Tag Archives: Pandemic

U.S. offers $1.5 billion to help provide school meals during supply chain crunch

By Christopher Walljasper

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. Agriculture Department is providing up to $1.5 billion to help school meal programs weather the supply chain crunch, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Friday.

Procuring large amounts of food has become difficult because of delays in shipments, a lack of certain products, high food costs and labor shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic.

USDA is tapping the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) for funding, providing $1 billion for schools to purchase food for their meal programs and another $500 million for the purchase of local foods to be distributed to schools, Vilsack said.

“This will result in a 5% increase in what school districts normally have available,” Vilsack said at Gourmet Gorilla, a food service company that prepares 40,000 meals to schools in the Chicago area.

The 1930s-era CCC has generally been tapped to provide subsidies for farmers, and gives USDA broad authority to make direct payments to growers when crop prices are low.

The number of Americans without enough food to eat remains higher than before the pandemic, and the Biden administration has sought to ramp up funding for food stamps and school meal programs.

The funds should be available starting in January.

(Reporting by Christopher Walljasper; Writing by Caroline Stauffer and Mark Porter)

Omicron delivers another uncertain holiday season to pandemic-weary Americans

By Joseph Ax and Julia Harte

(Reuters) – Americans face an uncertain and anxiety-filled holiday season for the second consecutive year, as the highly contagious Omicron variant threatens to intensify an already alarming surge of COVID-19 cases.

Public health officials have voiced deepening concerns about the rising number of infections, warning that hospitals – still fighting the effects of the Delta variant – could find themselves stretched beyond their limits if the two variants combine to create a fresh wave.

Maine set a record for the number of hospitalized COVID patients on Wednesday, a day after Michigan hit a new high. New Jersey recorded its highest number of cases on Thursday since mid-January, at the peak of last winter’s surge.

Over the past month, new cases have risen nearly 40% to a seven-day average of 121,000 new infections per day, according to a Reuters tally. That represents more than half of the level at this point in 2020, days after the first coronavirus vaccine was approved for emergency use.

Deaths have risen 18% since mid-November to an average of 1,300 lives lost a day. COVID hospitalizations have risen about 45% over the last month.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said on Thursday that the Omicron variant would soon dominate infections.

“We’ve seen that in South Africa, we’re seeing it in the UK, and I’m absolutely certain that’s what we’re going to be seeing here relatively soon,” said Fauci, who will meet with President Joe Biden Thursday afternoon to discuss the government’s response.

In South Africa, the United Kingdom and Denmark, the number of new Omicron infections has been doubling every two days.

Britain recorded nearly 80,000 new cases on Wednesday, its highest single-day total since the pandemic began, and officials there have warned that hospital admissions could soon hit record levels because of Omicron’s transmissibility.

Preliminary data suggests Omicron may be more contagious than Delta but less likely to cause severe illness, though much remains unknown. Research also indicates that the two-dose vaccine regimens have vastly reduced protection against Omicron but that a third booster dose restores much of the vaccine’s efficacy.

In New York City, the percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 doubled in three days, according to Dr. Jay Varma, a senior public health adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“Um, we’ve never seen this before in #NYC,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that the only explanation is Omicron’s ability to evade both natural and vaccine-induced immunity.

The surge has prompted worried Americans to reconsider holiday travel plans for the second consecutive year. Experts have said vaccinated individuals can travel safely as long as they wear masks and avoid unnecessary risks such as large crowds and indoor gatherings.

After months of planning a trip to Florida to see his parents for Christmas and his mother’s birthday, Kalaya’an Mendoza of Queens, New York, told Reuters he was forced to cancel it when he learned that several people at an event he attended on Monday had tested positive.

“I’m a little bit wrecked,” Mendoza, 43, said in an interview on Thursday. “It feels like 2020 all over again. I had to weigh my very intense Filipino need to be with family with their care and safety.”

Mendoza, who has not seen his parents since December 2019, said he was angry at how little progress the U.S. government had made on fighting the pandemic while spending billions of dollars this year on other items, such as the military.

“I remember watching my neighbors get carted away in body bags at the start of this pandemic, and two years in, we shouldn’t be here,” he said.

