Tag Archives: COVID-19

U.S. counter-intelligence chief worried about China, Russia threats to vaccine supply chain

By Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. counter-intelligence chief said on Tuesday he was worried about threats from China and Russia to disrupt the coronavirus vaccine supply chain in the United States.

William Evanina, director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told an online Washington Post event that U.S. adversaries were trying to interfere with Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government operation distributing the vaccines.

“Our adversaries are trying to disrupt that supply chain,” he said. Asked which adversaries he was particularly concerned about, he replied, “I would say China and Russia right now.”

The Chinese and Russian embassies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Evanina’s assertion. Russia and China have denied U.S. accusations that hackers linked to both governments tried to steal data from vaccine manufacturers.

U.S. states are scrambling to accelerate inoculations as infections and deaths surge – COVID-19 has claimed on average about 3,200 lives nationwide every day over the past week.

Since the pandemic began more than 10 months ago nearly 375,000 people in the country have died, according to a Reuters count.

Evanina said that his agency was working with the U.S. Army and the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure the safe “transportation” of the vaccines “from the manufacturing site to the end-user inoculation.”

Vaccines available are made by Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna. Nearly 9 million Americans have received the first of two doses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than one-third of the 25 million doses distributed by the federal government.

Public health experts have said no U.S. state has so far come close to using up its federal vaccine allotments, a much slower-than-expected roll-out blamed in part on rigid rules sharply limiting who can be inoculated.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Grant McCool)

Minneapolis policeman accused in Floyd killing to stand trial without three other defendants

By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – The former Minneapolis policeman accused of killing a Black man by kneeling on his neck will stand trial alone, without three officers accused of aiding and abetting the alleged murder, a Minnesota judge ruled Tuesday, in part because of COVID-19 concerns.

Judge Peter Cahill said in his ruling that the space limitations in the court house “make it impossible to comply with COVID-19 physical restrictions in a joint trial involving all four defendants,” given the number of lawyers and support personnel expected.

Derek Chauvin, who is white, has been charged with second-degree murder and other lesser charges in the May 25 death of George Floyd, after pinning his neck to the ground for nearly nine minutes. Videos of the incident set off nationwide protests over police brutality and racism in law enforcement.

Chauvin’s criminal defense attorney, Eric L. Nelson, was not immediately available to Reuters for comment.

Prosecutors were surprised by Cahill’s ruling, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement that all four officers should face charges in the same trial.

“We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision,” Ellison said. “We believe that all four defendants should be tried jointly,” he said.

Ellison said that the evidence against all the defendants is similar and that holding more than one trial could, “retraumatize eyewitnesses and family members.”

Chauvin’s trial is scheduled to begin March 8 and the other three officers will be tried in August, court papers say.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Ontario declares emergency amid surging COVID-19 cases as Canada buys more vaccines

By Moira Warburton and David Ljunggren

TORONTO/OTTAWA (Reuters) – Ontario declared an emergency on Tuesday after latest modelling put Canada’s most populous province on track to have more than 20,000 new COVID-19 cases per day by the middle of February, a nearly ten-fold increase from the current count.

Ontario, which is battling a coronavirus surge that has swamped its hospitals and triggered a province-wide lockdown, could also see roughly 1,500 more deaths in its long-term care homes through mid-February under a worst-case scenario, according to modeling from experts advising the government.

New restrictions that take effect on Jan. 14 mandate that residents must stay at home except for essential activity, while outdoor gatherings will be limited to five people, and non-essential construction work will be restricted.

“I know the stay at home order is a drastic measure, one we don’t take lightly. Everyone must stay home to stay lives,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford at a media briefing. “Enforcement and inspections will increase.”

Canada began targeted vaccinations in December, with current efforts focused on healthcare workers and residents of long-term care homes.

The federal government ordered an additional 20 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday. That would take the total number of doses to be delivered this year in Canada to 80 million.

Ontario, the country’s economic engine, has been under lockdown since Dec. 26, with non-essential businesses shuttered and schools closed for in-person learning.

Yet the daily number of COVID-19 cases has spiked above 3,500 on average over the past seven days, government data showed. On Tuesday, Ontario reported 2,903 new COVID-19 cases.

