Tag Archives: Pandemic

New coronavirus variant identified in New York: researchers

By Deena Beasley

(Reuters) – A new coronavirus variant that shares some similarities with a more transmissible and intractable variant discovered in South Africa is on the rise in New York City, researchers said on Wednesday.

The new variant, known as B.1.526, was first identified in samples collected in New York in November, and by mid-February represented about 12% of cases, researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, said on Wednesday.

The variant was also described in research originally published online February 15 by California Institute of Technology scientists. Neither study has been reviewed by outside experts.

The Columbia researchers said an analysis of publicly available databases did not show a high prevalence of coronavirus variants recently identified in South Africa and Brazil in case samples from New York City and surrounding areas.

“Instead we found high numbers of this home-grown lineage,” Dr. Anne-Catrin Uhlemann, assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, said in a statement.

The Columbia study was designed to search genomes from patient samples for mutations associated with worrisome British, South African and Brazilian virus variants. One mutation, E484K, in a genome region encoding the virus receptor binding domain, has been shown to be an escape mutation that greatly reduces the effectiveness of monoclonal and vaccine-induced antibodies.

Of the 65 virus samples containing the E484K mutation Ho’s team identified, a handful represented cases involving the known concerning variants, but 49 of the 65 belonged to the new New York B.1.526 lineage.

Studies have shown that recently launched coronavirus vaccines are still likely to neutralize the virus and protect against severe illness, even for infections with new variants. Vaccine makers are also working to develop booster shots to combat mutated versions of the virus.

Moscow homeless shelter sees visitors triple in pandemic

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A Moscow charity helping the homeless has seen the number of people dropping in for a cup of tea or a bite to eat increase threefold because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Russia, with more than 4.2 million recorded cases of the virus, imposed lockdowns last spring and many people lost their jobs.

Roman Skorosov, who runs services for the homeless at Miloserdie, one of Russia’s best-known charities, said an average of 300 people now visit its shelter in Moscow every day to warm up, have a modest meal or take a shower.

“This past year has had an impact on the homeless,” Skorosov said. “Since the start of pandemic, the number of people visiting the shelter has tripled. This is due to job losses and other difficulties.”

The shelter, set up in a heated tent east of the city center, draws even more people during Moscow’s frigid winters. It gives them a place to have a steaming cup of tea or receive medical attention for minor injuries.

“There are definitely more calls from homeless people during the winter,” said Olga Pavlicheva, head of Moscow’s Elizaveta Glinka Centre for Social Adaptation.

(Reporting by Elena Ostrovskaya; Writing by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Poorer Texans already had trouble paying energy bills – then came the storm

By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) – Cleopatra Mancha had already lost her job in the pandemic. Then the winter storm came to her home state of Texas.

“We had all the pipes bust in our house. It wasn’t just one area – it was everywhere. In the bathrooms, our sinks, where our washer and dryer are,” she said. “So we’re not having to just try to pay just our electric bill – we have to pay for all these repairs, too.”

The 44-year-old mother of two in Arlington, Texas, choked back sobs.

Energy insecurity among poor and middle-class Americans had already deepened because of the economic crisis the pandemic created, according to experts. Even before the pandemic, low-income households in Texas were spending 10% of their income on energy – compared with 2% for the better off.

Energy-burdened poorer Texans have been forced to buy less food to keep the lights on one month, or put off purchasing clothes another month to keep the heat going.

In Texas last week, 4 million people were without power for days and half saw water services disrupted. Across the United States, experts say, households will suffer unless energy policies are reworked, grid infrastructure improved and deep investments made to fix the 30 million housing units that have serious physical or health hazards, over one-fifth of the nation’s total.

Dana Harmon is the executive director of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute, which has been tracking increasingly unaffordable electric bills in lower-income communities and in neighborhoods of color. The pandemic has forced people out of work and at home for increasingly long periods – including children learning at a distance. That has increased demand for household energy consumption.

“Now when you put a storm on top of that,” Harmon said, “you see people facing real danger.”

There has been much attention cast on energy bills exceeding $10,000 for some Texas customers subject to variable energy market prices. Harmon said those customers only make up about 0.2% of all consumers in the competitive electricity market. She is more concerned about the 3.5 million low-income households across Texas that have already been paying a disproportionate chunk of their income for energy and likely face higher bills as fuel costs have risen for utility companies.

Harmon said a saving grace from the widespread blackouts might be that leaders in Austin who are making decisions on planning for energy systems, along with industry leaders in Houston and elsewhere, “keenly experienced what it’s like to go without energy during a crisis, and I hope we would see more empathy for what energy insecurity feels like.”