The increasing caseload has wreaked havoc on efforts by companies to return to normalcy, including postponing plans to bring workers back to the office. Citigroup Inc has told New York-based employees that they can work from home through the holidays, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

The United States leads the world in daily infections, accounting for one in every five cases reported globally. The country has seen more than 800,000 deaths and 50 million infections since the pandemic began.

At least 36 states have reported confirmed Omicron cases, CDC officials said on Wednesday.

The National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association have canceled several games this week after COVID-19 outbreaks hit several teams.

The National Football League has not yet announced any postponements after nearly 100 players were placed on the COVID-19 reserve list, including more than a dozen Cleveland Browns, who are scheduled to play the Las Vegas Raiders on Saturday.

(Reporting by Julia Harte and Joseph Ax in New York; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg, Tyler Clifford and Matt Scuffham in New York; Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; and Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Health costs pushed or worsened poverty for over 500 million

By Manas Mishra

(Reuters) – More than half a billion people globally were pushed or sent further into extreme poverty last year as they paid for health costs out of their own pockets, with the COVID-19 pandemic expected to make things worse, the World Health Organization and the World Bank said on Sunday.

The pandemic disrupted health services globally and triggered the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, making it even more difficult for people to pay for healthcare, according to a joint statement from both the organizations.

“All governments must immediately resume and accelerate efforts to ensure every one of their citizens can access health services without fear of the financial consequences,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Tedros urged governments to increase their focus on health care systems and stay on course towards universal health coverage, which the WHO defines as everyone getting access to health services they need without financial hardship.

Healthcare is a major political issue in the United States, one of the few industrialized countries that does not have universal cover for its citizens.

Globally, the pandemic made things worse and immunization coverage dropped for the first time in ten years, with deaths from tuberculosis and malaria increasing.

“Within a constrained fiscal space, governments will have to make tough choices to protect and increase health budgets,” Juan Pablo Uribe, global director for health, nutrition and population at World Bank, said.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

Where’s the paper, ink, lightbulbs? U.S. offices struggle with supply shortages

By Elizabeth Dilts Marshall and Maria Caspani

NEW YORK(Reuters) – While news of the Omicron coronavirus variant threatens to derail U.S. companies’ return-to-office-plans, employers trying to get workers back into offices said they are encountering a different, unforeseen challenge: keeping the lights on.

The disruptions to the global supply chain caused by factory shutdowns in Asia, congestion at U.S. ports and a nationwide labor shortage have led to widely publicized microchip and building materials shortages. Now these issues are causing shortages in everyday office supplies, everything from printer ink and toner to paper to lightbulbs.

When anthropology professor Sara Becker returned to her office at the University of California, Riverside, in early November, she noticed several bulbs had burned out over the eight months she’d worked remotely. An assistant in her department contacted the facilities unit for replacements, and Becker was asked what percentage of lightbulbs in her office were out.

“I’m an anthropologist not a mathematician!” Becker joked on Twitter. Becker said in an email interview that, instead of counting bulbs, she sent photos of her darkened office to the facilities department, which, university spokesman John Warren said, is short on lighting materials and lamps.

For offices and workers, these supply issues – which can trickle down to cause workplace headaches – are only adding to the obstacles companies face in getting people back to the office.

Variants of the coronavirus, such as Delta, have already forced companies to push back the dates when they hoped most employees would begin to return to offices. It is possible the Omicron variant, first detected in the United States on Wednesday, will delay openings further.

Now, just securing general lighting supplies is taking eight to 13 weeks longer than normal, said Cheryl Carron, whose duties include heading facilities management for global commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle.

“It’s a significant challenge as we look at how we bring people back to work,” Carron said in an interview. “It’s a real critical need and one we take for granted.”

Companies across the globe have sounded the alarm on supply issues, which have boosted prices on raw materials from chemicals to steel. The concern dominated the last earnings season, with mentions of the issue by chief executives jumping 412%.

U.S. Customs data showed imports of glass bulbs for use in incandescent lamps fell 25% from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the first quarter this year, a period when the supply-chain issues first hit supplies. Imports have since rebounded but are still below pre-pandemic levels. The United States gets most of its incandescent bulbs from Taiwan.

In addition to lightbulbs, a source at one of the big retail banks, speaking on condition of anonymity, said replacement parts for heating and air-conditioning units across its branch network were in short supply.

