December 9 coronavirus news

California broke Covid-19 records Wednesday as it recorded its highest number of cases in a single day and increased hospitalizations and intensive care admissions.

The state added 30,851 new confirmed cases Wednesday, about 800 more than the previous record set Sunday. The steep climb in infections brings California’s total to more than 1.4 million cases, according to data from California Department of Public Health.

Hospitalizations are at an all-time high with nearly 12,000 people receiving in-patient treatment. More than 2,600 of those patients have been admitted to intensive care units – another record number.

Available ICU beds in all of California have also dipped, according to state data. Several hospitals in the San Joaquin Valley have completely run out of ICU beds as has San Jose Regional Medical Center in the Bay Area. 

That limited capacity of ICU beds has triggered regional stay-at-home orders affecting about 27 million residents in Central and Southern California.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a new executive order on Wednesday that adds stricter limitations on indoor and outdoor gatherings and adds more counties to the state’s mask mandate list.

The new order limits indoor crowds to no more than 10, and outdoor crowds no more than 50. 

Face coverings are required in schools statewide.

There are 61 of the state’s 82 counties under a mandatory mask mandate, according to a release from Reeves’ office. 

On Wednesday, the state reported an additional 2,746 Covid-19 cases and 24 deaths.

Since the start of the pandemic, the state has reported 170,672 cases and 4,041 deaths. 

Note: These numbers 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.

Johnson & Johnson said it will cut the size of its Covid-19 vaccine trial because the virus is so widespread.

The trial initially planned to recruit 60,000 volunteers.

Moncef Slaoui, of Operation Warp Speed, said Wednesday that the trial may have enough participants by the end of the week.

“We have already recruited more than 38,000 subjects in the study,” Slaoui said at a news briefing. “With J&J we decided to cap the recruitment to around 40,000 subjects, which will happen by the end of this week or in the next two or three days.” 

Slaoui said that he thought if the data showed that the vaccine worked, an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration would be “hopefully approved swiftly.” 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said that he believes the United States has a "moral responsibility" to ensure equitable distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine around the world. 

While speaking, Fauci emphasized that he was giving his personal opinion and not speaking on behalf of the United States.

Fauci's comments were made a day after President Trump signed an executive order aimed at prioritizing the shipment of the coronavirus vaccine to Americans before other nations.

"We have a moral responsibility as a rich country, along with other rich countries, to make sure that when we have the facilities and the capabilities – be it life-saving drugs for HIV, life-saving preventions for HIV, or a vaccine for Covid-19 – that as a global community, we do everything we can to make sure that there is the equitable distribution of those countermeasures throughout the world," Fauci said. "I think we all need to pull together as a global community to make sure that there’s equitable distribution."

While the significant allergic reactions that two health care workers in the United Kingdom experienced after receiving Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine are of concern, Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday that such a reaction is likely "unusual and rare."

The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said on Wednesday it was "fully investigating" those two cases.

Yet "it likely is an unusual and rare effect but clearly everyone now is aware of that and will be looking at that -- and particularly taking care of people who do have underlying allergic phenomenon, that they may be cautious about vaccination or at least be prepared to respond with some sort of anecdote to the reaction," Fauci said.

Fauci added: "If I were a person that had an underlying allergic tendency, I might want to be prepared that I might get a reaction and therefore be ready to treat it." 

With news that two United Kingdom health workers had allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, White House vaccine chief Moncef Slaoui said Wednesday that the US Food and Drug Administration will likely consider this information as it makes its determination on emergency use authorization.

National Health Service England Wednesday said that people with a “significant history of allergic reaction” to vaccine, medicine or food or those who have been advised to carry an adrenaline autoinjector should not be given this vaccine in the UK. 

Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, said at a news briefing that people with a history of severe allergic reaction had been excluded from the clinical trials, so he said, the adverse reactions from the two health professionals was “new news.”

The FDA will ultimately determine if people with severe allergic reactions should be allowed to get the vaccine or not.

“The expectation will be that subjects with known severe allergic reactions should not take the vaccine, until we understand exactly what happened here,” Slaoui said. 

CNN's Phil Black reports. Watch below:

Over half – 53% – of Americans have said that they would likely get a first-generation Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it’s available, according to new poll results from Axios-Ipsos, released Wednesday. 

This number has increased from 51% before Thanksgiving and 38% in early October, Ipsos said.

Most people – 69% – said they were more likely to take the vaccine if it had been proven safe and effective by public health officials. And 67% and 65%, respectively, said they would likely take one if it had a 90% or more effectiveness rate, or it had been on the market for a few months.  

Sixty percent said that they would be likely to take it after being presented with a situation where Presidents Barack Obama, George Bush and Bill Clinton took the vaccine publicly. This was “an improvement over baseline but not as convincing as the safety arguments,” Ipsos said. 

The Axios-Ipsos poll is based on a nationally representative sample of 1,101 American adults and was conducted between December 4 and 7.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf announced Wednesday that he has tested positive for coronavirus and has no symptoms.

Wolf’s wife Frances has been tested and the couple is awaiting her results, according to a statement. Wolf is currently isolating at home and received his results after a routine test.

Wolf will continue to govern remotely, the statement said.

More than 278,000 courses of the two antibody treatments that have received emergency use authorization to treat Covid-19 have gone out to medial facilities, according to US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. The treatments, made by Eli Lilly & Co. and Regeneron, are for non-hospitalized patients.

Azar, who spoke at an Operation Warp Speed briefing Wednesday, said that the administration is working to send out more. 

Azar also encouraged people who have recovered from Covid-19 in the past three months to donate their plasma. As of the end of November, nearly 106,000 people with Covid-19 have been treated with plasma from recovered patients, according to UScovidplasma.org.