Other advocacy groups like the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio say landlords are finding loopholes to evict tenants behind on rent and a wider moratorium on evictions is needed.

Michelle Romero – national director for Dream Corps, an environmental, technology and social justice group – said that the grid in Texas and across the United States needs to be modernized to increase energy security.

Romero also said federal programs meant to help low-income households by offering funds for weatherization or bill relief badly need more funding and to be reworked so they cover more people.

A study released by Dream Corps on Wednesday found 30 million homes across the United States have serious physical or health hazards, from asbestos to structural damages, making it impossible for many to properly heat or cool their homes. The damage can also disqualify the homes from obtaining federal aid in the first place.

Romero said that just as the pandemic has allowed a wider public to see the intersections between race and health care disparities, she thinks the events like the Texas freeze are driving home the realities about who bears the brunt of extreme weather events.

“Who is impacted first and worst by events like we saw in Texas is absolutely an issue of income inequality and racial injustice,” she said.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Donna Bryson and Lisa Shumaker)

UK lowers COVID-19 alert status as pressure on hospitals eases

LONDON (Reuters) – The chief medical officers of the United Kingdom lowered their COVID-19 alert level on Thursday, citing a gradual reduction in pressure on the health service.

“Following advice from the Joint Biosecurity Center and in the light of the most recent data, the four UK Chief Medical Officers and NHS England National Medical Director agree that the UK alert level should move from level 5 to level 4 in all four nations,” Britain’s health ministry said in a statement.

Public health services in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland operate separately in most cases.

“The health services across the four nations remain under significant pressure with a high number of patients in hospital, however thanks to the efforts of public we are now seeing numbers consistently declining,” the medical officers added.

(Reporting by Andy Bruce, editing by David Milliken)

India warns of worsening COVID-19 situation, vaccinations to expand

By Krishna N. Das and Neha Arora

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India announced an expansion of its COVID-19 vaccination program on Wednesday but warned that breaches of coronavirus protocols could worsen an infection surge in many states.

Nearly a month after the health minister declared that COVID-19 had been contained, states such as Maharashtra in the west and Kerala in the south have reported a spike in cases amid growing reluctance to wear masks and maintain social distancing.

India’s infections are the second highest in the world at 11.03 million, swelled by a further 13,742 in the past 24 hours, health ministry data showed. Deaths rose by a two-week high of 104 to 156,567.

“Any laxity in implementing stringent measures to curb the spread, especially in view of new strains of virus…, could compound the situation,” the ministry said in a statement singling out nine states and a federal territory.

India has confirmed the long-time presence of two mutant variants – N440K and E484Q – in addition to those first detected in Brazil, Britain and South Africa.

TESTS FALLING

The health ministry said that while cases in the states of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, as well as the federal territory of Jammu and Kashmir, were rising, the proportion of high-accuracy RT-PCR tests in those places was falling because many states prefer antigen tests, which are cheaper and quicker but less accurate.

The federal government is worried excessive reliance on rapid antigen tests could undercount cases, leading to real infections going unchecked and spreading the disease.

Cases have also risen in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

In the past week, a third of India’s 36 states and union territories have reported an average of more than 100 new cases each day, with Kerala and Maharashtra both registering more than 4,000, in a trend experts link to the reopening of schools and suburban train services.

Maharashtra reported 8,807 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, the highest in nearly five months. Of those, 1,167 were in Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

The government has also asked states to speed up vaccinations for healthcare and frontline workers. Just about 11 million people have received one or two doses in a campaign that began on Jan. 16. The target is 300 million by August.

From March 1, India will start vaccinating people above 60 and those older than 45 with health conditions free of charge in about 10,000 government hospitals and for a fee in more than 20,000 private facilities, the government said.

Earlier on Wednesday, a regulatory panel sought more data from drugmaker Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories for emergency authorization of Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, a senior official with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

The Central Drugs Standard Control Organization did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for confirmation.

(Reporting by Krishna N. Das and Neha Arora; Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Czech Republic faces ‘hellish days,’ needs tighter COVID measures, PM says

PRAGUE (Reuters) – The Czech Republic must tighten measures to combat the pandemic and prevent a “catastrophe” in hospitals in the coming weeks as the country faces one of the world’s highest COVID-19 infection and death rates, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Wednesday.

The country reported over 15,000 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, the highest daily tally since Jan. 6, and has the fastest spread rate in Europe, with per capita infections more than six times higher than in neighboring Germany in the last two weeks.

