.

Your mother used to tell you nothing good happens after 11 oclock at night, Mr. Lamont said. You know, it gets more fun sometimes, but were going to push that off a little bit longer.

Mr. Lamonts announcement made nearly a year after Connecticuts first confirmed case of the virus is a significant step forward for the states reopening.

It followed several weeks in which new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have declined in the state, a decrease that Mr. Lamont attributed to successful mask mandates and Connecticuts vaccination rollout program.

As of Thursday, the state had 433 people hospitalized with the virus. Its average positive test rate over the past seven days is at 2.3 percent, which Mr. Lamont said was the lowest rate in nearly four months.

Were beginning to get a handle on what works, he said, pointing to the decline.

Still, over the past week, Connecticut has reported an average of 22 new virus cases a day per 100,000 people, a rate that is the 10th highest per capita among all states.

The United States as a whole is averaging 19 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Federal health officials, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have urged governors not to relax their rules, warning that the country may be leveling off at a relatively high number of daily virus cases.

But Mr. Lamont said that he did not believe that the capacity limits on businesses were having a significant enough effect on curbing the virus that they needed to remain in place.

Its not so much a question of how you adjust the dial and go capacity up 10 percent or down 10 percent, or whether you have a curfew for two weeks or four weeks, and then you go back, Mr. Lamont said. I think were finding what works is wearing the mask, social distancing and vaccinations.

Mr. Lamonts announcement reflected decisions by other states to loosen virus-related restrictions as vaccination programs were ramping up and the number of new cases were starting to plateau. Throughout the pandemic, officials have had to adjust restrictions, finding a balance between safety, economic concerns and political pressure.

The governors of New York and New Jersey, both also Democrats, with whom Mr. Lamont has collaborated significantly on the pandemic response, have raised capacity limits in businesses, including restaurants, in the past month. Both of those states have been reporting new cases at the highest rates in the country.

A small group of scientists and others who believe the novel coronavirus that spawned the pandemic could have originated from a lab leak or accident is calling for an inquiry independent of the World Health Organizations team of independent experts sent to China last month.

While many scientists involved in researching the origins of the virus continue to assert that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic almost certainly began with a leap from bats to an intermediate animal and then to humans, other theories persist and have gained new visibility with the W.H.O.-led team of experts recent visit to China.

Officials with the W.H.O. have said in recent interviews that it was extremely unlikely but not impossible that the spread of the virus was linked to some sort of lab accident.

In an open letter, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde, the French newspaper, the signers list what they cast as flaws in the joint W.H.O.-China inquiry, and argue that it could not adequately address the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab.

Many of those who signed the letter were based in France. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and one of the scientists who signed the letter, said it grew out of a series of online discussions among scientists, policy experts and others who came to be known informally as the Paris group.

Dr. Ebright said that no one in the group thought that the virus had been intentionally created as a weapon, but they were all convinced that an origin in a lab through research or by accidental infection was as likely as a spillover occurring in nature from animals to humans.

Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the W.H.O., replied in an email that the team of experts that had gone to China is working on its full report as well as an accompanying summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a couple of weeks.

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We need to get past Easter, and hopefully allow more Alabamians to get their first shot before we take a step that some of the states have taken to remove the mask order altogether and lift other restrictions. Folks, were not there yet, but goodness knows were getting closer. Our new modified order will include several changes that will ease up some of our current restrictions while keeping our mask order in place for another five weeks through April 9. But let me be abundantly clear, after April the 9th, I will not keep the mask order in effect. Now, theres no question that wearing masks has been one of our greatest tools in combating the spread of the virus. That, along with practicing good hygiene and social distancing, has helped us keep more people from getting sick or worse, dying. And when we even when we lift the mask order, I will continue to wear my mask while Im around others and strongly urge my fellow citizens to use common sense and do the same thing. But at the but at that time, it will become a matter of personal responsibility and not a government mandate.

Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama on Thursday said she was extending the statewide mask order for another month, breaking with two other Republican governors who have announced plans to lift mandates in their states against the advice of federal health officials.

Aside from her decision on the mask mandate, which will now be in place until April 9, Ms. Ivey said other virus related restrictions, including allowing restaurants and breweries to operate at full capacity, will also be lifted then.

Theres no question that wearing masks has been one of my greatest tools in combating the virus, she said at a news conference.

New coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are down in the state, according to a New York Times database. About 14 percent of the residents in the state have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The states health officer, Dr. Scott Harris, said the state had already given more than a million vaccine shots.

We need to get past Easter and hopefully allow more Alabamians to get their first shot before we take a step some other states have taken to remove the mask order altogether and lift some other restrictions, Ms. Ivey said on Thursday. Folks were not there yet, but goodness knows were getting closer.

In recent days, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has been pleading with state officials not to relax health precautions now, warning about the trajectory of cases nationwide and the detection of more cases of virus variants across the country.

We are just on the verge of capitalizing on the culmination of a historic scientific success: the ability to vaccinate the country in just a matter of three or four more months, Dr. Walensky said on Wednesday. How this plays out is up to us. The next three months are pivotal.

And President Biden on Wednesday criticized officials in several states, including Texas and Mississippi, for lifting mask mandates, describing their actions as Neanderthal thinking and insisting that it was a big mistake for people to stop wearing masks.

Ms. Ivey issued a statewide mask order last summer when the number of cases in the state soared less than three months after she eased restrictions at the end of April. The mask mandate has drawn criticism from members of her own party. She extended it in January when the state was seeing a second surge of cases.

On Thursday, she said she planned to wear her mask around others, even after the statewide over was lifted. She urged residents to use common sense and do the same thing.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, is also taking a more measured approach. He said he will lift all public health measures once coronavirus cases drop to 50 or fewer new cases per 100,000 people over two weeks.

Mr. DeWine put the numbers in context: On Dec. 3, Ohio was at 731 cases per 100,000 people over two weeks; by Feb. 3, that number dropped to 445 and to 179 per 100,000 on Thursday.

This is our path back, he said in a news conference Thursday. We are in the last few miles of what has been a grueling marathon.

The chapel at Continental Funeral Home was once a place where the living remembered the dead. Now the pews, chairs and furniture have been pushed aside to make room, and the dead far outnumber the living.

On a Thursday afternoon last month in Continentals chapel in East Los Angeles, across the street from a 7-Eleven, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes.

And two bodies in open coffins, awaiting makeup.

And seven wrapped in white and pink sheets on wheeled stretchers.

And 18 in closed coffins where the pews used to be.

And 31 on the shelves of racks against the walls.

The math numbed the heart as much as the mind 62 bodies.

Elsewhere at Continental in the hallways beyond the chapel, in the trailers outside there were even more.

I live a nightmare every day, said Magda Maldonado, 58, the owner of the funeral home. Its a crisis, a deep crisis. When somebody calls me, I beg them for patience. Please be patient, I say, thats all Im asking you. Because nothing is normal these days.

Funeral homes are places America often prefers to ignore. As the coronavirus pandemic surged in Los Angeles in recent months, the industry went into disaster mode, quietly and anonymously dealing with mass death on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped. Like those in Queens and Brooklyn in the spring or South Texas in the summer, funeral homes in parts of Los Angeles have become hellish symbols of Covid-19s toll.

Continental has been one of the most overwhelmed funeral homes in the country. Its location at the center of Southern Californias coronavirus spike, its popularity with working-class Mexican and Mexican-American families who have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, its decision to expand its storage capacity all have combined to turn the day-to-day into a careful dance of controlled chaos. For more than six weeks, a reporter and a photographer were allowed by Ms. Maldonado, her employees and the relatives of those who died to document the inner workings of the mortuary and the heartache of funeral after funeral after funeral.

