January 15 coronavirus news

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Friday morning that "it's quite feasible" the United States can achieve President-elect Joe Biden's goal to distribute 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine in his first 100 days of office. Fauci is set to serve as Biden's chief medical adviser.

"You still optimistic that we can get 100 million doses in 100 days?" NBC's Craig Melvin asked Fauci during an interview on the "Today" Show.

"We've discussed it with the Biden team, and we think it's quite feasible that we can do that. Right now, even now, we've gone from half a million a day to 750,000 a day. I believe strongly that it's doable — and if we do it, stay on target to get the overwhelming majority of the country vaccinated," said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"If we get about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we likely will get to that umbrella of herd immunity," Fauci said. "We can start approaching some form of normality, but it's really going to be dependent on the uptake of vaccines."

President-elect Joe Biden will deliver remarks today on his plans to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine once he takes office next week. He's set to speak at 3:45 p.m. ET in Wilmington, Delaware.

His remarks come a day after he outlined a $1.9 trillion emergency legislative package to fund a nationwide vaccination effort and provide direct economic relief to Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic, telling Americans that "the health of our nation is at stake."

Last month, Biden he laid out his three-point plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic, including his plans to distribute 100 million vaccine shots in his initial 100 days in office.

CNN reported last week that Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration's strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.

Releasing nearly all vaccine doses on hand could quickly ratchet up the availability of coronavirus vaccines by allowing more people access to a first dose.

It could also be a risky strategy as both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna's vaccines require two doses, administered at specific intervals, and vaccine manufacturing has not ramped up as rapidly as many experts had hoped.

The Department of Health and Human Services then announced sweeping changes Tuesday in vaccine rollout guidelines in an effort to boost the lagging number of vaccinations in the first month — effectively adopting the approach proposed by Biden's incoming administration.

It still remains unclear for how long someone who has recovered from Covid-19 might be protected from getting reinfected and whether they can still carry the virus and spread it to others, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Friday morning. 

He added: "We are doing studies to answer those kinds of questions."

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet earlier than planned with the country's 16 regional leaders to discuss ramping up coronavirus restrictions, Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert announced on Friday, as the virus surges across the country.

''New infection cases are too high,'' Seibert said, adding that Germany is on high alert for new, more contagious mutations of the virus. ''The German government is observing these developments very carefully and is taking this seriously,” he added.

Merkel was set to meet with the regional leaders on January 25.

Germany on Friday surpassed two million coronavirus cases after adding 22,368 new coronavirus infections within 24 hours, bringing the total number of reported infections to 2,000,958, the country's disease and control agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) said. 

On Thursday RKI chief Lothar Wieler said that the current lockdown in place is ''not as effective as in spring,'' urging that more people should work from home and adding that the current lockdown needed to be tightened.

Germany entered a partial national lockdown in November but tightened curbs in mid- December, closing schools and nurseries as well as non-essential shops. The lockdown is currently in place until the end of January. 

The executive director of the European Medicines Agency, Emer Cooke, has defended the organization against “criticism of perceived delays” in authorizing Covid-19 vaccines. 

“We constantly hear criticism about perceived delays in the EU, particularly after the emergency use authorizations that were granted in the UK and US. There is no European provision for such emergency approvals,” the head of the regulatory body said, while speaking at an Institute of International and European Affairs webinar event on Friday. 

The EU faced extensive criticism for its authorization speed in December, after the UK became the first nation to approve a Covid-19 vaccine -- the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine -- on December 2, which the EMA did not approve until December 21. 

Cooke emphasised the EMA was applying “the same robust authorization standards that we would for any vaccine” during its Covid-19 vaccine review process. 

To date, two Covid-19 vaccines have been authorized for use in the EU: the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on 21 December 2020 and the Moderna vaccine on 6 January 2021.

The EMA received an application for conditional marketing authorization for the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday and the EMA is “hoping we can conclude the evaluation by the end of January,” according to Cooke. 

