A British scientist warned on Thursday that the variant of the disease transmitted by the coronavirus COVID-19 that first appeared there and is much more infectious than the original virus could “sweep the world” and could complicate the effort to counter 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 version had already moved to the UK and was likely to spread around the world.
The news comes as California Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed that the variant that first appeared in South Africa has now been detected in two cases in Golden State. This variant worries experts because it is also highly contagious and seems more resistant to vaccines that have been granted emergency use authorization in the US and elsewhere.
Earlier this week, South Africa said it would stop using the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC AZN,
AZN,
and Oxford University because it seemed less effective at treating the strain, and on Wednesday, officials said they would begin offering Johnson & Johnson JNJ front-line health care workers.
vaccine instead. That vaccine has not yet received an emergency use authorization – an application for an EUA has been filed with the US Food and Drug Administration – but there is high hope for it because it is a single-dose regimen, unlike other authorized vaccines. , which requires two strokes, weeks away.
The World Health Organization on Thursday analyzed the AstraZeneca vaccine and said it was “extremely effective and safe,” even though it is less effective in treating the South African variant.
“The AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19 is 63.09% effective against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the WHO Strategic Advisory Group on Immunization Experts (SAGE) said in a statement. “Longer dosing intervals of 8 to 12 weeks are associated with greater vaccine efficacy.”
AstraZeneca, which reported year-round earnings on Thursday, said it solves vaccine manufacturing problems and expects to roughly double its monthly production to 200 million doses by April as it tries to get off to a rocky start. when launching the photo. , as reported by Dow Jones Newswires.
Last year, AstraZeneca failed to communicate the results of clinical trials and, more recently, suffered a deficiency in the doses committed to the European Union. Executive Director Pascal Soriot and other executives said they were working on production issues and would meet targets to deliver more than 400 million doses to rich and poor countries in the coming months. This follows the green lights in the UK, Europe and not just for vaccine use, which is not yet approved for US use.
The company also said it would take six to nine months to create a modified version of the vaccine to target new variants.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the vaccine monitor, now shows that as of 6 p.m. Wednesday, 44.8 million vaccines have been administered and about 66 million doses have been administered to states. The tracker shows that 33.8 million people received one or more doses, equal to about 10% of the population.
The United States added another 94,855 new cases of COVID on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, and at least 3,252 people died. Cases continue to fall and had an average of 104,554 new cases per day in the last week, down 36% from the average two weeks ago.
There was bad news for California, which on Wednesday overtook New York as the state with the most COVID deaths, according to the Times. Los Angeles is temporarily closing five vaccination sites due to lack of vaccines, the newspaper said.
In another train of thoughts:
• The US could have avoided 40% of the deaths suffered by COVID-19 if the rates were in line with other high-income members of the G-7 nations, a Lancet commission reported on Thursday, after examining the history of former President Donald Trump. Trump “brought misfortune to the United States and the planet” during his four-year term, the commission concluded, but also noted that the U.S. public health infrastructure was in poor condition as the country entered pandemic. “Although its effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act has failed, it has weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured by 2.3 million, even before the mass deployment of the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated the privatization of government programs. of health. “The report said. The US leads the world in terms of the number of cases, to 27.4 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University, or about a quarter of the global number. It has by far the most deaths, at 471,765, or about a fifth of the global total. The second largest number of cases is India, with 10.9 million, or less than half of the total US. Brazil has the second highest number of deaths, at 234,850, also less than half of the US number.
• Federal health officials have again reminded Americans to continue wearing masks, even though the number of new cases and hospitalizations is declining from a peak in early January, Jaimy Lee of MarketWatch reported. A report released 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 ensuring that a medical mask fits snugly on the face helped prevent exposure to particles in a single experiment. The CDC recommends that masks “have two or more layers, completely cover your nose and mouth and fit perfectly against the walls and side of your face.”
• President Joe Biden created a new working group focused on health equity and COVID-19. He turned to 12 experts, who are expected to issue a series of recommendations on the nation’s COVID-19 response and recovery. In December, MarketWatch spoke with Dr. James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry College, one of the four black medical schools in the United States and a member of Biden’s new COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. Read the full interview.
• U.S. employers may be allowed to ask workers to get a COVID-19 vaccine, but a new survey suggests most are not yet on the mandatory path, MarketWatch’s Meera Jagannathan reported. Only 0.5% of companies currently require coronavirus vaccination for all employees and only 6% intend to mandate it for all workers once the vaccines are readily available and / or fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to the survey. 1,802 C- suite directors, human resources professionals and in-house lawyers from a number of industries led by the law firm Littler. Another 3% said they intend to impose vaccination only on certain workers, such as those with client roles.
Read also: Target, Tractor Supply joins the list of companies that pay workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine
• A Texas doctor who inoculated 10 people with vaccine doses that were about to expire, rather than let them go to waste, was fired and charged with theft, the New York Times reported. Dr. Hasan Gokal made calls at home and directed people to his home, including foreigners, in an effort to make the doses count. His final patient was his own wife, who suffers from lung disease. Doses in each vial by Moderna Inc. MRNA,
vaccines are only viable for six hours after the seal is broken, which makes it urgent to administer them before expiry.
Latest accounts
The overall number of confirmed cases of coronavirus causing COVID-19 rose to more than 107.4 million on Thursday, while the death toll rose to more than 2.35 million.
Brazil has the second highest number of deaths, at 234,850 and is the third in cases, with 9.7 million.
India is second in the world in cases, with 10.9 million, and now fourth in deaths, at 155,360.
Mexico has the third highest number of deaths, with 169,670 and the 13th highest number of cases, with 1.9 million.
The United Kingdom has 3.9 million cases and 115,070 deaths, the highest in Europe and the fifth largest in the world.
China, where the virus was first discovered late last year, 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, reporting that dozens of workers are still losing their jobs, despite the launch of coronavirus vaccines and the decline in Covid-19 cases, MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash reported.
Initial unemployment claims traditionally filed by states fell by 19,000 to 793,000 in the seven days ended Feb. 6, the government said Thursday. Economists surveyed by the Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal had forecast new claims to total 760,000 seasonally adjusted.
But the decline was a mirage. New complaints two weeks ago were raised to 812,000, out of the 779,000 initially reported, an unusually high revision, which is likely to reflect the ongoing problems of collecting unemployment data.
Another 334,524 applications were submitted through a temporary federal aid program.
Collecting new state and federal claims, the government received 1.15 million unemployment benefits last week, based on real or unadjusted figures. The combined claims have not yet fallen below 1 million per week since May.
Before the pandemic, new claims were falling by 200,000 and never increased by more than 695,000 in a single week.
See: A visual look at how an unjust pandemic has reshaped work and home
“The numbers are somewhat misleading, reflecting more deposits and some fraud,” said Raymond James, chief economist Scott Brown. “However, these data reflect a continuing high level of job destruction.”
“An extraordinarily large number of people remain dependent on government support, indicative of ongoing labor market tensions,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief American economist at High Frequency Economics.
Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
and S&P 500 SPX,
were higher in Thursday’s trades.