January 24 coronavirus news

California added a total of 24,111 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday, bringing the state’s cumulative number of confirmed positive cases up to 3,109,151, according to an update from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).

The health department also reported 429 new deaths, bringing the state’s total number of lives lost since the beginning of the pandemic to 36,790.

The number of reported hospitalizations decreased slightly on Sunday with Covid-19 hospitalizations down by 3.5% and Covid-19 related intensive care unit hospitalizations down by 2.2%, according to data collected from hospitals across California.

The County Risk Level for nearly all regions in California still stands at “Widespread,” meaning many non-essential indoor business operations are closed.

To note: These numbers were released by the California Department of Public Health and may not line up exactly in real-time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, President Joe Biden’s nominee for US surgeon general, told ABC that the goal of 100 million doses in the President’s first 100 days in office is “a floor; it’s not a ceiling,” and that the success of vaccine distribution also has to be measured by its equitability. 

Murthy also said the 100 million doses is “a goal that reflects the realities that we face, what could go right, but also what could go wrong.”

He said that the President also understands that the larger goal is that “we’ve got to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.”

When asked if there were ways to get more equitable distribution and increase the supply of the vaccine, Murthy said that “success has to be gauged not just by the number of vaccines we deliver, but also by how fairly we deliver those vaccines, how equitably we deliver them.”

The Covid-19 crisis has already shown that rural communities have a harder time getting access to resources, that communities of color have experienced more cases and deaths and that seniors, especially those in long term care facilities, have struggled, he said.

A pharmacist fills syringes with the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at UMass Memorial hospital in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on January 12.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CBS Sunday that it’s “not the case” that President Joe Biden has deliberately set expectations low by saying that he has a goal of giving 100 million coronavirus vaccine doses his first 100 days in office. 

The US had almost reached that pace before Biden took office. According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Saturday, more than 20 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been administered, which represents a 1.5 million increase from the total reported the day before. 

When looking back at what was done in the first 38 days of vaccine administration under the Trump administration, Fauci said that he believed that maybe two of the days had reached the benchmark of one million shots a day and the average during that period was roughly 450,000 per day. 

“This is hard,” he said. “Now what we’ve got to realize that, although more recently there have been a couple of days were you’ve had a million, that has been predominantly in areas that are relatively easy from the standpoint of getting it done,” for example nursing homes and hospital settings.   

Fauci said that he thinks the goal was reasonable, and that “we always want to do better than the goal you set, but it is really a floor and not a ceiling.”  

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced three new cases of a more transmissible variant of Covid-19 on Sunday, bringing the state’s total variant cases to six.

Two of the new cases were adult women associated with the University of Michigan, which already had three cases of the same variant. The remaining case was an adult man from Wayne County, which covers Detroit and Dearborn, according to a news release from the department.

Michigan DHHS ordered the University of Michigan to halt athletics after new variant cases were connected to the program.

The new variant cases in Michigan are all of the B.1.1.7 variant, according to the health department.

That variant was first identified in the United Kingdom, but there are other variants first seen in South Africa and Brazil.

While B.1.1.7 may be more easily passed from person to person, “there has been no indication that it affects the clinical outcomes or disease severity compared to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has been circulating across the United States for months,” Michigan DHHS noted in its alert.

Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, on January 24.

Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, reacted to images of long lines of senior citizens waiting to get Covid-19 vaccines, telling CNN Sunday that it’s “not America, that’s not the way we treat those we consider vulnerable, in need of this vaccine most, that is not America at its best.” 

Becerra said that many states are suffering massive budget deficits and trying to figure out how to get resources for their overburdened health workers, adding that Biden’s plan provides for 100,000 new health care workers to get out and help all the states. 

“It’s a plan that can work if we all get, you know, put our muscle to it together,” he said. 

Some more context: States had previously submitted plans for vaccine distribution to the CDC in October but had said they needed federal money to carry them out.