When asked about reports that drug maker Johnson and Johnson will seek regulatory approval for its Covid-19 vaccine in February, Cooke responded that she expects the company “to seek approval when they’re ready to seek approval… we hope it to come in February but whether I could confirm that’s the case, I’m afraid I’m not in a position to do so.”

Oxygen supplies are running short and hundreds of patients are waiting for beds, as hospitals in Brazil's largest state, Amazonas, face a crisis amid surging coronavirus infections,

Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello described the healthcare system in the state capital, Manaus, as being in "collapse" during a Facebook live with President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday.

"I would say yes, there is a collapse in healthcare in Manaus. The line to get a hospital bed has grown a lot, today we have about 480 people waiting in line. And the reality is that there is a lower supply of oxygen -- not an interruption, but a lower supply of oxygen," he said.

The latest surge in cases in Amazonas may be fueled by a new variant of the virus recently identified in Brazil. Manaus, globally known as the gateway to the Amazon region, also suffered badly in the first wave of the pandemic.

Brazil's Covid-19 death toll is the second highest in the world, behind only that of the United States. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 207,000 deaths from Covid-19 in Brazil and more than 8.3 million reported cases of coronavirus.

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Almost half of Ireland’s total Covid-19 cases since the pandemic began have been reported in the last two weeks, Professor Philip Nolan, chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, said on Thursday.

Dr. Ronan Glynn, deputy chief medical officer for Ireland’s Department of Health, warned at the briefing that "there are going to be difficult days and weeks ahead as we report these numbers and unfortunately all of that is unquestionably going to translate into significant levels of mortality in the days and weeks to come”. 

In a statement from Ireland’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) on Thursday, Nolan also said that “from an epidemiological perspective, what we are seeing in this wave is different to what we have seen since springtime, and perhaps worse”. 

When Ireland came out of a strict six-week lockdown in December it had one of the lowest levels of Covid-19 cases in Europe. Since then, the situation has dramatically unraveled. The country recorded the highest infection rate in the world last week, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication based at the University of Oxford.

The seasonality of the virus, the presence of the more transmissible UK variant, and households mixing over the holidays all contributed to the surge, according to a spokesperson from Prime Minister Micheál Martin's office.

On Thursday, the country's Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) reported 28 additional deaths related to COVID-19 and 3,955 new confirmed cases.

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The European Union has administered 4.3 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine, according to data collated by Oxford University and last updated on Thursday.

Here are the highest country totals from Europe as a whole:

United Kingdom: 2,918,252 people have received their first dose of the vaccine, with many also receiving a second, according to government data.

Italy: 972,099 total vaccinations have been given, according to Health ministry data.

Germany: 842,455 people have received the vaccine, which represents about 1% of the country's population, according to latest data from the Robert Koch Institute.

Spain: 676,186 people have received the first dose, according to Spanish Health Ministry data.

Poland: 410,480 vaccinations have been given, according to the latest Polish government data.

France: 318,216 people have received the shot since the vaccine rollout began on December 27, according to the country's Health Ministry.

During the first peak of the pandemic in April 2020 1.6 billion students were out of school  and almost 700 million remained out as the year drew to a close, according to the World Bank.

It may take years for the full impact of these months of missed schooling to be known, so what can history tell us about the long-term effects of disruptions to education?

Nothing can be directly compared to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, said Alberto Posso, professor of economics at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, but some parallels can be drawn.

Posso looked at examples including the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, teacher strikes in Argentina in the 1980s and World War II in a piece for The Conversation.

Perhaps the most striking data came from a paper assessing the long-term education cost of World War II for children who were 10 years old during the conflict in Germany and Austria -- both participants in the war -- and comparable children in Switzerland and Sweden, countries that remained officially neutral.

"Austrian children missed around 20% of classes during the war and their earnings dropped by around 3%. German children lost around 25% of classes and had earnings dropped by around 5%," Posso told CNN, citing their findings.

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