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https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/11/world/covid-19-mandates-cases-vaccine
Covid News: China Dismisses 2 Mayors and Shanghai Closes Schools as Case Numbers Rise
Two years after saying that the coronavirus outbreak had become a pandemic, the W.H.O. says it isn’t over yet. One American public health expert noted, “This virus has fooled us every time.”
Follow the latest news on Covid-19, mask mandates and cases.
BEIJING — Two mayors have been dismissed in northeastern China, and Shanghai has closed its school system and shifted to online instruction, as a coronavirus outbreak in mainland China gathers speed.
China’s National Health Commission announced on Saturday that another 1,524 locally transmitted coronavirus cases had been detected in provinces across mainland China. That was up from 1,100 cases reported a day earlier, and a couple hundred cases per day a week ago.
Though China suffered heavy loss of life when Covid-19 first emerged in the city of Wuhan more than two years ago, it has had much more success than any other large country in controlling the virus since then. The surge in cases in the past few days, fueled by the Omicron variant, still leaves China far below the daily case count of about 35,000 in the United States, which has less than a quarter of China’s population.
The current increase in cases poses a significant challenge for China. After adopting a zero-tolerance strategy toward the virus for most of the past two years, China has shifted in recent months to a “dynamic zero” strategy. Under the new strategy, national leaders have tolerated the occasional emergence of a handful of cases in a city, provided that city leaders then quickly stamp out all further cases.
Now the Omicron variant is proving so infectious that local leaders no longer seem able to stamp out each outbreak. The cases reported on Saturday were scattered across 20 of China’s 31 provinces.
The mayors of Jilin City and the Jiutai district of the city of Changchun have both been dismissed, the state-run Xinhua news agency announced on Saturday, without specifying exactly when the dismissals had happened. Both places have had rapidly expanding outbreaks.
Jilin City has an urban population of 1.8 million, while the mostly rural Jiutai district, which reported 99 new cases on Saturday morning, has 760,000 residents.
Changchun, which has nine million people, was placed under partial lockdown on Friday, with each household only allowed to send out a member every other day to buy supplies. Jilin City, with over 1,000 cases in the past 10 days, has had a sustained outbreak at a local agricultural university.
China’s system for detecting and tracing infections has relied heavily on mandatory testing for anyone with a fever. Temperature checks are common at entrances to shopping malls and office complexes. Furthermore, people who try to buy fever-relieving medicine are tested for the coronavirus.
But two-thirds of the cases reported nationwide on Saturday involved people with no symptoms, possibly because China has a nearly 90 percent vaccination rate. Infected yet asymptomatic people can spread the virus to others, but finding these people is hard, Chinese officials have said.
Li You contributed research.
The World Health Organization, often criticized for being too slow to declare in 2020 that a pandemic was underway, now says — two years to the day after making that declaration — that many countries are being too quick to declare it over and let down their guard.
By the time Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s director general, officially declared the spread of the coronavirus to be a pandemic in the early evening of March 11, 2020, the virus was already known to have infected more than 120,000 people in 114 countries, killing about 4,300.
Then as now, the agency, an arm of the United Nations, tended to move cautiously and methodically. It was only after weeks of near-daily media briefings, in which he called on the organization’s nearly 200 member countries to contain the virus through testing, contact tracing and isolation of those who might be infected, that Dr. Tedros made the change to calling the crisis a pandemic. He did it, he said then, to attract attention, because many countries were not taking seriously the group’s earlier declaration of a public health emergency.
It worked.
“My first comment that day was, it was about time,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, recalled in an interview this week. “We had been in a pandemic for a while, and not necessarily behaving that way. We needed that message to jump-start it, from a global perspective.”
That day, the N.B.A. suspended its season and the actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, his wife, announced they had contracted the virus. In the days that followed, Broadway closed its curtains, stock markets plunged and schools and businesses shut their doors. President Donald J. Trump shut U.S. borders to most travelers from continental Europe. The known toll in the United States on March 11 stood at 1,263 cases and 37 deaths; soon the nation would be the global epicenter of the pandemic.