Beverly Hills has had 32 deaths. Santa Monica has had 150. East Los Angeles an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that is one of the largest Mexican-American communities in the United States has had 388.

With more than 52,000 virus-related deaths, California has recorded the most of any state but about average per capita. At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll hits the gut first, the eyes second.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Austrian officials will carry out a mass vaccination drive in the western district of Schwaz in the hopes of stabilizing the alpine area, which has been battered by a surge in new coronavirus infections driven in part by the variant B.1.351, first identified in South Africa.

The pilot program in Austria is the first such inoculation drive in the European Union. Like most of the rest of the bloc, the country is lagging behind some other wealthy nations such as Britain, Israel and the United States in its vaccine rollout. Only 5 percent of residents in the alpine state of Tyrol, which includes Schwaz, have received at least one shot.

All residents above the age of 16 will be able to get free vaccinations when the drive begins next week. The European Union has allocated 100,000 extra doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the area near the western Austrian city of Innsbruck, which is home to about 86,000 people.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Wednesday that the effort would be our chance to eradicate the variant in the region of Schwaz.

The infection rate in the broader Tyrol region has declined from its peak of about 800 cases per 100,000 people over a seven-day period in November to just over 100 per 100,000 in the past week. But the German government closed its side of the border with the area on Wednesday night when it became clear that a high percentage of those infections were caused by the B.1.351 variant.

On Thursday, Mr. Kurz traveled to Israel where, together with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, he planned to speak with experts about collaborating on future vaccines.

In other news from around the world:

The state of So Paulo, Brazil, will head into its toughest restrictions yet this weekend, Gov. Joo Doria told reporters on Wednesday, as cases surge in the region. All bars, restaurants and nonessential stores will close until at least March 19, according to The Associated Press. The restrictions come as the country grapples with a concerning new variant that has lashed the Amazonian city of Manaus, in the northwest, and is spreading to other places. Brazil recorded its highest single-day toll of the pandemic this week.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand said that a snap lockdown imposed last week on the countrys largest city, Auckland, would end on Sunday morning. Social gatherings will be capped at 100 people and other restrictions will remain in place. The lockdown was imposed after the authorities discovered an untraceable case. They have since conducted more than 50,000 tests and traced more than 6,000 contacts.

Japan plans to extend its state of emergency for the Tokyo metropolitan area until March 21, even as it prepares to lift that declaration in six other prefectures, the national broadcaster, NHK, reported on Friday. The restrictions in greater Tokyo, which include an order for restaurants and bars to close by 8 p.m., had been scheduled to end on Sunday.

Germanys independent vaccine panel has said that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine can be used on people 65 and over, reversing earlier guidance. Although the European drug regulator authorized use of the shots in January, the German panel had initially refused to recommend the vaccine because it had not been tested enough in that age group. Because Germany is still focusing its vaccination drive on those over 80, much of the AstraZeneca doses had lingered in storage.

Hungary announced on Thursday that it would introduce a new round of restrictions next week, with some schools closed and nonessential stores shuttered, to combat a sharp rise in coronavirus cases. The announcement comes as a blow to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had been vocal about his hopes for the country to begin reopening this month.

France on Thursday vowed to vaccinate at least 10 million people by mid-April as the government, still stopping short of a nationwide lockdown, extended restrictions on movements and gatherings to areas in the country where there have been surges in local cases. So far, only about 3.1 million people, or 4.7 percent of the countrys population, have received a first injection, and only 1.7 million people, or 2.5 percent of the population, have been fully vaccinated, which puts France behind other European countries in the vaccination rollout. Jean Castex, the prime minister, said at a news conference that starting in mid-April, all people ages 50 to 74 would be eligible for the vaccine, regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

Albee Zhang contributed research.

One in 10 children hospitalized with Covid-19 at four New York area hospitals last spring and summer developed acute kidney injury, a new study has found. The rate was even higher among children also found to have a serious inflammatory condition associated with Covid-19: almost one in five of them experienced sudden kidney injury.