In a recent earnings call, ODP Corp Chief Executive Gerry Smith, whose company owns the Office Depot and OfficeMax superstore chains, said the company anticipates a shortage in printer ink and toner until early next year. And one Midwestern law firm asked staff in an email last month to cut back on printing because they are short on paper, according to a copy of the email seen by Reuters. The law firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Peter Lorenz, director of facilities and office operations at law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, said they also experienced paper shortages and delays in obtaining lightbulbs at the firm’s New York City office, a 360,000-square-foot (33,445-square-meter) space that used to be occupied by about 500 employees before the pandemic.

Supplies have been ramping back up since mid-October, Lorenz said, as employees began returning to the office as part of a hybrid work model, in which they split time between that workplace and working remotely.

“I think a lot of the suppliers have sort of bulked up so that they have a pretty good inventory of what we need,” he said in a phone interview.

If there is a silver lining to be found in this facilities management headache, Jones Lang LaSalle’s Carron said, it is in the lessons that building managers learned from last year’s pandemic-triggered shortages.

“They’ve got toilet paper,” she joked.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts Marshall and Maria Caspani; additional reporting by Herb Lash; editing by Megan Davies and Jonathan Oatis)

 

Inflation worries, pandemic curb U.S. consumer confidence; house prices cooling

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. consumer confidence dropped to a nine-month low in November amid worries about the rising cost of living and pandemic fatigue, but that probably does not change expectations for stronger economic growth this quarter.

The survey from the Conference Board on Tuesday showed consumers less enthusiastic about buying a home and big-ticket items such as motor vehicles and major household appliances over the next six months. But consumers held strong views of the labor market, with the gap between those saying jobs are plentiful versus hard to get widening to a record high.

“This isn’t a cause for concern as the relationship between spending and sentiment is loose, particularly in the short-run,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “The good news is that consumers’ assessment of the labor market improved in November, pointing toward further acceleration in job growth.”

The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index fell to a reading of 109.5 this month, the lowest reading since February, from 111.6 in October. The survey was conducted before the discovery of Omicron, a new COVID-19 variant, that was announced last week by South African scientists.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index falling to 111.0. The measure, which places more emphasis on the labor market, has dropped from a peak of 128.9 in June. The fall was less than that of the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment, which dropped to a decade low this month.

Data this month have suggested that the economy was accelerating in the fourth quarter, with consumer spending surging in October. But the outlook for next year has been clouded by the Omicron variant, which has since been detected in several countries outside the southern African region.

Not much is known about how contagious or vaccine resistant the Omicron variant is. The Conference Board’s so-called labor market differential, derived from data on respondents’ views on whether jobs are plentiful or hard to get, jumped to a reading of 46.9 this month, the highest on record, from 43.8 in October.

This measure closely correlates to the unemployment rate in the Labor Department’s closely watched employment report.

Combined with declining new claims for unemployment benefits, it raises hopes that job growth accelerated further this month, though a shortage of workers remains a challenge. There were 10.4 million job openings at the end of September.

INFLATION FEARS MOUNT

Consumers’ inflation expectations over the next 12 months surged to 7.6% in November from 7.1% last month. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Tuesday that the higher prices were generally related to the pandemic, and warned that the risk of higher inflation had increased.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower on Powell’s inflation comments. The dollar rose against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices were mixed.

Rising inflation is starting to influence consumers’ spending decisions, the Conference Board survey suggested.

Buying intentions for motor vehicles fell as did plans to purchase household appliances, television sets and refrigerators over the next six months. But intentions to buy washing machines and clothes dryers rose.

The survey also showed consumers less inclined to buy a house over the next six months. Slowing demand could help to further cool house price inflation.

A second report on Tuesday showed the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller’s 20 metropolitan area home price index rose 19.1% on a year-on-year basis in September after advancing 19.6 %in August.

Signs that house price growth was moderating were evident in a third report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that showed house prices rose 17.7% in the 12 months through September after powering ahead 18.5% in August.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)

Germany’s Scholz supports mandatory vaccines by end Feb – sources

BERLIN (Reuters) – Olaf Scholz, who is set to take over as German chancellor next week, supports making vaccination against COVID-19 compulsory and backs barring the unvaccinated from non-essential stores, sources said on Tuesday.

