Coronavirus: Researchers are scrambling to learn why some coronavirus patients lose their sense of smell and taste. Some experts fear huge numbers of people may lose them permanently.

Once a rare diagnosis, a loss of smell and taste is often the first — and sometimes only — symptom of the coronavirus. Most patients regain their senses, usually within weeks. But for a minority of people like Michele Miller, above, the loss persists, putting them at risk for nutritional deficits and unintended weight loss.

And in California, Los Angeles County, already in the throes of a devastating surge in coronavirus cases after Thanksgiving travel and gatherings, is being hit with a spike from Christmas festivities.
Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

5. Desperate to control a new variant of the coronavirus, Britain quietly changed vaccination procedures to allow for a mix-and-match regimen.

If a second dose of the vaccine a patient originally received isn’t available, or if the manufacturer of the first shot isn’t known, another coronavirus vaccine may be substituted, health officials said. The new guidance contradicts guidelines in the U.S., where regulators noted that the authorized coronavirus vaccines “are not interchangeable.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. is falling behind in its vaccination campaign because federal officials left much of the planning to overstretched local health officials and hospitals, like the one in Puerto Rico, above. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity,” one expert said, “and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination.”
The New York Times