Stringent, contested stay-at-home orders have been extended in California’s vast southern region and Central Valley, state health officials announced on Tuesday, because new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are continuing to surge in those regions.
Hospitals in the state have been flooded with patients, to the point that some facilities have resorted to treating them in hallways, gift shops and tents. And in the wake of the holiday season, the hospital situation is expected to worsen, according to California’s secretary of health and human services, Dr. Mark Ghaly.
“We are essentially projecting that I.C.U. capacity is not improving in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, with demand exceeding capacity,” he said in a news conference on Tuesday.
The orders require residents of the two regions not to leave their homes except for certain essential activities, like shopping or working at grocery stores. Restaurants may stay open only for takeout, and stores must operate at reduced capacity, although indoor shopping malls have been allowed to remain open.
Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley were the first parts of the state to undergo the restrictions about three weeks ago, after available space in intensive care units dipped perilously low. The orders could have expired on Monday if the crowding was expected to ease soon.
But neither region now has any I.C.U. space available, and Dr. Ghaly said that hospitals were being stretched to a breaking point. Hospitals in Los Angeles County, now the hardest hit area in the state, have had to turn away ambulances. Care is suffering because health care providers are overwhelmed.
Dr. Ghaly said that hospitals and officials have been having urgent discussions aimed at preventing the need to ration care.
Daily reports of new cases remain alarmingly high across the United States, and officials worry that holiday travel and social gatherings will only accelerate the spread. More than 121,000 patients with Covid-19 are hospitalized across the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Dr. Ghaly did not give a new expiration date for the extended restrictions, saying that I.C.U. conditions would be evaluated day by day.
Two other regions — Greater Sacramento and the Bay Area — are also under the restrictions, but those orders were imposed later and are not yet eligible to expire. Hospitals across the Sacramento area have 19.1 percent of their I.C.U. capacity available, while those in the Bay Area have 10.4 percent, officials said. The state has said it would lift restrictions once a region’s hospitals are expected to soon have at least 15 percent of capacity free.
Experts have said that the prevalence of the virus in so many communities in the state has made the stay-at-home orders a necessary last resort. But California’s restrictions, among the strictest imposed in the nation since the spring, have met with considerable resistance. Many residents and businesses have openly defied the regulations, and the sheriffs of Orange and Riverside Counties have said they would not enforce them.
Even so, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday that “people have been in compliance — overwhelmingly so.”
And although the state has said it would withhold money from counties where local officials have declined to enforce the orders, officials said on Monday that the state had not yet taken any steps to do so.
DENVER — A case of the more contagious coronavirus variant first discovered in Britain was discovered in Colorado on Tuesday, Gov. Jared Polis said. It is the first confirmed case of the variant in the United States.
The case was detected in a male in his 20s with no travel history, Mr. Polis said. The man was in isolation in Elbert County, southeast of Denver, he said.
There have not been any close contacts identified as of Tuesday, Mr. Polis said, adding that health officials were working to identify potential cases through contact tracing interviews.
The Colorado State Laboratory confirmed the case and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said.
A recent study by British scientists estimated that the variant first discovered in Britain is 56 percent more contagious, though there has been no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly or resistant to the vaccines that have been deployed across the United States and Europe.
Scientists are worried about these variants but not surprised by them. It is normal for viruses to mutate, and most of the mutations of the coronavirus have proved minor.
The British variant has a constellation of 23 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. These mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit more efficiently, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.
Discovery of the variant led to a harsher lockdown across London and the surrounding areas around Christmas, and cases of the variant have been identified in France, Spain and other European nations. Health officials in Ontario, Canada, said on Saturday they had identified two cases of the variant in a couple with no known travel history or exposure.
Countries around the world have implemented stricter protocols for travelers entering from the United Kingdom. A new rule in the United States mandating that incoming travelers from the U.K. — including American citizens — show proof of a negative coronavirus test upon entry went into effect on Monday. After cases of the variant were discovered in Japan, the country closed its borders to all new entry by nonresident foreigners.
A similar variant, which shares one of the mutations in the British variant, has been found in South Africa. Discovery of that variant led to similar travel restrictions around the world.
Dozens of research papers published over the past few months have found that people whose bodies were teeming with the coronavirus more often became seriously ill and were more likely to die, compared with those who carried much less virus and were more likely to emerge relatively unscathed. Now that information could help hospitals.
