Daily Covid Briefing
July 17, 2021, 1:58 p.m. ET
July 17, 2021, 1:58 p.m. ET
Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the United States remain low but are slowly rising again, driven by outbreaks in patches of the country’s center, south and west, and by tiny increases almost everywhere else.
The highly contagious Delta variant, which now makes up a majority of new U.S. cases, has spread rapidly, fueling the national uptick. But because vaccines are effective against the variant — especially against serious disease — new cases and hospitalizations are primarily climbing in places with low vaccination rates.
Public health experts expect this trend to continue, putting the country’s vaccinated and unvaccinated on very different paths in the next phase of the pandemic. While nearly half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, the level of protection varies widely across and within states.
This morning I tested positive for Covid. I’m waiting for my PCR result, but thankfully I have had my jabs and symptoms are mild.
Please make sure you come forward for your vaccine if you haven’t already. pic.twitter.com/NJYMg2VGzT
— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) July 17, 2021
Sajid Javid, Britain’s new health secretary, said on Saturday in a short video on Twitter that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, only two days before almost all of the country’s virus-related restrictions were set to be lifted.
“I was feeling a bit groggy last night, so I took a lateral flow test this morning, and it’s come out positive,” said the health secretary, 51, who was smiling and appeared to be in good spirits. Britain has distributed the easy-to-use lateral flow tests as a means of encouraging people to test themselves or get tested for the virus.
Mr. Javid said that he had already received two doses of a coronavirus vaccine, and that his symptoms were “very mild.” He added that he was isolating at home with his family, and that he was awaiting the results of a P.C.R. test, which is considered more accurate, for confirmation.
Mr. Javid was appointed health secretary in June after Matt Hancock, who had spearheaded the country’s pandemic response, resigned after being accused of violating coronavirus restrictions in tabloid news reports of his affair with an aide.
The British government had planned to end England’s pandemic rules on June 21, but a jump in cases driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant led Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the lifting of restrictions by four weeks, to Monday.
So far, about 53 percent of Britain’s population has been fully vaccinated, and about 69 percent has received a single dose of a vaccine, according to a New York Times database.
In his video, Mr. Javid thanked all of those who have been involved in the country’s vaccination program, and he encouraged anyone who has yet to be vaccinated to do so.
“If everyone plays their part,” the health secretary said, “you’re not only protecting yourself and your loved ones, but you’re also safeguarding the N.H.S. and helping protect our way of life.”
Two Spanish regions reintroduced nighttime curfews on Saturday, just after local judges approved them as justified restrictions because of a recent uptick in coronavirus cases.
The regions — Catalonia and Cantabria — are enforcing curfews in municipalities where the infection rates have risen fastest. Overall, about eight million of Spain’s 47 million residents will no longer be allowed out of their homes late at night.
The curfews came into force early on Saturday. In Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, the police said that they had to force about 4,300 people to go home at 1 a.m. because they were still partying on beaches and in other areas of the city.
The virus’s latest surge has been uneven across Spain. Cumulatively, the country’s cases have risen by 217 percent over the last two weeks, hitting an average of 23,290 — a level not seen since early this year, when Spain was among the European countries worst hit by the pandemic.
Catalonia, on the country’s northeastern Mediterranean coast, has the highest coronavirus case rate in the country, with 105 infections per 100,000 people. Some 77 percent of Covid patients in intensive care had not been vaccinated, according to Reuters, and the highest rate of new infections was among young people aged 20 to 29.
Catalan officials said that around 84 percent of current infections involve the highly contagious Delta variant, which has been spreading across Europe. Local authorities said that 1,349 people were hospitalized with Covid as of Friday — double the number from a week earlier.
Cantabria, on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast, has seen a far smaller spike than most of the rest of the country, but even so, its cases have risen 85 percent over the last two weeks. That area won court approval to impose curfews in 53 towns, which will take place between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. for seven days.
MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. — When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask.
Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger Covid-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not need it because “I never get sick.”
Last week, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating Covid at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Mrs. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Ms. Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.
Ms. Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”
Yet despite their ordeals, none of them changed their minds about getting vaccinated. “It’s just too new,” Mrs. Billigmeier said. “It is like an experiment.”
While much of the nation tiptoes toward normalcy, the coronavirus is again swamping hospitals in places like Mountain Home, a city of fewer than 13,000 people not far from the Missouri border. A principal reason, health officials say, is the emergence of the new, far more contagious variant called Delta, which now accounts for more than half of new infections in the United States.
