Daily Covid Briefing
Sept. 19, 2021, 10:41 a.m. ET
Sept. 19, 2021, 10:41 a.m. ET
Madrid will remove most of its pandemic restrictions on Monday amid a general easing of lockdown rules in Spain after the country’s coronavirus infection rate fell to its lowest level in more than a year.
Restaurants and bars in Spain’s capital region will be allowed to stay open as late as their licenses allow, while shopping malls, cinemas and theaters will no longer have to apply capacity limits. Only a few restrictions will remain in Madrid, including limits on party sizes at restaurants — 10 per outdoor table, up from eight — and a 75 percent capacity limit at nightclubs.
This past week, Spain’s 14-day infection rate fell below 100 registered cases per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest since August 2020. The latest figures come after the infection rate reached almost 700 in July, before falling to 400 last month.
Most experts attribute the improvement to the speeding up of Spain’s vaccination campaign, which allowed the government to reach its goal of fully vaccinating 70 percent of the population by the end of August. As of Friday, 35.8 million residents, more than 75 percent of the population, had been fully vaccinated, giving Spain one of the largest vaccinated populations in Europe.
Tourism in Spain, which has maintained only limited travel restrictions over the summer, is also expected to increase after London’s decision this past week to stop forcing vaccinated visitors to test for Covid-19 before returning to Britain. The switch, which comes into force on Oct. 4, also benefits some other European countries that are heavily dependent on British tourists, such as France, Italy and Portugal.
The extremely transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus, which overtook all other variants in the United States just a few months ago, now represents more than 99 percent of cases tracked in the country, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The variant caused caseloads to surge in Britain and India this spring and summer, and in both countries outbreaks resurfaced after cases had seemed to be on the decline. The Delta variant has been fueling outbreaks in the United States throughout the summer, its contagiousness taking advantage of the number of people who have resisted Covid-19 vaccinations.
The data on Delta’s prevalence, contained in the C.D.C.’s latest biweekly report of virus sequencing, shows it climbing from just over a quarter of cases in mid-June to near total dominance in September.
“It’s not unexpected, because it’s more transmissible, but it is also a strong reminder that we need to have continuous vigilance,” said Dr. Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University.
The C.D.C.’s COVID Data Tracker, reporting results for the two-week period ending on Sept. 11, put the B.1.617.2 lineage of Delta at 99.4 percent among variants of concern, with two other Delta lineages tracked at 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent, the Mu variant — first detected in January in Colombia — at 0.1 percent and several other, unidentified variants at 0.2 percent. That data is based on thousands of sequences provided every week through the C.D.C.’s national genomic surveillance efforts, according to the agency’s website.
The country recently experienced a rise in hospitalizations, despite the availability of highly protective vaccines, and the Delta variant has been cited as the cause.
“We’re seeing more children in the hospital now because the Delta variant is more readily transmissible among everybody, adults and children,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, told The New York Times on Sept. 9.
Dr. Popescu said the rise of Delta should help Americans and health officials realize the coronavirus remains a serious public health threat.
“The biggest piece is, ‘Don’t let your guard down.’ We need continuous surveillance, genomic sequencing, access to testing and public health interventions,” Dr. Popescu said.
Vaccination and wearing masks can help, she said.
“We have transmission occurring with very limited exposure, and that means that, for example, times without a mask, when you are out and around others, become much more of a risk,” Dr. Popescu said.
For the first time in Alabama’s known history, the state had more deaths than births in 2020 — a grim milestone that underscores the pandemic’s calamitous toll.
“Our state literally shrunk in 2020,” Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s state health officer, said at a news conference on Friday. There were 64,714 total deaths in the state last year, compared to 57,641 births, Dr. Harris said.
Such a gap had never been recorded, not even during World War I, World War II and the flu pandemic of 1918, Dr. Harris said. Going back to the earliest available records, in 1900, “We’ve never had a time when deaths exceeded births,” he said.
Nationally, the birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and some experts say the pandemic may be accelerating that trend. A study from the University of New Hampshire found that half of the 50 U.S. states had more deaths than births in 2020, compared with only five states with more deaths than births in 2019.
In Alabama last year, 7,182 deaths were officially attributed to Covid, according to data from the Alabama Department of Public Health.
On Wednesday, in a town hall discussion with Al.com, Alabama’s largest digital news site, Dr. Harris dismissed arguments that Covid deaths were being misrepresented.
“We get skeptical people who go, ‘Oh well, those were just older people who were going to die anyway, and you’re just attributing their deaths to Covid,’” he said. “That is not the case.”
Alabama has recently averaged about 60 deaths a day, according to a New York Times database, and only 41 percent of the state’s eligible population is fully vaccinated.
Alabama’s rate of full vaccination is on a par with Idaho’s, tied as the third-lowest rate in the country. The two that rank lower are Wyoming and West Virginia.
Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, has urged the people of her state to get Covid vaccinations, but like many other Republicans, she objected when President Biden recently announced vaccine mandates, calling them “outrageous” and “overreaching.”
An increasing number of school districts are turning to testing to keep more children in the classroom and avoid disrupting the work lives of their parents. The resource-intensive approach — sometimes known as “test to stay” or modified quarantine — allows students who have been exposed to the virus to stay in school as long as they take frequent Covid tests, which are typically provided by the school, and adhere to other precautions.