The results suggest that knowing the so-called viral load — the amount of virus in the body — could help doctors distinguish those who may need an oxygen check just once a day, for example, from those who need to be monitored more closely, said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician at Columbia University in New York.
Tracking viral loads “can actually help us stratify risk,” Dr. Griffin said. The idea is not new: Managing viral load has long formed the basis of care for people with H.I.V., for example, and for tamping down transmission of that virus.
Little effort has been made to track viral loads in Covid-19 patients. This month, however, the Food and Drug Administration said clinical labs might report not just whether a person is infected with the coronavirus, but also an estimate of how much virus is in their body.
This is not a change in policy. Labs could have reported this information all along, according to two senior F.D.A. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Still, the news came as a welcome surprise to some experts, who have for months pushed labs to record this information.
“This is a very important move by the F.D.A.,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I think it’s a step in the right direction to making the most use of one of the only pieces of data we have for many positive individuals.”
Nearly half of England is under the nation’s strictest lockdown measures, and people have been ordered to stay at home, but the coronavirus is still spreading at an alarming rate. Hospitals are treating more patients than at any time during the pandemic, and there is a growing debate about allowing tens of thousands of students to return to classrooms after the holiday break.
The nation’s scientists have said that a more contagious variant of the virus is driving the rise in cases and, having already imposed severe restrictions on more than 48 million people, it remains unclear what other tools the government has at its disposal to get the outbreak under control.
There were 53,135 new lab-confirmed cases reported on Tuesday, the highest figure yet on a single day. The National Health Service said there were now over 20,000 people in the hospital there, more than at the peak of the pandemic in April.
With the government scheduled to meet to evaluate the current restrictions on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under pressure to impose another national lockdown and shift students — especially older ones in colleges and secondary schools, who may be more easily infected by the new virus variant — to remote learning.
The government said that it would rely on mass testing to keep the virus from spreading in schools, with military help. Some 1,500 soldiers are being dedicated to providing schools with the “guidance, materials and funding they need to offer rapid testing to their staff and students from the start of term,” according to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson.
But two teachers’ unions have said that staff has not been given adequate time to set up mass testing and the country’s board of scientific advisers, known as SAGE, has recommended against allowing classrooms to reopen, according to British media reports.
Even as the country’s health workers find themselves under growing pressure to treat the influx of patients, they are also being asked to speed up the largest mass vaccination program in the nation’s history.
Around 200,000 people are getting their first shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine every week. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the European Union would take an additional 100 million doses of that vaccine, bringing the total to 300 million doses.
With the approval of a vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford expected in coming days, the number of doses available will expand drastically. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which comes without the stringent temperature requirements of Pfizer’s, should also be easier to distribute.
There is no evidence that the vaccines are any less effective against the variant of the virus spreading in Britain, and they remain the best chance for the country to break the spread of the current wave of infections.
MOSCOW — After months of questions over the true scale of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia and the efficacy of a Russian-developed vaccine, the state statistical agency in Moscow has added to the uncertainty with new figures indicating that the death toll from Covid-19 is more than three times as high as officially reported.
From the start of the pandemic early this year, the health crisis has been enveloped and, critics say, distorted by political calculations as President Vladimir V. Putin and Kremlin-controlled media outlets have repeatedly boasted of Russian successes in combating the virus and keeping the fatality rate relatively low.
Russia has reported more than three million cases of infection, making it the world’s fourth-hardest-hit country, and 55,827 deaths, which ranks it No. 8 worldwide for the highest number of deaths from the virus. A demographer at a government agency who questioned the official fatality figures, dismissing them as far too low, was fired over the summer.
New data issued on Monday by Rosstat, the state statistics agency, however, indicated that the demographer was right and that the real number of fatalities was far higher than previously reported. The agency reported that the number of deaths from January to November was 229,732 higher than over the same period last year, an increase that a senior official blamed largely on the coronavirus.
Tatiana Golikova, a deputy prime minister leading Russia’s efforts to combat the pandemic, told a government briefing on Monday that more than 81 percent of the increased number of deaths in 2020 was “due to Covid,” which would mean that the virus had killed more than 186,000 Russians so far this year.
This is still far fewer than the more than 334,000 deaths caused by Covid-19 in the United States but means that Russia has suffered more fatalities as a result of the pandemic than elsewhere in Europe like Italy, France and Britain, whose poor record has been regularly cited by Russian state media as proof of Russia’s relative triumph.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday criticized the speed of vaccine distribution under the Trump administration and promised to step up the pace when he takes office, while offering a sobering warning about the continuing toll of the pandemic.