The variant has highlighted a new divide in America, between communities with high vaccination rates, where it causes hardly a ripple, and those like Mountain Home that are undervaccinated, where it threatens to upend life all over again. Part of the country is breathing a sigh of relief; part is holding its breath.
transcript
transcript
Biden Slams Social Media Companies for Pandemic Misinformation
President Biden said that companies like Facebook were responsible for spreading misinformation about vaccines and the coronavirus pandemic, attributing preventable deaths to the platforms.
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“What’s your message to platforms like Facebook?” “They’re killing people. I mean, really. Well, look, the only pandemic, we have is among the unvaccinated and that, and they’re killing people.”
President Biden unleashed his growing frustration with social media on Friday, saying that platforms like Facebook were “killing people” by allowing disinformation about the coronavirus vaccine to spread online.
Mr. Biden’s forceful statement capped weeks of grievance in the White House over the dissemination of vaccine disinformation online, even as the pace of inoculations slows and health officials warn of the rising danger of the Delta variant.
Just before boarding Marine One for a weekend in Camp David in Maryland, Mr. Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that — and they’re killing people.”
Mr. Biden spoke a day after the surgeon general of the United States used his first formal advisory to criticize tech and social media companies to stop dangerous health information that presents “an urgent threat to public health.”
The Biden administration has warned of the spread of misinformation about vaccines and the coronavirus from a range of sources, including politicians and news outlets. But this week, White House officials went further and singled out social media companies for allowing false information to proliferate. That came after weeks of failed attempts to get Facebook to turn over information detailing what mechanisms were in place to combat misinformation about the vaccine, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The spread of false information has become the latest flash point for social media companies. Facebook and other social media sites have struggled with their role as platforms for speech while protecting their users from disinformation campaigns, like Russian efforts to influence presidential elections or false statements about the pandemic.
British medical officials announced on Friday that fully vaccinated travelers arriving in England from France must continue to quarantine because of the threat posed by the Beta variant, though vaccinated travelers from other European nations on Britain’s medium-risk amber list will no longer have to quarantine as of Monday.
Monday is being celebrated as England’s “freedom day,” when almost all coronavirus restrictions will be lifted. The British decision angered many whose travel plans to and from France have been disrupted by the new restrictions.
Travelers from France — along with anyone who has traveled to France in the prior 10 days — must quarantine for five to 10 days in their own accommodation, and they will need a coronavirus test on Day 2 and Day 8.
This is one of the country’s first major actions related to the Beta variant, which was first identified in South Africa. Clinical trials show that vaccines offer less protection against Beta. Until now, Britain has been focused on the threat from the Delta variant, first identified in India, which is now dominant in Britain and France as well as the United States.
The Beta variant accounts for 3.4 percent of new cases in France over the past four weeks according to GISAID, an international open source database.
France has announced new vaccination requirements in its fight against Delta, but is continuing to open up to travelers. Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Saturday that unvaccinated travelers from the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Greece would be allowed entry into France as of Sunday, if they produce negative results from a coronavirus test taken within the 24 hours prior to their arrival.
Travelers who are fully vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccines, will be able to enter without a negative test.
Among those whose travel plans have been disrupted by the new restrictions is Lilliame Aubourg, a French citizen living in Britain. She has not seen her 62-year-old mother, who lives alone, in almost two years. Ms. Aubourg, 36, who is fully vaccinated, planned to travel to France with her husband, who is also vaccinated, in August.
“Waking up to the news yesterday night that actually there is a U-turn for France, it is just so disheartening,” Ms. Aubourg said, who has now canceled her trip. “We haven’t told our family yet. My mother is elderly, my husband’s parents are elderly. We just want to see our family.”
Juliet Walton, 50, a British citizen who lives in southwest France, is traveling to the United Kingdom on July 24 for her daughter’s 22nd birthday party. Now with the new restrictions, Ms. Walton will have to quarantine on her arrival.
With “Brexit and a pandemic, it’s just an absolute nightmare,” Ms. Walton said. “It’s just so ill-thought out and unnecessary. I’ve had both my jabs. I was looking forward to getting some sort of normality.”