Experts agree that children who are infected with the virus should isolate at home, but the question of what to do about their classmates poses a dilemma.
Allowing children who have been exposed to the virus to remain in school does pose a potential transmission risk, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that it “does not have enough evidence” to support the approach. Instead, it recommends that close contacts who have not been fully vaccinated quarantine for as long as 14 days. (Vaccinated close contacts can remain in the classroom as long as they are asymptomatic and wear a mask, according to the agency’s school guidance.)
“At this time, we do not recommend or endorse a test-to-stay program,” the C.D.C. said in a statement to The New York Times. The agency added, “However, we are working with multiple jurisdictions who have chosen to use these approaches to gather more information.”
The C.D.C. guidelines mean that in some cases, especially in classrooms where students are not vaccinated, masked or socially distanced, a single case of Covid can force a dozen or more students out of school. New York City’s school guidelines are even more stringent, stipulating that all unvaccinated students must quarantine for seven to 10 days if one of their classmates contracts the virus.
With the academic year barely underway, some districts in Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and other Covid hot spots have already had to quarantine hundreds or even thousands of students. In mid-August, Mississippi had nearly 30,000 students in quarantine, according to data reported to the state.
A new study, which was published last week in The Lancet, suggests that the test-to-stay approach can be safe.
Across Brazil, recycling plants stopped running for months. In Uganda, a junkyard is short on reusable plastics. And in Indonesia’s capital, disposable gloves and face shields are piling up at the mouth of a river.
Surging consumption of plastics and packaging during the pandemic has produced mountains of waste. But because fears of Covid-19 have led to work stoppages at recycling facilities, some reusable material has been junked or burned instead.
At the same time, high volumes of personal protective equipment have been misclassified as hazardous, solid waste experts say. That material often isn’t allowed into the normal trash, so a lot of it is dumped in burn pits or as litter.
Experts say a problem in both cases is that an early fear — that the coronavirus could spread easily through surfaces — has created a hard-to-shake stigma around handling perfectly safe trash. Many scientists and government agencies have since found that the fear of surface transmission was wildly overblown. But old habits die hard, especially in countries where waste-disposal guidelines haven’t been updated and officials are still preoccupied with fighting fresh outbreaks.
“Because there isn’t a route of transmission through recycling, say, we are still finding things being burned rather than recycled because people are scared” of surface transmission, said Anne Woolridge, who leads a working group on health care waste for the International Solid Waste Association. “You try to educate the entire world’s population in less than a year. It’s impossible.”
As for personal protective equipment, Dr. Woolridge said, the sight of gloves and masks littering the world would have been unthinkable before the pandemic. “But because everybody’s saying anything to do with the pandemic is a medical waste, it’s put pressure on the system,” she added.
Recycling rates dropped sharply around the world last year, in part because demand from manufacturers fell. In many countries where the recycling industry is still driven by hand sorting, rather than machines, in-person work was suspended out of virus-related fears.
In Brazil, for example, the generation of recyclable material in cities rose 25 percent in 2020, primarily because of a spike in online shopping, according to Abrelpe, a national association of sanitation companies. But recycling programs in several cities suspended operations for several months anyway, citing fears of surface transmission.
Recycling rates are now inching back to pre-Covid levels in developed economies, said James D. Michelsen, a solid waste expert at the International Finance Corporation.
But in countries where recycling is driven by informal collectors, he added, lockdowns and outbreaks are still creating major disruptions.
A coronavirus outbreak at a jail in Monterey County, Calif., has caused cases among inmates to quadruple in less than a week, mirroring dangerous conditions in other jails across the country as the Delta variant spreads.
The number of inmates who tested positive at the Monterey County Jail rose to 130 people as of Saturday, with one person hospitalized, from 30 on Monday, according to data provided by the jail. Seventeen deputies have also tested positive in one week, and of those, only one was vaccinated, said Derrel Simpson, a spokesman for the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office.
Mr. Simpson said the outbreak wasn’t tied to unsanitary conditions, adding that staff members are still wearing masks and providing cleaning stations. The recent spread of the virus, he said, is not exclusive to Monterey County.
“It’s happening in other jails,” Mr. Simpson said. “It’s cohort living. There’s multiple people occupying one space.”
But activists have said throughout the pandemic that more precautionary measures are needed to ensure the safety of incarcerated individuals.
At New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, staffing shortages and unsanitary conditions have paved the way for a new surge in coronavirus infections.
Throughout the pandemic, people who are incarcerated have been infected at rates several times higher than those of their surrounding communities.
Mr. Simpson said it was unclear how this recent outbreak started. But he said in-person court appearances and lawyer visits that started in late July very likely increased the chances of exposure to the virus.
Of the two-thirds of workers in the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office who have reported their vaccination status, 70 percent are fully vaccinated, Mr. Simpson said. The vaccination status of the remaining one-third is unclear, he added.
Inmates are offered vaccinations at the jail, but it is unclear what percentage of them are fully vaccinated because it is not required and their vaccination status before incarceration is often unknown, Mr. Simpson said.
He said the number of infections could most likely increase in the coming days.
“We simply don’t have the facility to house everybody in a cell all by themselves,” Mr. Simpson said.
