January 3 coronavirus news

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that while it’s hard to say if the new coronavirus strain is widespread across the country, the US has the tools regardless of the strain to defeat it.

The new strain, first identified in the United Kingdom, has now been reported in Colorado, California and Florida. 

The most important thing to know, he said, is “we do not, so far, feel that this new strain or these new strains will be resistant to the vaccines or to the therapeutics that we have available. So, that’s good news.” 

Adams said that if someone feels that a new strain is more contagious, “and it looks like these new strains may be more contagious, even if they’re not more deadly,” it means that following public health measures and getting people vaccinated as quickly as possible is even more important.

 “The bottom line is, we have the tools, regardless of the strain, to be able to defeat this virus, we just need the will to actually follow through and do the things that we know will help us,” said Adams.

As of Sunday morning, Ohio has completed 161,000 Covid-19 vaccinations, Gov. Mike DeWine told CNN’s Jake Taper on “State of the Union.” 

At least 61% of the nursing homes across the state have administered their first round of the vaccine, and the state projects that all nursing homes in the state will have received their first round of shots within two weeks, he added.

Earlier in the program, the US surgeon general told Tapper he’s concerned that 60% of Ohio’s nursing home workers have elected not to get vaccinated. 

Responding to the alarming statistic, DeWine said he would not mandate nursing homes and other health institutions to require their employees to be vaccinated, saying “that’s up to them” and that education is the key component of vaccination confidence.

Those nursing home staff who refused the first round of vaccinations will have another opportunity to be inoculated when the second round of vaccines go through the nursing homes across Ohio. 

“Nursing homes that have come up with a good education plan before the person had to make the decision do they get a shot or not, they're seeing their compliance rate go up significantly from that 40%, so this is a work in progress. I just wanted to put that 40% number out there because it's what we're seeing, and it is, as you say, alarming. And as the surgeon general said, we've got to improve it,” the governor continued.

The United Kingdom has registered over 50,000 new Covid-19 cases for six days in a row, with at least 54,990 new confirmed cases reported on Sunday.

The UK reported 53,135 cases on Tuesday, 50,023 on Wednesday, 55,892 on Thursday, 53,285 on Friday, and the highest number of confirmed cases seen since the start of the pandemic on Saturday with 57,725.

On Sunday, the UK also reported 454 new deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, bringing the total number of deaths to 75,024 since the beginning of the pandemic.

Earlier on Sunday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on the BBC that coronavirus restrictions in England are “alas, probably about to get tougher.”

“I am fully reconciled with that,” he added.

The French government aims to vaccinate 26 million French people against Covid-19 “by the summer,” France's Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari said on Sunday, speaking to CNN’s affiliate BFMTV.

His comments come amid criticism that France is lagging behind countries like the United Kingdom and Germany in the numbers of people having received a first dose of the vaccine.

“Right now we have 500,000 doses [of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine] arriving each week and we have already secured the contract for hundreds of thousands of doses per week for other vaccines whose use will be rapidly approved,” he said.

The official added that the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines will be also approved by the European Medicines Agency “in the coming days.”

French Health Minister Olivier Veran announced on Twitter on Thursday an acceleration of the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in France.

“We have decided, at the same time, to accelerate the protection [against Covid-19] of priority groups. As of Monday, healthcare workers aged 50 and more, on a voluntary basis, will be able to get vaccinated in centers that already have the vaccine,” he announced.

 “We know how to do mass vaccination,” Veran added, citing 1.5 million flu vaccines delivered in the country on the first day of the vaccination campaign last year.

Pope Francis said Sunday that he was “pained” and “saddened” by news reports claiming that in some countries, people were going on holiday to avoid Covid-19 lockdown measures.

Renewing his best wishes for the New Year, Pope Francis said: “what each of us — and all of us together — can do is commit ourselves a little more to take care of each other and of what was created, our common home.”

In order to follow the tight coronavirus measures that limit people's movement, Pope Francis is holding his Sunday prayers from the Apostolic Palace library, rather than from the usual window overlooking St. Peter’s square where the faithful usually gather. 

Earlier this morning, President Trump claimed in a tweet that the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths of the "China Virus is far exaggerated" because of the CDC's "ridiculous method of determination" compared to other countries which "report, purposely, very inaccurately and low."

In September, CNN reported that the CDC had debunked the claim that its reporting methodology was inaccurate.

CNN's Jake Tapper pressed US General Jerome Adams this morning on the President's claims, asking the official if he believes the death toll is real. Adams said he has "no reason to doubt" the Covid-19 death toll number despite Trump's continued baseless claims that the number of deaths has been "exaggerated."

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams this morning defended the Trump administration's failure to deliver on its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020.

Adams told CNN's Jake Tapper that the federal government did deliver 20 million doses to the states as promised.

On what went wrong, Adams said that because of the surge of cases over the past month "the local capacity to be able to vaccinate was being used for testing and responding to surges." 

"We have to understand that it occurred over the holidays and people in health departments and in hospitals take holiday breaks too," he added.

Adams said that there is "good news" to report as vaccinations ramp up.

"The last 72 hours, we saw 1.5 million first shots reported. If you extrapolate that out and many people are extrapolating numbers, that is 500,000 a day," he said.

The US Surgeon General said he wanted the American people to "have hope" that the vaccines are "being delivered are translated more and more into shots."

Some more context: The CDC says the US has administered more than 4 million vaccine doses, but is lagging behind some other countries as the number of cases continue to surge.

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams called on the American people to continue to take Covid-19 precautions as cases surge following the Thanksgiving holiday, and the impacts of travel over the Christmas holiday continue to unfold.

"You still can self-quarantine. You can still get tested knowing that greater than 50% of the spread now among people who are asymptomatic. You can still wear a mask and wash your hands and watch your distance. If we do that we will be able to temper this surge," he continued.

At least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with coronavirus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

"I want people to understand that if we get over this current surge, then things will start to get better but it depends on the actions that we all take right now," Adams said.

The official said that he's still optimistic amid the tragedy.

"Less than a year after getting this virus sequenced, we are going to have 20 million doses delivered within a month after actually getting the EUA (emergency use authorization)," he said.

The interview comes as the CDC says the US has administered more than 4 million vaccine doses, but is lagging behind some other countries as the number of cases continue to surge. The administered doses include both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.

Hospitals around the United States are racing to keep up with surges of Covid-19 patients at numbers they have not seen at any other time in the pandemic.

At least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with coronavirus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Impact of festive season continues to be felt: Cases have skyrocketed after the Thanksgiving holiday, and impacts from Christmas and New Year's celebrations are still unfolding. As of Saturday, more than 20.4 million people have been infected with the virus in the US and at least 350,186 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And health experts worry what will happen to those numbers if infections continue to spread.

"This is about total collapse of the health care system if we have another spike," said Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center.

A difficult start to the new year: As Americans rang in the new year, almost 11,000 families grieved the new loss of a loved one to Covid-19.

At least 10,901 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the last three days of 2020, according to Johns Hopkins University. That's about 3,633 deaths a day -- more than the number of lives lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

In less than 11 months, Covid-19 has killed more than 349,000 people in the US. And another 115,000 Americans could die from the disease over the next month, according to projections by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Read the full story:

RELATED

For more than a month, US hospitals have had more than 100,000 coronavirus patients every day