Under the worst-case scenario with 7% case growth, there would be 40,000 new cases daily by mid-February, while the best-case scenario with 1% growth would result in 5,000 new cases every day, Ontario’s data showed. Case growth has recently been over 7% on the worst days, the data showed.

In five of the hardest hit areas of Ontario – including the Toronto area, nearby Hamilton, and Windsor-Essex across the border from Detroit – schools will remain closed until at least Feb. 10. Childcare for children who are too young for school will remain open, along with emergency childcare for some school-age children.

“We will have to confront choices that no doctor ever wants to make and no family ever wants to hear,” Dr. Steini Brown, head of Ontario’s case modeling, said at a briefing on Tuesday. “People will die from the virus itself and from the overloaded health system that is unable to respond to their needs.”

Brown warned that the new COVID-19 variant from Britain was already in Ontario and could decrease the doubling time of cases – or how long it takes for case counts to double, currently 30 to 40 days – to 10 days.

Last week Quebec, Canada’s worst-affected province from COVID-19, became the first in the country to introduce a curfew to limit the spread.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Toronto and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Additional reporting by Allison Martell in Toronto; Editing by Denny Thomas, Paul Simao and Rosalba O’Brien)

Dutch COVID-19 lockdown extended by three weeks until Feb. 9

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Lockdown measures in the Netherlands, including the closure of schools and shops, will be extended by at least three weeks to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the government decided on Tuesday.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a live press conference that social curbs must remain in place, also because of the threat posed by the British variant.

All schools and many stores across the country were shut in mid-December, following the closure of all bars and restaurants two months earlier.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Bart Meijer)

U.S. releases millions of COVID-19 doses and urges states to include more people

(Reuters) – The Trump administration said on Tuesday it is releasing millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses it had been holding back for second shots and urged states to offer them to all Americans over age 65 or with chronic health conditions.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during a news briefing that the U.S. pace of inoculations has risen to 700,000 shots per day and is expected to rise to 1 million per day within a week to 10 days.

Most states prioritized health-care workers and nursing home staff and residents for their first deliveries of the COVID-19 vaccines which began last month, following recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The process of inoculating those groups has been slow due partly to the complexity of giving them the vaccines.

CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield said on Tuesday that he “strongly recommends” that vaccines be made available to people over 65 and those younger than 65 who have other chronic health conditions.

The CDC last week made clear that states can move on to the next priority group – people older than 75 and essential workers – without finishing the first round of inoculations, but fewer than 20 states have done so. A handful of states including Texas, Florida and Georgia have started giving shots to people over 65.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander and Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru and Rebecca Spalding, Carl O’Donnell and Caroline Humer in New York; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Alison Williams and Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. job openings fall in November; layoffs rise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. job openings fell in November, while layoffs mounted at restaurants and hotels amid rampant COVID-19 infections, supporting views that the labor market recovery from the pandemic was stalling.

Job openings, a measure of labor demand, dropped 105,000 to 6.527 million on the last day of November, the Labor Department said on Tuesday in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS. Vacancies have dropped from as high as 7.012 million in January.

The job openings rate slipped to 4.4% from 4.5% in October. Layoffs increased 295,000 to nearly 2.0 million. That lifted the layoffs rate to 1.4% from 1.2% in October. Layoffs were led by the accommodation and food services industry, which shed 263,000 workers. A resurgence in coronavirus cases has led to widespread curbs on businesses, with restaurants and bars hardest hit.

There were 42,000 job losses in the healthcare and social assistance sector. State and local governments, which are experiencing tight budgets because of the pandemic, laid off 21,000 workers.

Hiring was little changed at 5.979 million. The hiring rate was steady at 4.2%.

The JOLTS report followed on the heels of news last Friday that the economy shed 140,000 jobs in December, the first decline in nonfarm payrolls since April, after adding 336,000 positions in November. The economy has recovered 12.4 million of the 22.2 million jobs lost in March and April.

(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Chinese city of Langfang goes into lockdown amid new COVID-19 threat

BEIJING (Reuters) – The Chinese city of Langfang near Beijing went into lockdown on Tuesday as new coronavirus infections raised worries about a second wave in a country that has mostly contained COVID-19.

The number of new cases in mainland China reported on Tuesday remained a small fraction of those seen at the height of the outbreak in early 2020. However, authorities are implementing strict curbs whenever new cases emerge.

