There have now been over two million virus-related deaths worldwide.
The C.D.C warned that the new virus variant could fuel a huge spike in cases.
Joe Biden laid out plans for a vaccination blitz and proposed a $1.9 trillion virus relief package.
Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and vaccines in development.
Inside China’s outbreak
China is experiencing its worst surge of the virus since the summer, forcing 28 million people into lockdown and challenging the government’s success in subduing the disease.
The country’s National Health Commission said that 144 new cases had been recorded yesterday along with one death — the county’s first since May. Across China, more than 1,000 people are being treated for Covid-19.
The flare-up is mostly in Hebei, a northern province surrounding Beijing. The region’s capital, Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people, is scrambling to build an 82-acre quarantine center.
Our colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times’s Shanghai bureau chief, told us that the Chinese authorities “are very concerned about stamping this out, because they have taken a zero-tolerance approach in which they have tested as many as two million people a day in a city if there are even a handful of cases discovered.”
Keith said that for the past few months many people in China had been living as though the virus was a distant threat. They’ve been pulling off their masks, particularly outdoors, and restaurants, bars and theaters have hummed with activity. “Almost all people in China were able to go about their daily lives in the second half of last year as though practically nothing had happened,” he said.
But things have started to change, even for people who live outside the areas in lockdown. In Shanghai, Keith said, office buildings and apartment compounds are, once again, checking smartphone location tracking codes, to ensure that individuals haven’t traveled to hot spots. If someone has traveled to a risky area, that person must immediately report to the authorities and enter a home- or government-supervised quarantine.
“Mandatory immediate quarantine by the government, in total isolation, of every symptomatic or asymptomatic person, plus all of their close contacts” has been China’s secret to containing the coronavirus, Keith said. “In some cases, they identify 800 close contacts per person, so their definition of a close contact is not very close at all.”
With the U.S. and Europe in the throes of another brutal surge, there has been a great deal of nationalistic sentiment in China, promoting the country’s approach to the virus. “There are definite worries about the latest outbreaks,” Keith said. “But I have found a quiet confidence among many people that China has beaten this problem before and can do so again.”
How the variant affects kids
The new variant of the coronavirus, first identified in Britain, is expected to rapidly spread in the U.S. That has fueled fears that children, who have largely been spared the worst of the virus, may become just as susceptible and contagious as adults.
The latest research out of Britain largely puts the worst fears to rest. Data from about 20,000 people infected with the new variant — including nearly 3,000 children under age 10 — showed that young children were about half as likely as adults to transmit the variant to others.
“That’s exactly what we had been seeing with the current variant that’s circulating in the U.S., too,” said our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli, who wrote about the research. “Nothing has really changed on that front.”
That seems like good news. But the new variant is about 30 to 50 percent more contagious than the original, for children and adults alike. It is expected to become the dominant form of the coronavirus in the U.S. by March, which means more kids will get the virus, even if they are still proportionately less contagious and less prone to getting infected than adults.
“The variant is more contagious, but it’s more contagious across all age groups,” Apoorva said. “If kids were half as likely to be infected before, they’re also half as likely to be infected now.”
The pandemic, supercharged by the new variant, could force even elementary schools to close if community spread rises to unmanageable levels. But if schools act fast to shore up safety protocols — mask wearing, physical distancing, ventilation and extensive testing — they might buy themselves crucial time.
“Just like we had time in the summer to get ready for the fall for schools to open, we have a chance right now to get this right,” Apoorva said. “We know the variant is here, but it’s still at low levels. We have time now to prepare to make sure that schools are ready.”
The New York Times
Me: since this virus started in China and spread from there to the world, I’m not particularly bothered that the Chinese have it back again – good – might be my concerns there.