Scholz and outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel were meeting regional leaders on Tuesday to discuss how to respond to soaring infections in a fourth wave of the pandemic.

According to sources with information about the discussion, Scholz told the meeting he was in favor of a cross-party initiative to make vaccines mandatory, with the hope that it could be put into practice by the end of February.

Neighboring Austria, which like Germany has a relatively low rate of vaccination compared with the rest of western Europe, earlier this month announced plans to make vaccines compulsory as of February.

Scholz is also in favor of making non-essential stores require customers to show proof of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19, the sources said.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases reported that 452.2 people per 100,000 were infected in the last week, down slightly from 452.4 on Monday. It was the first decline since early November.

Despite this, the number of new daily cases rose slightly on Tuesday compared to last week to 45,753, and another 388 deaths were recorded – the highest daily figure since early March. That bought the overall death toll to 101,344.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Miranda Murray and Alison Williams)

WHO flags Omicron risk, countries tighten curbs, Biden urges vaccination

By Stephanie Nebehay, Alexander Winning and Wendell Roelf

GENEVA/JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday the Omicron coronavirus variant carried a very high risk of infection surges as more countries closed their borders, reviving fears over economic recovery from the two-year pandemic.

Airlines were scrambling to limit the impact of the variant on their networks, while delays in bookings threatened an already fragile recovery for global tourism.

But shares in airlines bounced back with the rest of the market on Monday after a sharp sell-off on Friday as hopes grew that the variant might prove to be milder than initially feared.

The WHO advised its 194 member nations that any surge in infections could have severe consequences, but said no deaths had yet been linked to the new variant.

“Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic,” the WHO said.

“The overall global risk related to the new variant of concern Omicron is assessed as very high.”

Further research was needed to understand Omicron’s potential to escape protection against immunity induced by vaccines and previous infections, it said, adding that more data was expected in coming weeks.

U.S. President Joe Biden said the new variant was a cause for concern but not panic and that it would sooner or later arrive in the United States, urging people to get vaccinated. He said it would be weeks before the world knew how effective current vaccines would be against it.

“Obviously, we’re on high alert,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official and Biden’s chief medical adviser, told ABC News. “It’s inevitable that, sooner or later, it’s going to spread widely.”

An infectious disease expert from South Africa, where scientists first identified Omicron, said it was too early to say whether symptoms were more severe than previous variants, but it did appear to be more transmissible.

Professor Salim Abdool Karim also said existing vaccines were probably effective at stopping Omicron from causing severe illness. Scientists have said it could take weeks to understand the severity of Omicron.

South African cases were likely to exceed 10,000 a day this week, rocketing up from barely 300 a day two weeks ago, Karim added.

But South African President Cyril Ramaphosa denounced “unjustified and unscientific” travel bans that damage tourism-reliant economies. His country has said it is being punished for its scientific ability to detect new variants.

After a virtual meeting on Monday, health ministers from the Group of Seven bloc of wealthy nations praised South Africa for its “exemplary work” in detecting the variant and alerting others.

JITTERY MARKETS

Fears the new variant might be resistant to vaccines helped wipe roughly $2 trillion off global stock markets on Friday but markets settled down again on Monday, even after Japan said it would close its borders.

Other countries also imposed travel and other restrictions, worried that Omicron could spread fast even among people with immunity.

Travelers stranded at Johannesburg international airport said they felt helpless as flights from South Africa were cancelled.

“We don’t know what to do, we are just waiting here,” said Ntabiseng Kabeli, a stranded passenger from Lesotho.

Portugal found 13 cases of the variant at a Lisbon football club. Spain, Sweden, Scotland and Austria also reported their first cases.

Japan described its ban on arrivals by foreigners as precautionary.

Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto said tests would determine if a traveler from Namibia was Japan’s first Omicron case.

In Israel, a ban on arrivals by foreigners took effect overnight.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern that restrictions would leave southern African countries isolated.

“The people of Africa cannot be blamed for the immorally low level of vaccinations available in Africa – and they should not be penalized for identifying and sharing crucial science and health information with the world,” he said.