In September, Congress had initially set aside $200 million to states for preparedness and planning and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added another $227 million for vaccine distribution in December.

But the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials have said they needed $8.4 billion to administer and conduct vaccine efforts of this scale. Former President Trump signed a massive $2.3 trillion relief bill at the end of December which included $8 billion for vaccine distribution. 

More than 85,000 people have died from Covid-19 in Italy, the first European country to be hit hard by the pandemic, Health Ministry figures show.

The number climbed past 85,000 on Saturday and reached 85,461 on Sunday after 299 new deaths were recorded.

People wait in their cars to get tested for Covid-19 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on January 4.

There have been at least 25,003,695 total cases of coronavirus in the US and at least 417,538 people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

The university recorded the first case of coronavirus in the United States on Jan. 21, 2020.  

There are 17 other countries in the world that have reported more than 1 million total Covid-19 cases, according to the university: 

Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, on January 24.

Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, told CNN Sunday that the US can change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it won’t happen overnight.

On Friday, Biden said “There is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” 

Becerra added that the President has put forward not just a plan, but a rescue plan that should be followed by a recovery plan, “but first you got to rescue the people, you got to rescue the economy.”

When asked what the timeframe was for changing the course of the pandemic, Becerra again made it clear that it won’t happen overnight. 

“We can do better, we can not only control Covid but get us back to real normality,” he said. “But it takes everybody, all hands on deck, we’ve got to make sure we’re coordinating and we are talking to people.”

New York’s Covid-19 positivity rate fell to 5.09% on Sunday, with 12,720 new reported cases, according to new data from New York state.

Total Covid-19 hospitalizations, intensive care unit admissions, and intubations are all down from Saturday’s numbers, the data showed.

There are 160 more New Yorkers who have died due to Covid-19, bringing the state’s overall death toll to 34,069, state data showed.

Currently, health department statistics show that New York’s Long Island and Mid-Hudson regions have the highest positivity rates at 6.99% and 6.85%, respectively. New York City has a rate of 5.58%, with the most cases in the Bronx.

To note: These figures were released by the state’s health agency and may not line up exactly in real-time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders on January 24.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee, told CNN Sunday morning that Democrats will use budget reconciliation “as soon as we possibly can” to pass a Covid-19 relief package by 51 votes, rather than 60. 

Some more context: Reconciliation was used by the Republicans to pass legislation when Donald Trump was president. 

On the urgency to pass a Covid-19 relief package, Sanders told CNN: “If we do not respond now, yes, I believe two years from now the Republicans will say ‘Hey, you elected these guys, they did nothing, vote for us,’ and they will win.”

Funeral director Steven Correa moves the casket of someone said to have died from Covid-19 in preparation for burial at Continental Funeral Home in East Los Angeles, California, on December 31, 2020.

The influential coronavirus model at the University of Washington is projecting 569,000 Americans will have died from Covid-19 by May 1.

This a slight increase since its last update, which projected 567,000 deaths by the same date. 

The model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) projected that by May 1, “42,800 lives will be saved by the projected vaccine rollout.” 

The model expected 157 million people to be vaccinated by that time which translates to 36% of the country being immunized, assuming the vaccines are at least 50% effective. 

More details: The forecasters note that overall, just half of the country is willing to accept the vaccine.

“In the US, 50.8% of people say they would accept a vaccine for Covid-19 and 25.5% say they are unsure if they would accept one,” the model said.

However, the modelers also note that they do not expect the US to reach a high enough level of herd immunity to prevent a third wave next winter, “because a quarter of Americans state they will not take the vaccine and a further quarter state they are unsure.” 

The forecasts also do not take into account the potential spread of the new variants first identified in the UK and South Africa, “which could extend the fall/winter surge into late spring if they spread in the US.” 

Ron Klain testifies in Washington, DC, on March 10, 2020.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain appeared on “Meet the Press” this morning and defended statements by the White House that there was no plan in place for vaccine distribution when the Biden administration walked in the door.