Callum Sowler, 35, who flew to the south of France on Tuesday to visit his fiancée’s family, will now have to quarantine with his fiancée and their son, who joined him on Friday for the summer holidays, when they return to England.
“It’s turned what was supposed to be a fun holiday into something that’s now caused us loss of sleep last night and stress this morning, because we really don’t know what to do for the best now,” Mr. Sowler said.
Véronique Trillet-Lenoir, a French member of the European Parliament and an oncologist, said, “I really don’t understand the decision,” adding that the Beta variant was “not an issue in mainland France,” but more so in Réunion Island, a French department about 4,000 miles from Europe, off the southeastern coast of Africa.
Some research has shown that the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, the backbone of Britain’s inoculation campaign, has been less effective in preventing mild and moderate Beta cases, which Ms. Trillet-Lenoir said could be a motivation behind the British government’s decision to announce the new restrictions..
“The majority of English people have been vaccinated with AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a good [vaccine], but not that powerful against some variants, and especially against the Beta variant,” she said. “There is nothing to be frightened about as far as people coming from France are concerned.”
Organizers of the Tokyo Olympics said on Saturday that a person had tested positive for the coronavirus inside the Olympic Village, less than a week before the Games are scheduled to begin.
It was the first confirmed case of the virus within the Olympic Village, which is in the seaside Tokyo district of Harumi. Organizers said the infected person was a visitor from overseas involved in staging the Games, not an athlete, and was serving a 14-day quarantine.
The chief executive of the Tokyo organizing committee, Toshiro Muto, said that the person had tested positive during coronavirus screening within the village, and that he did not know the individual’s vaccination status, the Kyodo news agency reported.
A total of 14 cases were reported on Saturday among personnel connected to the Games, including two members of the foreign media. It was the highest single-day total yet, according to officials, and brought to 44 the number of coronavirus infections that have been confirmed among Olympic delegations, staff members and contractors.
With opening ceremonies scheduled for Friday, infections among Olympic personnel and a rising Covid-19 caseload in Tokyo have fueled fears that the Games could become a superspreading event. Organizers have barred spectators from most Olympic venues and set up “bubbles” to separate foreign athletes and officials from the Japanese public.
The Olympic Village opened on Tuesday and is expected to house most of the approximately 11,000 athletes participating in the Games. Residents are screened for the coronavirus daily, officials said.
Although the athletes are not required to be vaccinated against Covid-19, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, said this week that 85 percent of the people staying in the Olympic Village would be fully inoculated.
The Yankees were allowed to return to baseball on Friday, but without two of their best players. Aaron Judge and Gio Urshela, along with backup catcher Kyle Higashioka, were placed on the Covid-19 injured list after testing positive for the coronavirus. All are expected to miss at least 10 days.
A total of six Yankees are now on the Covid list, the second outbreak to hit the team this season. While many of the positive tests among Yankees players and staff have been so-called breakthrough cases, where a player who was vaccinated tested positive, the team said that was not the case for all of Friday’s positive tests, meaning at least one of the players was not vaccinated. But the Yankees did not identify which players were, or weren’t, vaccinated.
Judge, one of the most popular Yankee players, was at Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Denver, and was near many of the game’s biggest stars, igniting concern that the game’s best players may have been exposed. Five Boston Red Sox All-Stars shared a clubhouse with Judge, but all five were active on Friday. The three position players among that group, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and J.D. Martinez, were all in Boston’s starting lineup.
Officials with other teams, in conjunction with Major League Baseball, have been following up with Judge’s close contacts at the All-Star festivities and have been conducting testing where appropriate.
In Denver, the Colorado Rockies announced it had made four players inactive because of Covid and contact tracing protocols.
The series between the Yankees and Red Sox was permitted to resume Friday night after Thursday’s game was postponed. The postponement had come after three Yankee pitchers — Nestor Cortes Jr., Jonathan Loaisiga and Wandy Peralta — were confirmed as positive for the virus. After Friday’s round of testing, M.L.B. determined the series could go on and the postponed game would be made up on Aug. 17 as part of a doubleheader.
For M.L.B., it was the eighth postponement because of virus concerns within the first 2,964 games this season. Last year, 45 out of 900 games were postponed.