Guterres has long warned about the dangers of vaccine inequality around the world and that low immunization rates are “a breeding ground for variants.”

More than 261 million people in over 210 countries have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019 and 5,456,515​ have died, according to a Reuters tally.

The new variant was discovered just as many parts of Europe were suffering a fourth wave of coronavirus infections as winter grips the continent in the runup to Christmas, with more people gathering indoors and increasing the risk of infection.

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde tried to reassure investors that the euro zone could cope with a resurgence of infections.

“We now know our enemy and what measures to take,” she told Italian broadcaster RAI late on Sunday. “We are all better equipped to respond to a risk of a fifth wave or the Omicron variant.”

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Himani Sarkar, Catherine Evans and Nick Macfie; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Peter Graff)

Thanksgiving air travel set to be busiest since pandemic

By Rajesh Kumar Singh

CHICAGO (Reuters) -Flights and airports across the United States are expected to have one of their busiest days since before the pandemic on Wednesday as millions of people fly to visit their families for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) expects to screen about 20 million air passengers during the Thanksgiving travel period, the most since 2019 when nearly 26 million Americans were on the move at that time, as rising COVID-19 vaccination rates have made people more confident about travel.

The travel demand is also getting a boost from consumers flush with savings as rising wages along with government stimulus have strengthened household balance sheets.

On Tuesday, the TSA screened about 2.21 million U.S. air passengers, the sixth consecutive day with checkpoint volume topping 2 million.

Los Angeles International Airport expects 2 million passengers. Victoria Spilabotte, the airport’s public information officer, said the numbers showed people were willing to travel again and added that passengers should arrive early to allow extra time for security.

The holiday weekend is a test for carriers after a spate of flight cancellations marred travel over the summer. One in five Americans are concerned about delays and cancellations, an American Pecans/YouGov survey found.

Carriers have ramped up staffing and offered bonuses and other incentives to employees.

“We’re staffed and ready to get our customers to where they need to go safely, reliably and enjoyably,” a Delta Air Lines spokesperson said.

Calm weather expected for Thanksgiving should also help to prevent disruption.

Some passengers at the Los Angeles airport said the airport was not as busy as they expected.

“So far, so good,” said Lani Emanuel, who is traveling to Seattle to see her daughter. “It was a little tricky finding parking, but it doesn’t seem too crazy busy just yet.”

U.S. passenger railroad Amtrak is also expecting a jump in passenger volumes. A company spokesperson said some trains are already close to full capacity.

Travel group AAA estimates, in all, 53.4 million people will travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, up 13% from 2020, with air travel recovering to about 91% of pre-pandemic levels.

The biggest concern this holiday season is high fuel prices, the YouGov survey found.

(Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh; additional reporting by David Shepardson, Alan Devall and Omar Younis; Editing by Stephen Coates, Barbara Lewis and Mark Porter)

Foreign tourists back in New York, long business recovery seen ahead

By Tyler Clifford

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York has launched its largest tourism advertising campaign in history. John F. Kennedy International Airport bustles again with foreign passengers. The holiday season promises peak travel cheer, with more visitors on streets and in stores.

But souvenir shops, horse carriage drivers and small businesses that rely on vacationers said it could take weeks, or longer, to revive their fortunes, especially to robust pre-pandemic levels.

“I’m just pessimistic, that they’re not going to return in the way people think they will,” said Daniel Zambrzycki, the owner of Gifts on the Square in Times Square, one of the world’s most-visited tourist sites. “It’s a snail-pace progression.”

International tourists bring something different to New York than domestic travelers, city tourism officials said. They tend to spend more, stay longer, and bring a mix of cultures, accents and attitudes that reinforce its cosmopolitan feel.

How and when New York tourism emerges from the pandemic after U.S. curbs on foreign travel were eased on Nov. 8 is something that business owners, city officials and other top tourist destinations are closely watching.

Vijay Dandapani, chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City, sees the country’s most populous city as a litmus test for tourism in the rest of the country.

“New York is the biggest destination,” he said. “Many stop here and go on to other places.”

Current forecasts are not encouraging. This year, NYC & Co, the city’s tourism agency, expects total visitor spending of $24 billion, down from about $47 billion in 2019.

