January 6 coronavirus news

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday it is evaluating the reported death of a Miami doctor weeks after he received a coronavirus vaccine.

The Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s office told CNN earlier Wednesday it was investigating the death of Dr. Gregory Michael, who worked at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Michael was vaccinated in mid-December.

A CDC spokeswoman said in an email that it is aware of the reports of a Florida individual who died about two weeks after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Pfizer said in a separate statement it did not believe the vaccine caused the death.

“It’s been a difficult year as each of us grapple with a worldwide pandemic. Use of COVID-19 vaccines is the next step in our efforts to protect Americans and reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the CDC spokeswoman said.

The city of New Orleans will enact new restrictions on gathering and introduce capacity limits for the next three weeks due to a spike in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations, according to a statement from the mayor's office.

Daily new cases throughout the city jumped by more than 200 after hovering around 30 for most of the fall months. The percentage of positive tests also ballooned past 10% after being around 5% for the past two weeks, the statement notes.

The restrictions go into effect Friday at 6 a.m. and include:

Japan's health authority identified 5,953 Covid-19 infections Wednesday, a single-day record for new cases in the country.

Another 72 virus-related deaths were also reported Wednesday, authorities said.

The government is preparing to declare a state of emergency in Tokyo and three neighboring prefectures -- Saitama, Chiba and Kangawa -- where cases are spiking. Tokyo set its own record for number of infections identified in a day on Wednesday, with 1,591 new cases.

Health Ministry data shows that as of Wednesday, the number of patients in serious condition across Japan rose to 784, while 41,054 patients are being treated in hospital.

At least 259,105 cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in Japan, killing 3,904 people.

Upwards of 8,000 people are in Los Angeles County hospitals being treated for Covid-19, authorities said.

County officials say the situation is now "a health crisis of epic proportions.”

Another 11,841 Covid-19 infections and 258 virus-related deaths were reported in Los Angeles County on Wednesday. To date, the county has reported a total of 852,165 coronavirus cases and 11,328 fatalities.

Of the 8,023 people being treated in the hospital with the virus, 20% are in the ICU, according to the statement. While the three-day average number of coronavirus hospitalizations on November 1 was 791, that figure had increased to 7,873 on January 4.  

Health crisis: The test positivity rate in the county has also increased to 21.8% from 3.8% in November. One in five people who are tested are testing positive, according to the public health department.

"This is a health crisis of epic proportions. I am more troubled than ever before, and in part, my concern is rooted in the reality that it will take so much more for us to slow the spread given the high rate of community spread,” Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. 

According to Dr. Ferrer, the number of people dying from the virus each day has doubled.

People’s immunity to Covid-19 lasts at least eight months after they have recovered from an infection, researchers reported Wednesday.

A study of 188 people who recovered from Covid-19 infections showed they had broad immune protection months later -- not just antibodies, but also several types of immune cells that the body musters after an infection.

While there have been worries that the antibody response fades, Dr. Jennifer Dan of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and the University of California, San Diego worked with her team to see how the immune responses held up for Covid-19 survivors. She said they found just the opposite.

Dan and her team found that peoples' bodies were producing antibodies, memory B cells, CD8 T cells, and CD4 T cells that were trained to home in on Covid-19 for as long as eight months after they became ill.

There have been reports of people getting infected twice by coronavirus, but the researchers noted that large studies showed if it happens, it’s rare.

The United States reported 132,476 current Covid-19 hospitalizations on Wednesday, setting a new record high since the pandemic began, according to the Covid Tracking Project (CTP).

This is the 36th consecutive day the US has remained above 100,000 current hospitalizations.

The highest hospitalization numbers according to CTP data are:

The US Food and Drug Administration has made clear that it does not plan to make any changes to Covid-19 vaccine dosing schedules in the United States -- but if any changes were made, the vaccine manufacturer would have to specifically ask the agency to adjust authorization.

CNN confirmed with the FDA on Wednesday that before any change could be made to the emergency use authorization for a vaccine, the manufacturer would need to submit data to the FDA supporting the requested change.

If changes are proposed to the Covid-19 vaccine dosing schedules in the future, "it won't be FDA that moves it," said David Benkeser, a biostatistician at Emory University whose research includes work on preventive vaccines. "They're bound by legal operations that dictate how drugs are approved in the country, and so it's not surprising to hear them say that their strong preference is to stick with what we know works."

Health officials have been speculating about the possibility of stretching vaccine supply by giving people a single dose instead of two doses, or by cutting doses in half. British officials created an uproar by saying they would consider such changes.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and Dr. Peter Marks, who heads FDA’s vaccine division issued a statement Monday, saying that “suggesting changes to the FDA-authorized dosing or schedules of these vaccines is premature and not rooted solidly in the available evidence.”

An ensemble forecast published Wednesday by the CDC projects there will be 405,000 - 438,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States by January 30.

Unlike some individual models, the CDC’s ensemble forecast only offers projections a few weeks into the future. The previous ensemble forecast, published December 30, projected up to 424,000 coronavirus deaths by January 23.

At least 359,977 people have already died from Covid-19 in the US, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

At least 52 cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in the United Kingdom have been identified in the United States, according to the CDC on Wednesday.

This includes 26 cases in California, 22 cases in Florida, two cases in Colorado, and one case in Georgia and New York.

CDC says this does not represent the total number of cases circulating in the US, but rather those that have been found by analyzing positive samples. The agency cautions that its numbers, which are expected to update on Tuesdays and Thursdays, may not immediately match those of state and local health departments.

While the variant appears to spread more easily than Covid-19, there's no evidence that it's more deadly or causes more severe disease, according to CDC. 

Experts suspect there could be many more cases in the US and have criticized the country for not doing more genetic sequencing of virus samples to surveil for mutations. On Sunday, a CDC official told CNN the agency plans to more than double the number of samples it sequences over the following two weeks -- with a target of 6,500 per week.

The earliest known US sample that carried the current version of the variant was taken on December 19 in Florida, according to the genomic database GISAID. However, collection dates are not available for all samples.