A senior scientist in the UK warned on Thursday that the variant of the coronavirus-transmitted disease COVID-19 that first appeared there and is much more contagious than the original virus ‘could overcome the world’ and the attempt to curb the pandemic could complicate.
In an interview with the BBC’s Newscast podcast, Professor Sharon Peacock, head of the UK’s genetic observation program, said the new variant had already spread across the UK and was likely to spread widely around the world.
The news came when Gavin Newsom, governor of California, confirmed that the variant, which first appeared in South Africa, has now been found in two cases in the Golden State. The variant worries experts because it is also highly contagious and more resistant to the vaccines that have authorized emergency use in the US and elsewhere.
Earlier this week, South Africa said it would stop developing the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC AZN,
AZN,
and Oxford University because it seemed less effective in dealing with the tension, and officials said Wednesday they would start giving the Johnson & Johnson JNJ to frontline health workers,
vaccine instead. That vaccine has not yet received authorization for emergency use – an application for an EUA has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration – but there is high hope for it, as it is a single dose, unlike the other authorized vaccines. two jabs, weeks apart.
The World Health Organization weighed the AstraZeneca vaccine on Thursday, saying it was “very effective and safe”, even though it was less effective in dealing with the South African variant.
“The AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19 has an effectiveness of 63.09% against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the WHO Strategic Advisory Group on Immunization (SAGE) said in a statement. “Longer dose intervals within the range of 8 to 12 weeks are associated with greater vaccine efficacy.”
AstraZeneca, which reported its annual revenue on Thursday, said it was solving problems with its vaccine production and expected it to double its monthly production to 200 million doses in April as it tried to get past a rocky start to the rollout. to move from the lap. , as Dow Jones Newswires reported.
Last year, AstraZeneca stumbled across the release of clinical trial results and recently had a shortage of doses assigned to the European Union. CEO Pascal Soriot and other executives said they were working out production bumps and reaching targets to deliver more than 400 million doses to rich and poor countries in the coming months. This follows on from green lights in the UK, Europe and beyond for the use of the vaccine, which has not yet been approved for US use.
The company also said it would take six to nine months to create the modified version of the vaccine to target new variants.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention vaccine detection now shows that as of 8:00 a.m. Wednesday, 44.8 million vaccines have been administered and approximately 66 million doses have been delivered to states. The tracker shows that 33.8 million people received one or more doses, equivalent to about 10% of the population.
According to a New York Times tracker, the U.S. added another 94,855 new COVID cases on Wednesday, killing at least 3,252 people. The cases are still falling and have averaged 104,554 new cases per day in the past week, 36% lower than the average two weeks ago.
There was bad news for California, which on Wednesday surpassed New York as the state with the most COVID deaths, according to the Times. Los Angeles is temporarily closing five vaccination sites due to a shortage of vaccinations, the newspaper reported.
In other news:
• The US would have avoided 40% of the deaths due to COVID-19 if rates were in line with other high-income G-7 members, a Lancet commission said Thursday reported after the performance of former pres. Donald Trump. Trump brought an accident to the US and the planet during his four years in office, the commission concluded, but it also noted that the US public health infrastructure was in a bad state when the country entered the pandemic has. “Although his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, he weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2-3 million, even before the massive disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and called for the privatization of accelerate government health programs. , ”Reads the report. According to Johns Hopkins University data, or about a quarter of the global score, the US is the world, by figures, 27.4 million. It has by far the most deaths, with 471,765, or about a fifth of the global total. The second highest case is India, with 10.9 million, or less than half the US total. Brazil has the second highest death toll at 234,850, also less than half the U.S. number.
• Federal health officials have again reminded Americans to continue wearing masks, even as the number of new cases and hospitalizations has been declining since a peak in early January, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. In a report published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the fact that wearing two masks (such as a surgical mask and a cloth mask together) and to ensure that a medical mask is tight against the face fit, which helped prevent exposure to particles in one experiment. The CDC recommends that masks “have two or more layers, completely cover your nose and mouth and fit snugly against your walls and the side of your face.”
• President Joe Biden has created a new task force focusing on health equity and COVID-19. He utilized 12 experts, who are expected to make a number of recommendations on the country’s COVID-19 response and recovery. Back in December, MarketWatch met with dr. James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry College, one of four historically black medical schools in the U.S., and a member of Biden’s new COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force chat. Read the full interview.
• Employers in the U.S. may allow workers to take a COVID-19 vaccine, but a new survey suggests that most are not yet going the required route, reports MarketWatch’s Meera Jagannathan. Only 0.5% of companies currently hold coronavirus vaccination for all employees, and only 6% plan to set it up for all workers once vaccines are readily available and / or fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to the recruitment of 1,802 C-suite executives, HR professionals and in-house attorneys from a variety of industries run by the Littler labor firm. Another 3% said they plan to get vaccinated only for certain workers, such as those who have customers.
Also read: Purpose, tractor supply joins list of companies paying workers to get COVID-19 vaccine
• A Texas doctor who vaccinated ten people with doses of vaccine that were about to expire rather than destroy them has been fired and charged with theft, reports the New York Times. Dr. Hasan Gokal made house calls and led people to his house, including strangers, in an attempt to make the doses matter. His last patient was his own wife, who was suffering from a lung disease. The doses in each vial of the Moderna Inc. MRNA,
vaccine is only viable for six hours after the seal is broken, which is given urgently before it expires.
Latest scores
The global score for confirmed cases of the coronavirus causing COVID-19 climbed above 107.4 million on Thursday, while the death toll rose above 2.35 million.
Brazil has the second highest death rate at 234,850 and is third in cases at 9.7 million.
India is second in cases worldwide with 10.9 million and now fourth in deaths at 155,360.
Mexico has the third highest death toll at 169,670 and the 13th highest fall is 1.9 million.
The UK has 3.9 million cases and 115,070 deaths, the highest in Europe and the fifth highest in the world.
China, where the virus was first discovered late last year, had 100,515 confirmed cases and 4,827 deaths, according to official figures.
What does the economy say?
Nearly 800,000 people applied for U.S. unemployment benefits in early February, indicating that many workers are still losing their jobs despite the introduction of coronavirus vaccines and a decline in Covid-19 cases, MarketWatch Jeffry Bartash reported.
Initial jobless claims traditionally filed by states fell from 19,000 to 793,000 in the seven days ended Feb. 6, the government said Thursday. Economists polled by the Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal predicted that new claims would total a seasonally adjusted 760,000.
The decline, however, was basically a mirage. New claims from two weeks ago have been raised to 812,000 from an originally reported 779,000, an extraordinarily large review that is likely to reflect ongoing problems in collecting unemployment data.
Another 334,524 applications were submitted through a temporary federal relief program.
The government added 1.15 million applications for unemployment benefits last week, based on actual or unadjusted figures. Joint claims have not fallen by less than 1 million a week since May last year.
Before the pandemic, new claims took place in the low 200,000s, and in no week did it rise by more than 695,000.
See: A visual look at how an unfair pandemic has changed work and home
The “figures are somewhat misleading, and reflect multiple submissions and a degree of fraud,” said Raymond James, chief economist Scott Brown. “However, the data reflects a consistently high level of job destruction.”
“An extraordinarily high number of people depend on government support, indicating the continuing tensions in the labor market,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist of the U.S. high-frequency economy.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
and S&P 500 SPX,
was higher in Thursday transactions.