Just 2.8 million foreign visitors are expected this year, a far cry from the record 13.5 million in 2019, when they accounted for 20% of all visitors and half of the spending.

International visitors could triple to 8.5 million next year, NYC & Co spokesman Chris Heywood said. But a rebound to 2019 levels may not come until 2025, two years after domestic travel is expected to recover.

By comparison, it took five years for international tourism in the city to fully recover following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, according to the agency.

‘IT TAKES TIME’

Some souvenir stores in the Times Square area closed for good after pandemic restrictions shut down discretionary travel from much of the world, making parts of New York feel like a ghost town. While pedestrian traffic has picked up since the summer, shops that remain are operating through uncertainty.

Zambrzycki, for one, worries that spikes in crime and homelessness since the pandemic began in March 2020 will deter some foreign visitors.

He said revenues at his store remained down 65% from 2019. He has no immediate plans to restore store hours or enlarge his four-person staff – half the number in 2019.

Jalal Alif, who manages a shop called I Love NY by Phantom of Broadway, also sees no quick surge in customer traffic.

“It takes time,” Alif said, standing in the middle of the nearly empty store. “It’s not going to be the same like before.”

To jumpstart a rebound, NYC & Co has launched a $30 million tourism campaign, its largest, with $6 million dedicated to key international markets, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea, Heywood said.

“Our goal really is to create urgency to book now and ensure that New York is at the top of the priority list for international travel.”

About 20 blocks north of Times Square, Kieran Emanus has offered rides through Central Park in his horse-drawn carriage for decades. Like a visit to the Statue of Liberty, the experience is on the bucket list of many out-of-town visitors.

Emanus enjoyed a modest uptick in bookings in the first week after restrictions were lifted. A good day before the pandemic would have had six carriage bookings on weekdays and 12 on weekends, he said. Now, “if you get eight on a weekend day, you are very happy.”

But there are hopeful signs.

Six groups from Britain were among Emanus’ recent customers, he said. “I hadn’t seen an English person since the pandemic.”

(Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)

Factbox – Latest on the worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – The Americas is facing an impending crisis in routine vaccinations because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pan American Health Organization said, and vaccinations against the coronavirus are behind where they should be.

DEATHS AND INFECTIONS

EUROPE

* France is at the beginning of a fifth wave of the epidemic, Health Minister Olivier Veran said.

* Russia’s deaths hit a record in the previous 24 hours, two days after most of its regions emerged from a week-long workplace shutdown.

* People aged under 30 in Germany should only receive the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine as it causes fewer heart inflammations in younger people than the Moderna shot, an advisory committee said.

AMERICAS

* Over 900,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 11 are expected to have received their first COVID-19 shot by the end of Wednesday, the White House said, as the government ramped up vaccinations of younger children.

* The United States has brokered a deal between Johnson & Johnson and the COVAX vaccine-sharing program for the delivery of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine to people living in conflict zones.

* U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists played “a major role” in developing Moderna’s vaccine and the agency intends to defend its claim as co-owner of patents on the shot, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Reuters.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* South Korea encouraged citizens to take booster shots as more of the elderly fell ill and reported vaccine breakthrough infections, driving serious and critical cases to a record.

* Thailand said it will set aside up to 500,000 doses of vaccines for foreign workers.

* Vietnam will by the end of this month have sufficient vaccines to cover its population, a deputy prime minister said, as the country approved India’s Covaxin vaccine for emergency use.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Israel’s pandemic advisory board backed administering Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s vaccine to children age 5-11, as a fourth wave of infections subsides nationwide.

* Bahrain will cancel working with its coronavirus travel red list from Nov. 14.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* French vaccines company Valneva won European Commission approval for a deal to supply up to 60 million doses of its vaccine candidate over two years.

* Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said Japan will pay about $1.2 billion for 1.6 million courses of their COVID-19 antiviral pill molnupiravir.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* Wall Street lost ground on Wednesday as surging consumer prices fueled fears of a longer-than-expected wave of heightened inflation dampened investor risk appetite.

* San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly said she expects high inflation to moderate once COVID-19 recedes, and repeated that it would be “quite premature” to raise rates now or even to speed up the Fed’s bond-buying taper.

(Compiled by Devika Syamnath and Sarah Morland; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Sriraj Kalluvila)