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A senior British scientist on Thursday warned that the variant of the disease transmitted by the coronavirus COVID-19 which first appeared there and is much more contagious than the original virus could ‘sweep the world’ and complicate efforts to contain the pandemic.
In an interview with the BBC’s Newscast podcast, Professor Sharon Peacock, head of the UK’s genetic surveillance program, said the new variant has already swept across the UK and will likely spread widely around the world.
The news comes as California Governor Gavin Newsom has confirmed that the variant that first emerged in South Africa has now been detected in two cases in the Golden State. This variant worries experts because it is also highly contagious and appears to be more resistant to vaccines that have been granted emergency use clearance in the United States and elsewhere.
Earlier this week, South Africa said it would stop using the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC AZN,
AZN,
and the University of Oxford because it seemed less effective in dealing with the strain, and officials on Wednesday said they would start giving frontline healthcare workers the Johnson & Johnson JNJ,
vaccine instead. This vaccine has not yet received emergency use authorization – an application for EUA has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration – but there are high hopes as it is about a single dose regimen, unlike other licensed vaccines, which require two shots, weeks apart.
The World Health Organization weighed in on the AstraZeneca vaccine on Thursday and said it was “very effective and safe” even though it was less effective in treating the South African variant.
“The AZD1222 COVID-19 vaccine has 63.09% efficacy against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) said in a statement. “Longer dose intervals in the range of 8 to 12 weeks are associated with greater vaccine efficacy.”
AstraZeneca, which announced its annual results Thursday, said it was solving problems with manufacturing its vaccine and planned to roughly double monthly production to 200 million doses by April, as it sought to surpass a start difficult in the deployment of the shot. , as reported by Dow Jones Newswires.
Last year, AstraZeneca stumbled in releasing clinical trial results and more recently suffered a shortfall in doses promised to the European Union. Managing Director Pascal Soriot and other executives said they were working on production issues and would meet targets of delivering more than 400 million doses to rich and poor countries in the coming months. This follows green lights in the UK, Europe and beyond for use of the vaccine, which is not yet approved for use in the US.
The company also said it would take six to nine months to create a modified version of the vaccine to target new variants.
In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine tracking now shows as of 6 a.m. Wednesday, 44.8 million vaccines had been administered and about 66 million doses had been delivered to states. The tracker shows that 33.8 million people have received one or more doses, or about 10% of the population.
The United States added 94,855 new COVID cases on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, and at least 3,252 people have died. Cases continue to decline and have recorded an average of 104,554 new cases per day over the past week, a 36% drop from the average of two weeks ago.
There was bad news for California, which surpassed New York on Wednesday as the state with the most COVID deaths, according to the Times. Los Angeles is temporarily closing five vaccination sites, due to a vaccine shortage, the newspaper reported.
In other news:
• The United States could have avoided 40% of the deaths it has suffered from COVID-19 if the rates were in line with those of other high-income members of the G-7 countries, a Lancet commission reported Thursday, after reviewing the background of former President Donald Trump. Trump “brought misfortune to the United States and the planet” during his four years in office, the commission concluded, but it also noted that America’s public health infrastructure was in poor condition as the country entered the pandemic. “Although its efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act have failed, it has weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2.3 million, even before the massive dislocation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and accelerated privatization of government health programs. The report said. The United States leads the world in cases, at 27.4 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University, or about a quarter of the global tally. It has by far the most fatalities, at 471,765, or about one-fifth of the world total. The second highest number of cases is in India, with 10.9 million, less than half of the US total. Brazil has the second highest death toll with 234,850, less than half the US number.
• Federal health officials have again reminded Americans to continue wearing masks even as the number of new cases and hospitalizations is down from a peak in early January, reported Jaimy Lee of MarketWatch. A report released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that wearing two masks (such as a surgical mask and a cloth mask together) and securing a medical mask snug against the face helped to ‘avoid exposure to particles in an experiment. The CDC recommends that masks “have two or more layers, completely cover your nose and mouth, and fit snugly against your walls and the side of your face.”
• President Joe Biden has created a new working group focused on health equity and COVID-19. He called on 12 experts, who are expected to issue a number of recommendations on the response and recovery of COVID-19 in the country. In December, MarketWatch spoke with Dr. James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry College, one of four historically black medical schools in the United States, and a member of the new COVID-19 Health Equity Working Group. by Biden. Read the full interview.
• Employers in the United States may be allowed to require workers to take a COVID-19 vaccine, but a new survey suggests most are not yet following the mandatory route, reported MarketWatch’s Meera Jagannathan. Only 0.5% of companies currently require coronavirus vaccination for all employees, and only 6% plan to require it for all workers once vaccines are readily available and / or fully approved by the Food and Drug US administration, according to the 1802 C-suite survey, human resources professionals and in-house lawyers from various industries, led by the labor law firm Littler. Another 3% said they plan to impose vaccination only on certain workers, such as those who come into contact with customers.
Also read: Target and Tractor Supply join list of companies paying workers for COVID-19 vaccine
• A Texas doctor who inoculated 10 people with doses of the vaccine about to expire instead of letting them go to waste has been fired and charged with theft, The New York Times reported. Dr Hasan Gokal has made house calls and referred people to his house, including strangers, in an effort to make the doses matter. His last patient was his own wife, who suffers from lung disease. The doses in each vial of Moderna Inc.mRNA,
vaccines are not viable until six hours after the seal is broken, making it urgent to administer them before they expire.
Latest calculations
The global tally of confirmed cases of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 rose above 107.4 million on Thursday, while the death toll topped 2.35 million.
Brazil has the second-highest death toll with 234,850 and the third-highest for cases with 9.7 million.
India is second in the world with 10.9 million cases, and now fourth in deaths with 155,360.
Mexico has the third highest death toll with 169,670 and the 13th highest number of cases with 1.9 million.
The UK has 3.9 million cases and 115,070 deaths, the highest in Europe and the fifth in the world.
China, where the virus was first discovered late last year, has recorded 100,515 confirmed cases and 4,827 deaths, according to its official figures.
What does the economy say?
Nearly 800,000 people applied for unemployment benefits in the United States in early February, signaling that many workers are still losing their jobs despite the deployment of coronavirus vaccines and a drop in Covid-19 cases, reported Jeffry Bartash of MarketWatch .
The first unemployment claims traditionally filed through the states fell from 19,000 to 793,000 in the seven days ended Feb. 6, the government said Thursday. Economists polled by Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal had forecast new claims for a total of 760,000 seasonally adjusted.
The decline was essentially a mirage, however. New claims from two weeks ago were raised to 812,000 from the 779,000 initially reported, an unusually large revision that likely reflects persistent problems in collecting unemployment data.
Another 334,524 requests were made under a federal temporary relief program.
Adding up new state and federal claims, the government last week received 1.15 million claims for unemployment benefits, either on the basis of actual or unadjusted numbers. Combined claims have yet to fall below 1 million per week since last May.
Before the pandemic, new claims totaled 200,000 and had never increased by more than 695,000 in a week.
See: A visual look at how an unfair pandemic has reshaped work and home
“The numbers are somewhat misleading, reflecting multiple deposits and a certain degree of fraud,” said Chief Economist Scott Brown of Raymond James. “However, these data reflect a high level of job destruction.”
“An extraordinarily large number of people remain dependent on government support, indicating persistent tensions in the labor market,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
and S&P 500 SPX,
were higher in Thursday trades.
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