Europe’s vaccination campaign begins
From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Poland, older Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday to receive coronavirus vaccine shots.
The campaign to inoculate more than 450 million people comes as many European countries are struggling with their worst outbreaks since the start of the pandemic. The spread in Britain of a more contagious variant of the virus has raised alarm.
The numbers: More than 350,000 people in the 27 nations of the European Union have died from Covid-19 since the first fatality was recorded in France on Feb. 15. In Poland, November was the deadliest month since the end of World War II. The global total of infections has passed 80 million, and more than 1.7 million people have died.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:

■ Millions of Americans lost crucial unemployment coverage as President Trump continued to criticize a huge relief bill that would keep pandemic aid from lapsing.

■ Canada, France, Japan, Spain, Sweden and Norway have found small numbers of infections involving a new, potentially more transmissible variant of the coronavirus, most linked to travelers from Britain, where it was first detected.

■ A tide of new coronavirus cases in Africa is raising alarm in countries that, over all, appear to have fared far better than those in Europe or the Americas.

■ U.S. case numbers are about as high as they have ever been. Total infections have surpassed 19 million and deaths are over 330,000, meaning that at least 1 in 17 people in the country have contracted the virus and 1 in 1,000 have died from it.
the New York Times