Children with the inflammatory condition and kidney injury frequently had poor heart function and stayed in the hospital for longer, the researchers found. The study, published in the journal Kidney International, was carried out by investigators at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, which is part of Northwell Health.

Acute kidney injury, or acute kidney failure, develops rapidly. It occurs when the kidneys stop working properly and cannot filter waste from the blood. The condition is seen most commonly in critically ill patients, and it can be fatal. It is treated with fluids, medications and dialysis.

The researchers reviewed the medical records of 152 children under age 18 with Covid-19 who were admitted to four Northwell Health hospitals from March 9 to Aug. 13. Among them were 55 children who had the inflammatory condition, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

Acute kidney injury is known to be a complication of Covid-19 disease in adults; another Northwell study found that the condition was diagnosed in over one-third of adult patients hospitalized with Covid-19. But less is known about how often kidney injury occurs in children.

Estimates of the incidence in children have varied from as low as 1 percent, in China, to as high as 44 percent, as reported in a preliminary multicenter study at 32 hospitals in the United States.

In the new study, the most common first symptoms for children with acute kidney injury were gastrointestinal, such as diarrhea and vomiting, the report said. The injury resolved in most of the children by the time they were discharged from the hospital.

Black children appeared to be at nearly three times the risk of developing acute kidney injury, researchers said. But the number of children in the study was small, and investigators were not able to tease out the effects of socioeconomic status, pre-existing conditions or other factors.

Pediatricians treating children after a hospitalization for Covid-19 may need to check their blood pressure and urine regularly, the researchers said. An episode of acute kidney injury may increase the chances of kidney disease in the future.

This informs care down the road, said Dr. Abby Basalely, the papers first author, a pediatric nephrologist who is an investigator at the Feinstein Institutes. Thinking about whether there were kidney injuries sometimes falls to the wayside, but it may be an important thing to follow up on.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is donating his three-dimensional model of the coronavirus to the Smithsonians National Museum of American History.

I wanted to pick something that was really meaningful to me and important because I used it so often, Dr. Fauci said in an interview on Wednesday about his decision to give the model to the museum.

The model, which he said was made with a 3-D printer at the National Institutes of Health, is a blue sphere studded with spikes replicating the spiked proteins that can latch onto cells in our airway, allowing the virus to slip inside. Dr. Fauci said he had often used it as a visual aid when briefing members of Congress and former President Donald J. Trump about the virus.

Its a really phenomenally graphic way to get people to understand, he said.

Dr. Fauci announced the donation and showed off the model as he was being awarded the museums Great Americans medal on Tuesday for his leadership of the nations Covid-19 response and his contributions to the fights against other infectious diseases, such as AIDS. The model will become part of the museums national medicine and science collection, Smithsonian officials said.

The National Museum of American History said its curators have been collecting items from the pandemic for a future exhibition, called In Sickness and in Health, that will examine more than 200 years of medicine in the U.S. including Covid-19.

Dr. Fauci said he could see himself donating other items to museums and institutions in the future, whether from his time managing the countrys response to the coronavirus pandemic or from his leadership of federal efforts to combat H.I.V., SARS, the 2009 swine pandemic, MERS and Ebola.

I think when you reach a certain stage you have things that are more valuable to the general public than they are to you keeping them, he said.

China is requiring some travelers arriving from overseas to receive an invasive anal swab test as part of its coronavirus containment measures, a move that has outraged and shocked several foreign governments.

Japanese officials said on Monday that they had formally asked China to exempt Japanese citizens from the test, adding that some who had received it complained of psychological distress. And the United States State Department last month said it had registered a protest with the Chinese government after some of its diplomats were forced to undergo anal swabs, though Chinese officials denied that.

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Covid-19: U.S. Vaccination Pace Increases to 2 Million Doses a Day - The New York Times