“As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” Mr. Biden said in Wilmington, Del., adding that at the current pace, “It’s going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”
Mr. Biden promised a “much more aggressive effort” under his administration.
“This is going to be the greatest operational challenge we’ve ever faced as a nation,” Mr. Biden said, “but we’re going to get it done.”
The president-elect will take office in just over three weeks amid a crisis that has already killed more than 335,000 people in the United States. He has vowed to get at least 100 million vaccine shots into the arms of Americans in his first 100 days in office.
The administration of vaccines has gotten off to a slower start than federal officials had hoped. As recently as earlier this month, federal officials had said their goal was for 20 million people to get their first shots by the end of the year. As of Monday morning, 11.4 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been distributed across the country, but just 2.1 million people in the United States had received their first dose, according to a dashboard maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that most likely reflects a reporting lag of several days.
Earlier Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. She got her shot on live television, just as Mr. Biden did last week. Ms. Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was also vaccinated on Tuesday.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday and urged the public to get vaccinated as well, declaring, “Literally this is about saving lives.”
Ms. Harris received the Moderna vaccine at United Medical Center, a public hospital in Southeast Washington, where she rolled up her sleeve and received the shot in her left arm.
“That was easy,” she said when it was over. “Thank you. I barely felt it.”
Ms. Harris appeared on live television to receive her shot, just as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. did last week when he received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a hospital in Delaware. Ms. Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was also vaccinated on Tuesday.
After getting the vaccine, Ms. Harris urged Americans to get vaccinated as well, saying: “It is relatively painless. It happens really quickly. It is safe.”
“I trust the scientists, and it is the scientists who created and approved this vaccine,” she added. “So I urge everyone, when it is your turn, get vaccinated. It’s about saving your life, the life of your family members and the life of your community.”
Two million children in the United States had tested positive for infection with the coronavirus as of Dec. 24, one million of them just since Nov. 12, according to data gathered by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Severe illness among children is still rare, but the numbers indicate a worrying trend in the proportion of children becoming infected. Children now make up 12.4 percent of the total cases in the country, based on age distributions of diagnoses in 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. In 11 states, children account for 15 percent or more of total cases.
But states define a child in various ways. The upper limit for a child’s age varies from 14 to 20 years, and some states have adjusted the ranges during the course of the pandemic, making direct comparisons difficult.
Nearly 400,000 children were diagnosed in the two weeks leading up to Dec. 24. It’s unclear why the number has risen so sharply over the past few weeks. Family gatherings during the Thanksgiving holiday and increased testing among children may have contributed.
The new viral variant reported in Britain, B117, is thought to be more transmissible among children, raising concerns that they may become more vulnerable as the pandemic expands.
The report did not include details on testing, hospitalizations and deaths, but the academy plans to release those data next week.
Margaret Keenan, the first patient in Britain to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Dec. 8, received her second injection on Tuesday, making her the first publicly known person to be fully vaccinated against the virus outside a clinical trial.
Ms. Keenan made headlines this month when she became the first person in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested coronavirus vaccine, wearing a Christmas penguin T-shirt and saying she felt privileged to be vaccinated. At the time, she said, “If I can have it at 90, then you can have it, too!”
The second injection given to Ms. Keenan, now 91, provided some good news in Britain as the country reported 53,135 new lab-confirmed cases on Tuesday, its highest daily number since the start of the pandemic.
Although nearly half of England is under lockdown, the virus is spreading at an alarming rate, and hospitals are treating more patients than at any time during the health crisis.
Over 600,000 people have received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine in Britain, but scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that two million people needed to be vaccinated every week to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed like they were during the first wave.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 71,000 people in Britain have died from the coronavirus, the second highest death toll in Europe after Italy.
Romell Broom, a death row inmate in Ohio whom the state attempted and failed to execute by lethal injection in 2009, died on Monday. The cause was probable Covid-19, officials said.
Technicians tried and failed for two hours on Sept. 15, 2009, to maintain an IV connection in order to inject Mr. Broom with lethal drugs. As the process continued, Mr. Broom covered his face and cried from the pain; at one point, he screamed when the needle struck bone. It was the first time an execution by lethal injection had failed and been rescheduled.