Klain said that outside of nursing homes and hospitals, a plan for “the community as a whole did not really exist.”  

Klain was asked about the differing comments from the White House on there not being a plan in place on vaccine distribution, which Dr. Anthony Fauci disputed this week.

Klain also stressed that the administration will “own” the vaccine problem going forward, unlike the administration before them.  

When asked where the problem lies, Klain said, “We need more vaccine, we need more vaccinators and we need more vaccine sites.” 

Klain, speaking about the administration’s goal of 100 vaccines in its first 100 days, said it is “still a very bold and ambitious goal.”  

“Obviously we’re not going to stop there. 100 million people- 100 million shots is an ambitious goal but we need to keep going after that so. That is our goal. That is our first goal. It’s not our final goal. It’s not the endpoint. It’s just a metric that the American people can watch and measure how we’re doing,” Klain added. 

Police attend the event in east London early on Sunday morning.

Police in the United Kingdom broke up a rave that saw more than 300 people packed under a railway arch in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Officers arrived at the party in Hackney, east London, at 1:30 a.m. local time, and said they have issued more than £15,000 ($20,500) to revelers for breaching the UK’s lockdown policy.

The Metropolitan Police said “numerous attempts were made to engage with organisers and others but they were uncooperative.” The doors to the building were padlocked from the inside to stop police getting in, they added.

The UK has been under a strict lockdown since earlier this month, with indoor gatherings banned.

Officers stopped 78 people and issued £200 fines at the event.

“Officers were forced, yet again, to put their own health at risk to deal with a large group of incredibly selfish people who were tightly packed together in a confined space - providing an ideal opportunity for this deadly virus to spread,” Chief Superintendent Roy Smith said in a statement. “Our frontline officers continue to police this public health crisis with compassion & professionalism but it is completely unacceptable they have to face such needless risks to their own health and to their families too.”

Health care staff at a hospital in Tehran, Iran, tend to a Covid-19 patient in the intensive care unit on December 20, 2020.

Iran reported 5,945 new daily coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing the country’s total number of cases to 1,372,977.

The new numbers were announced by Iran’s Health Ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadaat Lari in a news conference on state TV.

The country reported 89 new deaths from Covid-19 bringing it death toll to 57,383.

The health ministry said 4,090 patients are currently hospitalized in ICU.

Iran is the Middle East country hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of both total cases and deaths, though both have fallen from record highs at the end of 2020. The country is keeping restrictions in place to bring the case tally under control.

According to Johns Hopkins University’s tally of cases in the United States, there have been at least 24,991,748 cases of coronavirus in the U.S.; at least 417,399 people have died in the U.S. from coronavirus. 

On Saturday, Johns Hopkins University reported 169,935 new cases and 3,292 new deaths. 

At least 41,411,550 vaccine doses have been distributed and at least 20,537,990 doses of the vaccine have been administered, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other U.S. territories, as well as repatriated cases. 

England is a “long, long, long way” from easing lockdown restrictions given the “enormous” pressure on the National Health Service (NHS), British Health Minister Matt Hancock said on Sunday.

Speaking on Sky News, Hancock said: “There is early evidence that the lockdown is starting to bring cases down. But we’re a long, long, long way from that from being low enough because the case rate was incredibly high and you can see the pressure on the NHS. You can see it every day.” 

Pressed to comment on whether the United Kingdom would need a blanket ban on people traveling to the country amid fears of new variants, Hancock said: “We’ve got to have a precautionary principle. We’ve introduced pre-departure testing and we’ve also introduced checks on everybody to check that that’s happened and that the passenger locator form is completed.

“But it is absolutely vital that we protect this country from a new variant that may not be as well dealt with by the vaccine. We cannot risk the progress that we have made.”

Separately, England’s deputy chief medical officer urged people who have already been vaccinated to continue following social-distancing rules. 