The National Health Commission reported 55 new cases on Tuesday, down from 103 on Monday. Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, accounted for 40 of the 42 locally transmitted infections.

In a village in the south of Beijing that shares a border with Hebei, residents were stopping vehicles and asking to see health-tracking codes on mobile phones.

“We have to be careful as we’re near Guan, where COVID cases were reported today,” said a volunteer security officer surnamed Wang.

At a highway checkpoint, police in protective gowns ordered a car entering Beijing to return to Hebei after the driver was unable to show proof of a negative coronavirus test.

China’s state planning agency said it expected travel during next month’s Lunar New Year period to be markedly down on normal years, with a bigger share of people choosing cars over other transport. Many provinces have urged migrant workers to stay put for the festival.

HOME QUARANTINE

Langfang, southeast of Beijing, said its 4.9 million residents would be put under home quarantine for seven days and tested for the virus.

The government in Beijing said a World Health Organization team investigating the origin of the coronavirus would arrive on Thursday in the city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged in late 2019, after a delay that Beijing has called a “misunderstanding”.

Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s capital, has been hardest hit in the latest surge and has already placed its 11 million people under lockdown. The province has shut sections of highway and is ordering vehicles to turn back.

A new guideline from the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control recommended that taxi and ride-hailing operators suspend car-pooling services, and that drivers should get weekly DNA tests and be vaccinated in order to work, the ruling Communist Party-backed Beijing Daily reported.

As of Jan. 9, China had administered more than 9 million vaccine doses.

Across the country, the number of new asymptomatic cases rose to 81 from 76 the previous day. China does not classify asymptomatic cases as confirmed coronavirus infections.

The total number of confirmed cases reported in mainland China stands at 87,591, with an official death toll of 4,634.

(Reporting by Jing Wang and Andrew Galbraith in Shanghai and Sophie Yu, Roxanne Liu and Lusha Zhang in Beijing; writing by Se Young Lee and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sam Holmes and Kevin Liffey)

Two gorillas at San Diego Zoo test positive for COVID-19

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Two gorillas at the San Diego Zoo have tested positive for COVID-19 after exhibiting symptoms of the disease, California’s governor said on Monday, in what is believed to be the first known transmission of the virus to apes.

Governor Gavin Newsom, in his latest coronavirus update for the state, said the source of the gorillas’ infection was still under investigation to determine whether the virus was transmitted between animals or from humans to the apes.

A statement posted on the San Diego Zoo Safari Park website said the gorillas were suspected of having contracted infection “from an asymptomatic staff member,” despite following all COVID-19 safety precautions recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zoo authorities initiated testing of fecal samples of the park’s gorillas after two of the apes began coughing last Wednesday, and preliminary results two days later found the presence of the virus “in the gorilla troop,” the statement said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture National Veterinary Services Laboratories confirmed the positive results on Monday.

“The test results confirm the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in some of the gorillas and does not definitively rule out the presence of the virus in other members of the troop,” it said.

“Aside from some congestion and coughing, the gorillas are doing well,” Lisa Peterson, executive director of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, said in the statement. “The troop remains quarantined together and are eating and drinking. We are hopeful for a full recovery.”

Gorillas are members of the family of primates known as the great apes, or hominids, that also include orangutans, chimpanzees and humans.

The coronavirus has also been found in a number of other wild-animal species in captivity, including several lions and tigers at the Bronx Zoo in New York and four lions at the Barcelona Zoo in Spain.

But the gorillas in San Diego are believed to mark the first known case of infections confirmed in apes. The virus also has shown up in a number of household dogs and cats.

Last month, the USDA said it had confirmed the first known case of the coronavirus in an animal in the wild, a mink, following an outbreak among farmed minks that killed 15,000 of the animals.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler and Peter Cooney)

COVID-19 patients still have symptoms 6 months later; interferon may be helpful treatment after all

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Half a year later, COVID-19 patients still have symptoms

Most patients hospitalized with COVID-19 have at least one symptom six months after falling ill, according to findings from a study in Wuhan, China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged in late 2019. Doctors there tracked 1,733 patients who were diagnosed and hospitalized between January, 2020 and May. Six months later, 76% had at least one symptom including fatigue or muscle weakness (seen in 63%), sleep difficulties and anxiety or depression. Most of those who had been severely ill had ongoing lung problems and chest abnormalities that could indicate organ damage, while 13% of patients whose kidneys functioned normally in the hospital went on to develop kidney problems later, researchers reported on Friday in The Lancet. “We are only beginning to understand” some of the long-term effects of COVID-19, study coauthor Bin Cao from the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing said in a statement. “Our analysis indicates that most patients continue to live with at least some of the effects of the virus after leaving hospital,” highlighting the need for post-discharge care.