Mr. Broom, 64, was convicted of abducting, raping and killing Tryna Middleton, 14, who had been walking home from a football game with two friends in Cleveland in 1984.
Mr. Broom’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully to prevent the state from attempting to execute him again, arguing that doing so would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. He was scheduled to be executed in March 2022.
The spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said that as of Tuesday his death was listed as a probable Covid-19 related death, pending his death certificate. At the time of his death he was incarcerated at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus.
In a statement, Mr. Broom’s lawyers, Adele Shank and Tim Sweeney, said that Mr. Broom had survived his first attempted execution “only to live with the ever-increasing fear and distress that the same process would be used on him at his next execution date, March 16, 2022. Let his passing in this way, and not in the execution chamber, be the final word on whether a second attempt should ever have been considered.”
The New Yorker did something on Monday that had few precedents in the magazine’s 95-year history: It published an issue devoted to a single feature article. The topic was, of course, the coronavirus.
“The Plague Year,” by Lawrence Wright, examines how the United States permitted the virus to become the “yearlong catastrophe” he identifies in the opening sentence. It includes interviews with Dr. Deborah L. Birx; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci; and Dr. Barney S. Graham, an immunologist whose research aided the development of several early vaccines and a monoclonal antibody treatment.
The article also includes fly-on-the-wall descriptions of White House meetings and the experiences of Dr. Ebony Hilton, a Virginia anesthesiologist who witnessed firsthand how the virus worsened racial disparities in health.
At roughly 31,000 words, the article is as long as a novella, roughly five times the length of a typical major magazine article.
Mr. Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, initially turned in 76,000 words. “I have an appetite to go into depth,” he said in an interview. (He added, with a laugh: “I get paid by the word.”)
“The Plague Year” occupies the issue’s entire “feature well” — the heart of the magazine, typically occupied by three or four long feature articles. The New Yorker had done that only a handful of times before, notably for John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” in 1946, for the first installment of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in 1963 and for Mark Danner’s “The Truth of El Mozote,” a report on an atrocity in El Salvador, in 1993.
“You really needed the real estate to do what he was out to do,” said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.
Mr. Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his nonfiction book on Al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower.”His novel “The End of October,” published last April, tells the story of a new strain of influenza breaking out. Mr. Wright did extensive research and reporting for his work of fiction; Dr. Graham, the National Institutes of Health immunologist featured in the New Yorker article, is thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.
Global Roundup
The pandemic has caused the highest number of excess deaths in the Netherlands since World War II, the CBS, the country’s independent national statistics bureau, said on Tuesday.
Up to last week, the Netherlands — which has a population of roughly 17 million people — reported 162,000 deaths, about 13,000 more than usual, according to the CBS, the statistics bureau, whose figures are used by the government and businesses in the Netherlands. During both waves of the virus, when European countries struggled to contain cases, the number of excess deaths in the country was notable. All excess deaths during the first wave in the spring were caused by the coronavirus, according to the statistics bureau, and an August heat wave also caused some excess deaths this year.
Over the summer, the country had barely any lockdown measures in place, and some people were able to go on vacation. But over the past few months, as the country has been facing and trying to fight a brutal second wave of the pandemic, 6,100 more people died than would have been expected. The Netherlands has also found cases of the British variant in the past week.
The pandemic has hit the Netherlands particularly hard. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced harsh new lockdown measures — the strictest of the pandemic — until at least Jan. 19 because of “a dramatic increase in the number of infections, with figures up to around 9,000 per day,” according to the government.
In other developments from around the globe:
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A woman in hotel quarantine in Queensland, Australia, is the first person in the country found to have a new South African strain of the coronavirus that is thought to be more contagious, health officials said on Tuesday. The woman had traveled from South Africa and has been transferred to a hospital north of Brisbane.
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Officials in India said on Tuesday that they had found six cases of the virus variant first detected in Britain. The Indian Union Health Ministry said the patients had traveled from Britain and have been isolated in government-run facilities, while their close contacts have been quarantined. India is one of dozens of countries that have temporarily banned flights from Britain.
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The United States on Tuesday began vaccinating its 28,500 troops in South Korea, as the government there reported a single-day record for coronavirus deaths. Service members are receiving the Moderna vaccine, though it is not mandatory, U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement. There have been more than 450 coronavirus cases tied to U.S. forces serving in South Korea. The country, which is struggling to contain a third wave of infections, has had a total of 58,725 cases and 859 deaths, with 40 reported on Tuesday. South Korean officials say vaccinations for the public will begin in February.