Two years later, American states and many countries are rushing to drop public health precautions, reduce testing and lift restrictions, citing the swift decline of the Omicron surge — and the W.H.O. is saying: Not so fast.
In several forums this week, the agency urged continued vigilance, especially about inequities. In a stark update on the threat the virus continues to pose, the W.H.O.’s regional arm for the Americas said that the Western Hemisphere, with less than 13 percent of the world’s population, had reported 63 percent of all new known coronavirus cases in the first two months of 2022.
“This virus has fooled us every time,” Dr. Benjamin said. “That’s why they’re appropriately cautious.”
The agency has been trying for months to keep its wealthier member nations from racing far ahead of the rest. In August, the W.H.O. sought a moratorium on booster shots to free up vaccine doses for the billions of people still unvaccinated in poorer countries, with exceptions only for immunocompromised people. Not until Tuesday did the agency give a broader endorsement of booster shots.
That was followed on Wednesday by a new recommendation to greatly expand supplies of self-testing kits in poor countries, where professional testing can be burdensomely expensive.
“This inhibits our ability to see where the Covid-19 virus is, how it’s spreading and evolving,” Dr. Tedros said of the scarcity of testing in poor countries.
But it could be months before the test initiative makes much headway, if the struggles of Covax, the global coronavirus vaccine distribution program, are any guide. Only 14 percent of people in the low-income nations that Covax is meant to help most have received a dose, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
With more than 10 million new coronavirus cases reported last week — almost surely an undercount, because testing rates have declined significantly — the W.H.O.’s biggest challenge now is the same as it was two years ago: getting the member countries that finance its work to heed its warnings.
“The pandemic is far from over,” Dr. Tedros said on Wednesday, “and it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere.”
Tracking the Coronavirus ›
Buckingham Palace said on Friday that Queen Elizabeth II, who recently recovered from Covid-19, will not attend a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey next week — in what would have been her first major public engagement in weeks.
The queen, who returned to work on March 1, met Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada this week in her first in-person official meeting after her positive test result. The palace posted a photograph to Twitter on Monday of the queen, who is also queen of Canada, receiving Mr. Trudeau at Windsor Castle for a one-on-one meeting.
The decision to skip the Commonwealth Day service was related to discussions about the queen’s comfort in traveling to and from the event, according to reporting from Reuters. Queen Elizabeth, 95, was hospitalized last October for undisclosed ailments and was advised by her medical team to rest for at least two weeks.
The service, which will be held on Monday, celebrates the Commonwealth of Nations, mainly former territories of the British Empire. The palace said in a statement that Queen Elizabeth asked Prince Charles to represent her.
In addition to Charles, the heir to the throne, the palace said the service would be attended by his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall; William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge; and Princess Alexandra, a cousin of the queen’s. But, in another example of the royal family dealing with Covid within its ranks, Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, another cousin of the queen’s, recently tested positive for the coronavirus, and the palace said he would not be attending.
The event is coming as new cases of the coronavirus are climbing in Britain — up 40 percent from the daily average two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.
A highly transmissible subvariant of Omicron known as BA.2 has become the dominant strain in parts of Europe. In England, researchers found that it took less time on average for someone with BA.2 to infect another person, accelerating its spread through communities. But officials say it is too early to determine if it is driving Britain’s recent rise in cases.
Queen Elizabeth first tested positive for the coronavirus on Feb. 20, with the palace describing her symptoms as mild. In the days after, the queen canceled some virtual engagements but continued with “light duties,” the palace said.
When the queen received Mr. Trudeau on Monday, the public was further reassured about her recovery. “The Queen will continue with other planned engagements, including in-person audiences, in the week ahead,” the palace said in its statement.
Scattered demonstrations around the globe on Friday seeking to waive intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines punctuated the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaring the contagion a pandemic.