The number of hospital patients with COVD-19 who are in serious condition has risen to a record 1,389, leaving few spare beds in the country of 10.7 million.

Some hospitals have had to transfer out patients while the health minister has warned hospitals risk being overwhelmed in the coming weeks. The government is looking at asking Germany for help with some patients.

The country has reported a total 1.18 million cases of the virus and 19,682 deaths since the first infections nearly one year ago.

Babis said the situation was grave.

“Hellish days await us,” he said at a news conference.

The government is due to hold talks on possible further measures later on Wednesday. Babis said the health ministry would propose restrictions but declined to give details.

The country has been in some level of lockdown since October as it has battled a much harsher second and now third wave of the pandemic. Industry, though, has remained running unlike early in the pandemic when large factories shut for several weeks, hammering the economy.

Restaurants, gyms, theatres and other entertainment venues are closed while only shops selling essential goods are open.

Schools are shut except for pre-schools and the first and second grades. Babis said an aim to start returning other students to classrooms next week was not possible anymore.

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jason Hovet; Editing by Gareth Jones and Nick Zieminski)

Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine effective and safe: FDA staff

(Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine appeared safe and effective in trials, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) staff said in documents published on Wednesday, paving the way for its approval for emergency use.

The FDA’s panel of independent experts meets on Friday to decide whether to approve the shot. While it is not bound to follow the advice of its experts, the FDA usually does and has authorized vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

J&J said in documents submitted to the FDA that its data suggested its vaccine was effective at preventing asymptomatic infections. It said that in a preliminary analysis of its trial, it found 16 cases of asymptomatic cases in the placebo group versus two in the vaccine group, or an 88% efficacy rate.

While asymptomatic infection was not the primary goal of the trial, which studied the vaccine’s ability to stop moderate to severe COVID-19, the reduction of asymptomatic cases implies the shot can also cut transmission of the disease.

J&J’s vaccine was 66% effective in preventing COVID-19 against multiple variants in a global trial involving nearly 44,000 people, the company said last month.

Its effectiveness varied from 72% in the United States to 66% in Latin America and 57% in South Africa, where a new variant has spread, though the vaccine was 85% effective overall in stopping severe cases of the disease.

The vaccine was effective in reducing the risk of COVID-19 and preventing PCR-test confirmed COVID-19 at least 14 days after vaccination, the FDA said in its briefing documents.

Fourteen days after injection, only two vaccine recipients developed COVID-19 severe enough to need medical intervention, compared with 14 in the placebo group. After 28 days, no vaccine recipients developed COVID severe enough to require medical intervention whereas seven in the placebo group did.

Three vaccine recipients had severe side effects in the trial that were likely related to the vaccine, but the FDA said its analysis did not raise any specific safety concerns that would preclude issuance of an emergency use authorization.

The FDA said the most common solicited adverse reactions were injection site pain at 48.6%, headache at 39%, fatigue at 38.2% and myalgia at 33.2%. Other side effects included a fever in 9% of participants and a high fever in 0.2% of those who received the vaccine.

The regulator said one case of pericarditis, a heart disease, may have been caused by the vaccine. It said cases of a rare disorder, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, were unlikely to be related to the shot though data was insufficient to determine whether or not the vaccine had caused these side effects.

J&J had not previously released details of its clinical trial data beyond efficacy rates.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Mike Erman, Caroline Humer and Rebecca Spalding; Editing by Bernard Orr and David Clarke)

Powell’s Econ 101: Jobs not inflation. And forget about the money supply

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a congressional hearing dominated by talk of the pandemic and what may be needed to heal the economy from its effects, Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday had a subtle message for U.S. senators evaluating their options.

Toss out the college textbooks, because the world has changed.

The unemployment rate? Forget it. The Fed only cares about the number of people working and how to get it higher, not an age-old statistic that, for all its familiarity, overlooks a key group, namely those who stopped looking for work during the pandemic and need to be brought back.

Inflation? Not a problem anytime soon. Queried by Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner about the need to make “a sizeable investment” in U.S. infrastructure, Powell set aside classic concerns of hefty government borrowing driving up prices and responded “this is not a problem for this time as near as I can figure.”

The money supply? No longer relevant, Powell, 68, told Republican U.S. Senator John Kennedy, 69, about the once-important measures of cash and easily spent assets that was a central focus for the Fed in the past.