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The Philippines on Tuesday banned foreign travelers from 19 countries and territories until Jan. 15 in an effort to keep out a more virulent strain of the coronavirus that was first detected in Britain. In addition to Britain, which was already under a travel ban, the countries and territories affected are: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Passengers who arrived before Wednesday and Filipino citizens arriving from those places must quarantine at a designated facility for 14 days, according to a government advisory.
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Venezuela signed a contract with Russia to begin a mass vaccination campaign using Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, according to the main government-run television network, VTV. President Vladimir V. Putin announced in August that Russia had developed the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, even though it had not been tested in a major clinical trial, and Russia has offered it in recent weeks to teachers, medical workers, and others. This has led to widespread distrust of the vaccine among the Russian public.
Jason Gutierrez, Jennifer Jett, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.
Over the weekend, Bulgaria received its first shipment of 9,750 doses of the coronavirus vaccine. Before the vaccination rollout on Sunday, Bulgarian authorities turned to hot dog trucks to deliver the vaccine to different locations across the country.
Escorted by the police, several refrigerated vans initially delivered the doses to at least a couple of cities. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine must be stored at extreme temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius to remain effective, and it can be kept at temperatures of 2 degrees to 8 degrees Celsius for up to only five days.
News about the unorthodox choice of transportation prompted a wave of mockery on social media.
Hot dog-themed memes, bearing the logo of Pfizer, with Photoshopped images and frankfurter-related puns and jokes, have flooded Facebook and Twitter. One Facebook post included a picture of frankfurters stamped with the Pfizer logo.And an old, popular ad for this particular hot dog brand — showing a shopkeeper in a butcher’s store holding a string of hot dogs — was being shared online, but, this time, with an updated tagline: “The vaccines are here.”
The vaccination campaign begins at a time when Bulgaria has one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the E.U., with more than 25 people per 100,000 dying from the virus over 14 days, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and its health system has been struggling to cope with the surge of virus patients.
While some Bulgarians have mocked the creative mode of transportation, others have expressed concern that it signals that the state is not well prepared to receive and store the first batch of the vaccines.
“It doesn’t matter if the trucks have images of hot dogs or Black Angus beef plastered on them,” Mariya Sharkova, a lawyer specializing in health care, said. “What matters is for the government to strictly follow the distribution and storage regulations.”
She is concerned that the delivery of vaccines in food trucks may make the country legally liable, she said, since “the vaccine manufacturer cannot be held responsible” if “transport and distribution protocols are not observed properly.”
“Bulgarian authorities knew, for a while now, exactly when the first vaccines were arriving,” said Desislava Nikolova, a health editor at the Bulgarian newspaper Capital Weekly. “It perplexes me why the government needed to use a hot dog truck instead of a vehicle licensed for distribution of thermolabile medicines.” Bulgaria has strict laws about the proper transportation of pharmaceuticals, and each vehicle needs to be licensed and registered with health authorities.
Kostadin Angelov, the health minister, assured Bulgarians that the hot dog trucks had met all of the requirements needed for storage of the vaccine, and said that he found the hot dog-inspired jokes “inappropriate.”
“Seeking to exploit that aspect is unacceptable,” he told reporters on Sunday shortly after becoming the first Bulgarian to be inoculated. “Bulgaria is not the only country where private logistics companies provide transportation.”
Mr. Angelov vowed that this first batch was an exception and the next deliveries of the vaccine would be distributed using transportation provided by the manufacturer.
Ms. Sharkova worries that the delivery incident might further worsen vaccine skepticism among some Bulgarians.
“There are many people outside of the anti-vax movement who are hesitant to get vaccinated,” she said. “Instead of using the vaccine arrival to defuse their fears, the state has become a target of ridicule.”
Coronavirus: Then & Now
As 2020 comes to a close, we are revisiting subjects whose lives were affected by the pandemic. When Thomas Fuller first spoke with the Clarks in March, they were passengers trapped on a cruise ship that was being kept at sea because of a coronavirus outbreak onboard.
OAKLAND, Calif. — Never again! So said Cookie Clark, a retired real estate agent, as her Hawaiian cruise on the Grand Princess came to an end in San Francisco Bay in March.