Interferon boosts proteins that deny entry to coronavirus

An experimental inhaled form of interferon being tested for treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients may not have a limitation researchers had feared. A potential problem with interferon is that it increases levels of a protein called ACE2, which the new coronavirus uses as a gateway into cells. In test tube experiments, researchers looked at cells that line the path from the nose into the lungs and discovered there are actually two forms of ACE2 – the well known one and a short form that lacks the entryway used by the virus. Interferon increases the short form of ACE2 but not the longer form, they found, which means it does not appear to boost entry points for the virus. “We were excited to discover a new form of ACE2,” Dr. Jane Lucas of the University of Southampton, who co-led the study reported on Monday in Nature Genetics, said in a statement. “We believe this may have important implications for managing COVID-19 infection.” An inhaled interferon from Synairgen Plc is being tested in late-stage trials.

Saliva viral load improves prediction of COVID-19 severity

The amount of the new coronavirus in saliva might help guide doctors’ care of patients because it is a better predictor of disease course than viral load in swab samples obtained from the nose and the back of the throat, researchers said. They studied 26 mildly ill COVID-19 patients, 154 hospitalized patients – including 63 who became critically ill and 23 who eventually died – and 108 uninfected individuals. Saliva viral load, but not nasopharyngeal viral load, was linked with COVID-19 risk factors like age and gender, and with immune system responses. Saliva viral load was also superior to nasopharyngeal viral load at predicting critical illness and death, the researchers reported on Wednesday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. Saliva contains inhaled germs that are cleared from the lungs by the body’s protective mechanisms, coauthor Akiko Iwasaki of Yale University explained in a tweet on Sunday. The saliva viral load therefore reflects how well the virus is making copies of itself all the way through the respiratory tract, from the nose to the lungs, and not just in the nose and back of the throat, Iwasaki said.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Cuomo outlines plans to fix New York finances weakened by COVID-19

By Barbara Goldberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday promised a kaleidoscopic mix of “New York tough” plans to jumpstart the state’s finances amid COVID-19, create jobs, and ensure racial, social and economic justice for underserved communities.

In his State of the State address, Cuomo gave the outlines of his plan, which he said he would detail further in coming days. They are set to include more on Cuomo’s previously flagged proposals to employ online sports betting and recreational marijuana to help close a $15 billion budget deficit.

Cuomo also talked about beating COVID-19 and vaccinating at least 70% of the 20 million New Yorkers.

“We will win the COVID war and we will learn from it. We are New York tough,” Cuomo said.

Reeling off a series of proposals aimed in part at jobs creation, Cuomo described a ‘Medical Supplies Act’ to ensure the sort of vital public health materials like face masks and gowns that were in short supply last spring when New York was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. New York, which last year scrounged and scrambled for supplies largely made in China, would purchase first from its own manufactured supply, Cuomo said.

Improved transportation was also in the pipeline, he said.

“We will commence the most aggressive construction and transportation development program in the United States of America. New air, road and rail systems, upstate and downstate, more affordable housing and more economic development to create jobs, jobs and more jobs,” Cuomo said.

Cuomo said he would seek to eliminate racial and social inequities through such plans as affordable broadband connections, eliminating healthcare premiums, and converting unused commercial space into inexpensive housing.

Cuomo also vowed to expand voter access, an issue at the center of a national debate over the future of democracy in the United States. The Democratic governor’s proposals include adding time for early voting, broadening availability of absentee ballots, and speeding up vote counting.

Cuomo praised New Yorkers for supporting one another through the COVID-19 pandemic, citing their unity in a nation that has been deeply divided by politics during Trump’s term.

“Over the last year when forces were trying to convince this country that the strongest four-letter word is ‘hate,’ New Yorkers showed that the strongest four-letter word is ‘love’ and that love wins every time,” Cuomo said.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Rosalba O’Brien)