January 21 coronavirus news

All residents in Beijing’s Daxing district have not been allowed to leave the area since Wednesday because of a rising number of Covid-19 cases, according to local officials. 

People wishing to leave the district need to provide a negative Covid-19 test taken within three days, a district notice announced. 

More than 24,000 residents around the infection hotspot in Daxing have also been asked to stay at home until further notice.

Daxing district has reported 11 confirmed cases since Sunday, according to the city’s health commission.

Schools and education facilities across Beijing will need to complete all in-person learning by Saturday, and kindergartens have been shut from today. Meanwhile, University and college students are being discouraged from leaving Beijing unless absolutely necessary. 

New cases: China’s National Health Commission reported 144 new Covid-19 cases across the country on Wednesday, including 18 imported infections. Among the 126 locally transmitted cases, 68 were reported in Heilongjiang, 33 in Jilin, 20 in Hebei, two in Beijing, two in Shanxi and one in Shandong. 

Additionally, 113 asymptomatic infections were reported nationwide, 16 of which were imported. China counts asymptomatic cases separately.

The White House released US President Joe Biden's letter reversing the Trump administration's decision to leave the World Health Organization after the new US leader was sworn in on Wednesday.

US re-engagement: US diplomats around the world have already been notified of changes they must make as they conduct American diplomacy after Biden signed a series of executive orders tonight.   

The first department wide memo sent by Acting Secretary of State Dan Smith instructed all US diplomats to re-engage with WHO and halt any staff drawdown at the UN health agency, according to the memo reviewed by CNN. 

The memo was sent shortly after Biden signed a series of executive orders, including one to reverse former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from WHO. 

The US had been in the process of withdrawing staff at WHO in the final months of the Trump administration. That withdrawal will now be halted and reversed. 

The White House will require daily testing for coronavirus and N95 masks for staffers in a bid to model good pandemic behavior, according to press secretary Jen Psaki.

She said the new rules also include stringent requirements on social distancing.

Psaki said President Joe Biden "has asked us also to be models to the American people" -- a contrast to the previous administration, which largely ignored government mask and social distancing recommendations.

Psaki also said the administration will resume regular briefings with public health officials in addition to the daily White House press briefings. 

Psaki said that the White House will combat misinformation by giving accurate information to the American people “even when it is hard to hear.”

The Trump administration had briefings with health officials regularly last spring when the coronavirus pandemic initially took hold, however those briefings were often not entirely focused on the pandemic as then-President Donald Trump led them awry.

Those regular briefings ended in April after Trump suggested injecting disinfectant could be a cure for coronavirus.  

New research out this week provides reassuring evidence that people vaccinated against coronavirus will be protected against emerging new variants of the virus.

Two teams tested two of the new variants against blood taken from people who had received the full two-course dose of either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine.

While the mutations in the new variants of the virus -- one first seen in Britain, and another first identified in South Africa -- did allow them to evade some of the immunity induced by vaccination, it was far from a complete escape, the two teams reported separately.

A team led by Dr. Michel Nussenzweig of the Rockefeller University tested plasma taken from 20 people who got two doses of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine as part of clinical trials.

They found the vaccines produced strong antibody responses, as well as cells that keep producing new antibodies for months or years.

Wild-type virus is the catchall name for virus generally circulating that is not changed enough to be designated a variant.

Different mutations in the viruses did allow some escape from some types of antibodies, but the bodies of the volunteers threw an army of different types of antibodies at the viruses, the team reported in a pre-print study -- not peer reviewed -- published online.

"When you start putting all these mixtures of antibodies together, what it means is that together they can take care of the variants," Nussenzweig said. Even though they had a reduced effect, overall the response was so overwhelming that it should not matter, he said.

Eventually, the vaccines should be updated -- but the new mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna can be changed very quickly. "Should the vaccines be tweaked?" he asked. "Probably -- but that doesn't mean that they won't be effective."

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President Joe Biden, who plans to make the coronavirus pandemic his top priority, will begin his presidency by asking Americans to wear masks for 100 days and requiring their use on federal property.

His first executive order, the "100 Days Masking Challenge," will symbolize the administration's sharp turn from the Trump era by emphasizing recommendations by public health experts. A president cannot tell states or cities what to do, but a federal mandate will affect federal offices and federal lands and will urge states to do the same.

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As state leaders clamored for more Covid-19 vaccine doses, Joe Biden became President on Wednesday with an eye toward changing approaches to the pandemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives in the US.

Some state officials say they aren't seeing as many doses as the federal government reports distributing and the demand for the vaccine is outpacing the supply. Georgia, for example, reports adequate staff, volunteers and infrastructure but not enough doses.

Biden, meanwhile, has signaled he intends to alter the federal government's approach to the pandemic and public health in several ways, and one of his first acts as President, a few hours after his inauguration, was to sign an executive order mandating masks on federal property.

He also intends to restore a previously disbanded National Security Council office that would focus on pandemic preparedness and to stop the previous administration's process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, one of his aides has said.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency is conducting a comprehensive review of all existing Covid-19 guidance. "The toll that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on America is truly heartbreaking," she said.

Biden took office just a day after the country surpassed 400,000 recorded deaths for the pandemic.

Across the country, hospitalizations and daily new cases and deaths have been dipping, though experts have warned that more-transmissible virus variants, including one first seen in the UK, could send cases surging again:

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