With more than 20 people infected with the coronavirus onboard, the ship was a floating symbol of the nation’s disjointed reaction to the pandemic reaching American shores. President Trump had said he didn’t want the ship to dock because it would increase the tally of infected people in the country. So the ship was kept circling for days off the California coast, while the authorities on shore debated what to do and the passengers and crew grew increasingly frustrated.
“I’m ready to get the hell off this ship,” Ms. Clark said from her cabin.
The Grand Princess finally got clearance to dock on March 9, and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge to a pier in the port of Oakland. When Ms. Clark and her husband, Joe, disembarked, they were taken to Travis Air Force Base along with other passengers, to be quarantined for two weeks in rudimentary conditions.
The ordeal might have been enough to make homebodies out of anyone, and that’s the way Ms. Clark, 76, was feeling in March. But nine months later, she and her husband, 82, are itching to travel again.
The couple has been strict about social distancing during the pandemic. When they take walks outside their home in Oakdale, Calif., at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, they give neighbors and fellow pandemic hikers a wide berth. Ms. Clark lamented that they weren’t able to attend her granddaughter’s graduation from the University of California, Berkeley. And they have sworn off visits to the mall for the duration. But they are getting antsy.
“We’re older and we’re retired, and it’s just like we’ve lost the whole year,” Ms. Clark said by telephone from her home.
Another cruise?
“We would do it again,” she said. “I’m sure.”
One of the World Health Organization’s senior officials warned on Monday that although the coronavirus pandemic has been “very severe,” it is “not necessarily the big one.”
Reflecting on the year in the W.H.O.’s final media briefing of 2020, the head of the emergencies program, Michael Ryan, said that his words may come as a shock.
More than 1.7 million people worldwide have died this year from Covid-19, more than 81 million cases have been recorded and the spread of the coronavirus has been unrelenting in many countries.
“These threats will continue,” Dr. Ryan said. “If there’s one thing we need to take from this pandemic with all the tragedy and loss is that we need to get our act together. We need to get ready for something that may even be more severe in the future.”
Dr. Ryan acknowledged that much progress has been made on improving how we communicate and govern during this pandemic, but, he said, this year was a “wake up call” and “we must honor those we’ve lost by getting better at what we do every day.”
Striking a similarly solemn tone, David Heymann, the chair of the W.H.O.’s strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards, predicted that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, would become endemic, like the other human coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS that have spread in recent years.
Coronavirus vaccination programs, the W.H.O. said, would be integral to saving lives and protecting vulnerable people.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, promised that the organization would “not rest until those in need everywhere, in all countries, have access to vaccines and are protected.”
Moderna will make its Covid-19 vaccine available to its workers, on-site contractors and board members in the United States, as well as to adults in their household, the company said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.
The Massachusetts firm, which developed one of two vaccines that received emergency use authorization this month from the Food and Drug Administration, justified the move on the basis that its workers are conducting “essential services in developing, manufacturing and delivering a Covid-19 vaccine.” The decision to include adult household members was made to “reduce the risk of absenteeism and disruption due to a Covid-19 infection,” the statement said.
Moderna has about 1,200 full-time employees, a figure that does not include on-site contractors. A spokesman for the company, Ray Jordan, said the firm did not have a specific estimate of how many people would be vaccinated through the program, noting that participation would be voluntary. Mr. Jordan said that the program began with vaccinating on-site manufacturing workers and is expanding through the rest of Moderna’s population.
Moderna said it will pay for the costs of the doses given to its workers and for administering them. They will be given separately from Moderna’s deal to supply the United States with 200 million doses of the vaccine, with the first half to come by the end of March and the second half to come by the end of June.
Most of the people who have been vaccinated in the United States so far — over 2 million, according to a New York Times database — have been health care workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In the coming weeks, vaccines are expected to increasingly be given to other high-risk groups, including older people and frontline workers.
At Pfizer, the maker of the other coronavirus vaccine that has received authorization so far, chief executive Dr. Albert Bourla told CNBC earlier this month that he had not yet received his company’s vaccine and that he and other executives and board members would not “cut the line.”
A spokeswoman for Pfizer, Amy Rose, said that Pfizer plans to vaccinate its employees in the order that groups of them become eligible under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She said the first group is expected to be the company’s essential workers, especially in manufacturing. “There are no plans to prioritize the vaccination of our executives or board members ahead of other high-risk groups,” Ms. Rose said.
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