January 11 coronavirus news

The World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic will arrive in China later this week, China's National Health Commission announced on Monday.

Last week, WHO said that China blocked the arrival of the team of global experts as the necessary permissions to enter the country had not been approved.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was "very disappointed," in a rare rebuke of China from the UN agency.

For months, WHO officials had been negotiating with Beijing to allow a team of global scientists access to key sites to investigate the origin of the virus -- first detected in Wuhan in December 2019 -- and its likely jump from an unidentified host species to humans.

In May, WHO agreed to hold an inquiry into the global response to the pandemic after more than 100 countries signed a resolution calling for an independent probe.

CNN has reached out to WHO for comment. 

California has recorded more than 2.6 million Covid-19 cases and at least 29,701 Californians have died from the virus.

The state continues to see a surge that’s not slowing down.

Here's what's happening in the Golden State:

Japan’s Health Ministry says passengers who traveled from Brazil, quarantined, and tested positive for Covid-19 in early January were later found to have been infected with virus-carrying mutations that appear similar to variants of the coronavirus first seen in Britain and South Africa.

The travelers had been in the Brazilian state of Amazonas and landed at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on January 2, the ministry said in a statement Sunday. They tested positive at the airport quarantine. 

The Brazilian Health Ministry said it was notified by its Japanese counterpart Saturday.

Health authorities have been concerned about new variants of the virus, like those first identified in the UK and South Africa, because they appear to be more easily transmitted.

There's no evidence that new variants of the virus are any more dangerous or can affect the efficacy of the vaccines. 

Japan’s Health Ministry is not yet able to say whether the variant found in passengers from Brazil is more transmissible.

The spokesperson for Mexico’s President announced on Sunday that he has tested positive for Covid-19.

Mexico has reported more than 1.5 million Covid-19 cases, including at least 133,204 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The United States reported 129,229 current Covid-19 hospitalizations on Sunday, according to the Covid Tracking Project (CTP).

This is the sixth highest number reported and the 40th consecutive day that the US has remained above 100,000 current hospitalizations.

 The highest hospitalization numbers according to CTP data are:

In some hospitals, health centers and pharmacies in the United States, there are vials of Covid-19 vaccines that aren't making it into arms.

Out of the more than 22 million doses of vaccine that have been distributed to hospitals and pharmacies so far in the US, only about 6.7 million people have received their first dose, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There's no one reason for the slow rollout or doses going unused; experts say it was never going to be easy to begin a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic. It takes time to vaccinate and monitor large numbers of people, and some facilities are staggering staff vaccinations to avoid having too many health care workers out at once.

The supply and demand don't always line up. Some in the highest priority groups -- health care workers and and long-term care facility residents -- don't want the vaccine, or at least, not yet. At the same time, the American Medical Association on Friday said it was "concerned" that some health care workers not employed by hospitals or health care systems face difficulties accessing the vaccine.

To speed up the process, the federal government is urging states to offer the vaccine to people who are older or in higher-risk groups, but some areas are still focusing on the earliest priority groups -- even if that means doses brought out of cold storage go unused.

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More than 40,000 people have died from symptoms related to the novel coronavirus in Germany, according to data from the country's center for disease control.

The daily tally from the Robert Koch Institute showed an additional 465 deaths in a span of 24 hours, bringing the country's total death toll to 40,343.

The country also recorded 16,946 new infections in the same time frame, bringing total cases to 1,908,527.

Germany, which was praised for its handling of the first wave of the pandemic, reported its largest 24-hour increase in Covid-19 fatalities on Friday. With this, the country’s death toll increased by 1,188 in 24 hours.

Lockdown extended as cases surge: Earlier in the week, the government extended the country's national lockdown -- originally scheduled until January 10 -- until the end of the month, while tightening restrictions on movement and contact to curb the spread of the virus.

Germany pushes ahead with vaccine drive: On Saturday, Health Minister Jens Spahn announced that half a million people across the country had been vaccinated against Covid-19.

India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare announced Saturday that the nationwide Covid-19 vaccination drive would start from January 16, 2021.

The country of 1.35 billion people is embarking on one of the world's most ambitious mass immunization programs ever undertaken, with plans to inoculate 300 million frontline workers, and elderly and vulnerable people by August. Preparations have been months in the making.

On Saturday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a high-level meeting to review the status of Covid-19 in the country along with the preparedness for the vaccination rollout, according to a statement from the Ministry of Health. 

The country conducted its third nationwide dry-run on Friday across 615 districts covering 4,895 session sites in 33 states and Union Territories.

More than 61,000 program managers, 200,000 vaccinators, and 370,000 other vaccination team members have been trained so far. 

Read more about India's vaccine drive:

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