“Even after you have had both doses of the vaccine you may still give Covid-19 to someone else and the chains of transmission will then continue,” Jonathan Van-Tam wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. “If you change your behaviour you could still be spreading the virus, keeping the number of cases high and putting others at risk who also need their vaccine but are further down the queue.”

Health Secretary Hancock praised the country’s vaccine rollout, saying that more than three-quarters of over-80s have been vaccinated, and a similar number in care homes.

“We have vaccinated more people in just the last three days than France for instance has in the entire history of this disease,” he added.

“The good news is that there are early signs that certainly the rise in the number of cases has been halted and in many parts of the country cases are starting to come down,” he added later on while speaking to the BBC.

The United Kingdom has had at least 97,329 deaths related to Covid-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, giving it one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.

Crisler Arena is seen ahead of the game between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Michigan Wolverines in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on January 06.

The University of Michigan will pause all sports programs after a more transmissible variant of the Covid-19 virus was detected in several individuals linked to the Michigan Athletic Department.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services mandated on Saturday that the university halt all athletic activities in order to stop the new variant of Covid-19 from spreading within the community. All Michigan sports programs will pause games, team and individual training sessions until further notice.

Student-athletes, coaches and team staff are being required to quarantine “effective Jan. 23 until further notice and up to 14 days (Feb. 7),” the school said.

The most notable impact will be to the men’s and women’s basketball teams. The Wolverines men’s team will have four games postponed and the women’s team will have five games postponed over the next 14 days. The university says no determination has been made on how the pause may impact scheduled games beyond February 7.

Director General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield speaks to the media during a news conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on January 24.

New Zealand has reported a probable case of Covid-19 community transmission, authorities said.

If confirmed, it would be the first instance of community transmission seen in the country sine November 18.

Chris Hipkins, the New Zealand minister for the country’s Covid-19 response, said Sunday the case was a 56-year-old woman who has recently been through isolation in Auckland after returning from Europe.

Bloomfield said she tested negative twice and did not have symptoms while in managed isolation. She returned home on January 13. She started to feel very mild symptoms on January 15 and these got progressively worse before she was tested.

Bloomfield added that after being released from managed isolation, she traveled around the southern part of the Northland region with her husband and has been in roughly 30 locations in the five days or so. He said a thorough interview has suggested just four close contacts and those people have all been spoken to, isolated and tested.

New Zealand’s strict quarantine policies for inbound travelers and regional lockdowns early in the pandemic helped keep its Covid-19 numbers down.

Fewer than 2,300 cases have been confirmed in the country, and only 25 people have died.

A man receives a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine at a vaccination site in the Bronx, New York, on January 10.

“Modest delays” between first and second doses of Covid-19 vaccine are not expected to decrease protection against the virus, the US Food and Drug Administration told CNN Saturday.

Previously, the agency had warned that changes to vaccine schedules without appropriate data could put public health at risk. 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week updated its guidance to say second doses of Covid-19 vaccines may be scheduled up to six weeks after initial doses, if necessary. The CDC said that second doses should be administered as close as possible to the recommended interval – three weeks after the first dose for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and four weeks after the first dose for the Moderna vaccine. 

In its statement on Saturday, the FDA said it “recognizes that getting as many people as possible across the country fully immunized will help to curtail the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19 and should be a priority.”

Earlier this month, when concerns about the availability of vaccines prompted suggestions to extend the length of time between doses, FDA officials doubled down on initial recommendations.

Clinical trials showed both vaccines are about 95% effective, when used according to recommended dosages and dosing intervals. The FDA noted that it has not evaluated data regarding the protection provided by the vaccines if there are longer delays in administering the second dose.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN on Friday that he didn’t think it would make a big difference if a person’s second dose took place two or three weeks after the recommended time. 

Two residents of Washington state have tested positive for the Covid-19 variant first detected in the United Kingdom, the Washington State Department of Health said.

As of Friday, at least 195 cases of the variant been identified in 22 US states, according to data posted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The variant has also been found in at least 60 countries worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.