Meanwhile, the Toronto Blue Jays, Canada’s only big-league baseball team, will be returning to their home city on July 30. Because of the closed U.S.-Canada border, the team has been forced to find makeshift regular-season homes in Dunedin, Fla., its spring training site, and in Buffalo, where it displaced the franchise’s top minor league team.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Representatives of Pfizer met privately with senior U.S. scientists and regulators this week to press their case for swift authorization of Covid-19 booster vaccines, amid growing public confusion about whether they will be needed and pushback from federal health officials who say the extra doses are not necessary now.
Officials say more data — and possibly several more months — would be needed before regulators could determine whether booster shots were necessary. The meeting, held Monday, came on the same day that Israel started administering third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to heart transplant patients and others with compromised immune systems.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website now notes that “People who are immunocompromised should be counseled about the potential for reduced immune responses to Covid-19 vaccines,” and urges them to continue wearing masks, staying six feet from people outside their households, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces.
Debate has been intensifying about whether booster shots were needed in the United States, at what point and for whom. At the same time, the World Health Organization has pointed to the profound inequities in global vaccine access, and urged wealthy countries to share their doses with needier ones rather than consider adding booster shots domestically.
Many American experts, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, have said that there is insufficient evidence yet that boosters are necessary.
Some, though, say Israel’s move may foreshadow a decision in the United States to at least recommend them for the vulnerable, or to begin with certain age groups, officials said.
For example, booster shots might go first to nursing home residents who received their vaccines in late 2020 or early 2021, while older people who received their first shots in the spring might have a longer wait. And then there is the question of what kind of booster: a third dose of the original vaccine, or perhaps a shot tailored to the highly infectious Delta variant, which is surging in the United States.
In other news this week:
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A shipment of 500,000 Covid vaccine doses from the United States arrived in Haiti on Wednesday, the first shots to reach a nation thrown into turmoil after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The donation is part of the Biden administration’s effort to bolster lagging vaccination campaigns in the world’s poorer countries, and will be distributed by Covax, the global vaccine-sharing effort, according to the Pan American Health Organization, part of the World Health Organization.
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President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday used his first formal advisory to the United States to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about Covid. The official, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared such misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”
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With less than a week to go before the Summer Olympics in Japan, organizers and competitors face ever-growing challenges as infections in Tokyo reach six-month highs. The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, insisted that the arrivals of thousands of athletes and officials from overseas would not spread infections. But dozens of cases have emerged among people involved with the Games, including the first infection within the Olympic Village, which was reported on Saturday.
LONDON — The cast and crew of “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner,” an experimental play at the Royal Court, were just two weeks into their run when they received bad news: One member of the company had tested positive for the coronavirus, and everyone had to quarantine.
On July 4, the theater canceled performances for a week.
The next day, the producers of “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum announced that they were canceling nine days of shows, because a member of the production team had tested positive, and later that week the Globe called off a performance of “Romeo & Juliet,” because an actor in the show had, too.
Last Monday alone, “The Prince of Egypt” at the Dominion Theater; another “Romeo & Juliet,” at the Regent’s Park Theater; and “Bach and Sons,” at the Bridge were all canceled for at least five days because of confirmed or potential cases.
The spate of abandoned shows comes at what was supposed to be a celebratory moment for British theater. Starting Monday, playhouses in England will be allowed to open at full capacity. Audience members will no longer have to wear masks inside theaters, although many are encouraging patrons to keep them on.
Yet with coronavirus cases soaring in Britain because of the more contagious Delta variant, theaters fear more cancellations. Because of the country’s phased rollout, many young actors and crew members are not yet fully vaccinated. “It’s going to be fragile all summer,” Lucy Davies, the Royal Court’s executive producer, said in a telephone interview.
Called-off shows will cause further financial stress on cash-strapped theaters, Davies said, especially because no commercial insurers in Britain offer cover for coronavirus-related cancellations. And producers say the British government’s coronavirus rules are part of the problem. When people test positive here, they are required to quarantine for 10 days, as must all of their “close contacts” — defined as anyone who has been within about six feet of an infected person for 15 minutes.
In most London theaters, casts and crew are tested several times a week, and masks and distancing are typically required offstage
The safest productions seem to be those created especially for pandemic times, with social distancing among the players. The Globe has used this approach for shows like its “Romeo & Juliet.”
Even so, last Saturday, Will Edgerton, who is playing Tybalt, learned that he had the virus after performing a home test. The Globe canceled that afternoon’s show so that a new actor could rehearse the role, then went ahead with the evening performance.