“When you and I studied economics a million years ago M2 and monetary aggregates seemed to have a relationship to economic growth,” Powell said, referring to one main measure of the money in public hands. “Right now … M2 … does not really have important implications. It is something we have to unlearn I guess.”

There has been a lot of unlearning these days at the Fed and the economic academy, on everything from basic economic relationships to the hazards – or not – of mountainous government debt. Even before the pandemic the central bank was reassessing one of its core ideas – that when the unemployment rate was low, inflation would be high, and vice versa.

The idea led past central bankers to worry whenever the jobless rate fell below a certain point, and to start itching for rate increases that would slow the economy and fend off the coming inflation. It also put people out of work.

That concept was pretty much thrown overboard as of August: Whatever drives inflation, the Fed concluded – and there is plenty of disagreement about what that is – a low unemployment rate is no longer considered part of it.

The unemployment rate itself may even have become passé. It measures the number of people working divided by the number of people working or looking for work. What it does not count, though, are the people out of the labor market – retirees, for example, but also, and of more concern, women who abandoned careers to care for family during the pandemic.

When the Fed considers its goal of maximum employment these days, Powell said, “we don’t just mean the unemployment rate, we mean the employment rate,” measured against the population as a whole and aspiring to “high levels of participation.”

(Reporting by Howard Schneider in Washington; Editing by Dan Burns and Matthew Lewis)

COVID-19 vaccine makers tell Congress U.S. supply will surge soon

By Michael Erman and Manojna Maddipatla

NEW YORK (Reuters) – COVID-19 vaccine makers told Congress on Tuesday that U.S. supplies should surge in the coming weeks due to manufacturing expansions and new vaccine authorizations.

Executives from Pfizer Inc, Moderna Inc and Johnson & Johnson – speaking at a hearing at the U.S. House of Representatives – said they would be able to supply enough vaccine to fully inoculate 130 million people in the United States by the end of March.

The drugmakers also reaffirmed their commitments to supply more than enough doses necessary to vaccinate all Americans by the end of July.

Pfizer Chief Business Officer John Young said it was plausible that there could be a surplus of vaccine in the United States sometime in the second quarter of this year.

“We certainly hope that we’re going to be in a position where every eligible adult will be able to receive vaccinations,” Young said.

Around 44.5 million people in the United States had received at least one dose of two-shot vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna, as of Tuesday morning.

Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine will be considered by an outside advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later this week, and emergency use authorization could come shortly afterward.

Richard Nettles, Vice President of Medical Affairs at J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals unit, said the company would be able to ship nearly 4 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine upon authorization and 20 million doses by the end of March.

Additional doses could also come from AstraZeneca Plc and from Novavax Inc, which are currently running clinical trials of their experimental vaccines.

An AstraZeneca executive said the drugmaker could supply doses necessary to vaccinate another 25 million people by the end of April if their vaccine is authorized by U.S. regulators.

(Reporting by Michael Erman; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Philippines offers nurses in exchange for vaccines from Britain, Germany

By Neil Jerome Morales

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines will let thousands of its healthcare workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate much-needed coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday.

The Philippines, which has among Asia’s highest number of coronavirus cases, has relaxed a ban on deploying its healthcare workers overseas, but still limits the number of medical professionals leaving the country to 5,000 a year.

Alice Visperas, director of the labor ministry’s international affairs bureau, said the Philippines was open to lifting the cap in exchange for vaccines from Britain and Germany, which it would use to inoculate outbound workers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino repatriates.

Nurses are among the millions of Filipinos who work overseas, providing in excess of $30 billion a year in remittances vital to the country’s economy.

“We are considering the request to lift the deployment cap, subject to agreement,” Visperas told Reuters.

Britain is grappling with the world’s sixth-highest coronavirus death toll and one of the worst economic hits from the pandemic, while Germany has the 10th most infections globally.

While the two countries have inoculated a combined 23 million people, the Philippines has yet to start its campaign to immunize 70 million adults, or two-thirds of its 108 million people. It expects to receive its first batch of vaccines this week, donated by China.

The Philippines wants to secure 148 million doses of vaccines altogether.

The British embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment while calls to Germany’s mission went unanswered.

In 2019, almost 17,000 Filipino nurses signed overseas work contracts, government data showed.

While Filipino nurses have fought to lift the deployment ban to escape poor working conditions and low pay at home, the workers-for-vaccine plan has not gone down well with some medical workers.

“We are disgusted on how nurses and healthcare workers are being treated by the government as commodities or export products,” Jocelyn Andamo, secretary general of the Filipino Nurses United, told Reuters.