In addition, more than 130 world leaders, economists, humanitarians, scientists and other prominent global figures called for an end to vaccine monopolies, releasing an open letter pushing to rapidly vaccinate middle-income and poor countries.
“Sadly, despite what some leaders in wealthy countries would like us to believe, the pandemic is not over,” the letter said, in part. “But it is within our grasp to end it and ensure everyone is protected. That requires giving everyone, everywhere access to safe and effective vaccines and other lifesaving Covid-19 technologies.”
The letter was organized by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a global coalition of 90 groups, and signed by the current leaders of Finland, Tanzania, and many former officials, like the U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon. Celebrities like Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, and the actress Charlize Theron also joined the call.
Top U.S. health officials said last week that they intended to begin offering low- and middle-income nations access to the technology developed by government scientists that might be used to prevent or treat Covid-19. They did not say which technologies would be licensed and whether Moderna’s vaccine, which was developed in partnership with N.I.H. scientists, would be included. Moderna is locked in a patent dispute with the government.
Protesters, who took to the streets in Lower Manhattan, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Spain and the Philippines, among other places, want the United States and the European Union to immediately waive intellectual property rights that they say slow vaccine production.
Vaccination rates continue to lag in low-income countries, where only 14 percent of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine. In high- and upper-middle-income countries, 79 percent of the population has received at least one dose.
The United Nations-backed program to vaccinate the world against the coronavirus, known as Covax, has delivered 1.4 billion vaccine doses to 144 countries, according to the latest data from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.
As the Omicron coronavirus surge subsides, researchers are keeping an eye on a highly transmissible subvariant known as BA.2. Although it doesn’t appear to have the capacity to drive a large new wave of infections, the variant could potentially slow the current decline of Covid cases and make treatments more difficult.
Here’s what we know so far about BA.2.
It’s not really new. Scientists first discovered the Omicron variant in November, and it quickly became clear that the viral lineage already existed as three genetically distinct varieties. Each branch of Omicron had its own set of unique mutations. At the time, the most common was BA.1, which quickly spread across the world. BA.1 was almost entirely responsible for the record-shattering spike in cases this winter. At first, BA.1 was a thousand times as common as BA.2. But in early 2022, BA.2 started to be found in a larger proportion of new infections.
It seems to be easier to catch. In Denmark, for example, scientists examined the spread of both subvariants in households. They found that people infected with BA.2 were substantially more likely to infect people they shared a house with than those with BA.1.
It is not yet causing a new surge in the United States, and probably won’t. Existing vaccines work against the BA.2 variant, and it’s vulnerable to antibodies made by the immune system after an earlier Omicron infection.
BA.2 does not appear to be more severe than the previous version of Omicron. British researchers have found that BA.2 infection does not carry a higher risk of hospitalization than BA.1.
BA.2’s ‘stealth variant’ nickname is outdated. BA.2 was nicknamed the “stealth variant” when it did not tip off its presence in positive P.C.R. test samples, making it a challenge for researchers to distinguish Omicron cases from those of Delta and other variants. BA.2 carried a mutation that concealed one of the three telltale coronavirus genes that the tests detect. Now that a vast majority of positive tests involve Omicron, the missing mutation doesn’t matter: Nearly all viruses picked up by P.C.R. are BA.1, and those that are not are BA.2.
It’s an image that shocked many: bodies of the dead piled up next to Covid patients.
On Friday, the authorities in Hong Kong said that the city’s hospital mortuaries had filled up so quickly amid a sharp Covid outbreak that body bags were being crammed into wards with patients who were still being treated for the virus.
“For some of the bodies, we have not been able to move them from the wards to the mortuary,” said Sara Ho, the chief manager of patient safety and risk management at Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority. “It may cause some concerns among patients.”
Officials are scrambling to beat back the city’s worst Covid outbreak, with the government reporting more than 600,000 cases and 3,231 deaths since late January. And while such figures may no longer seem all that remarkable for large countries like the United States, Hong Kong is one of the last places on Earth that is still trying to completely stamp out the coronavirus.
The city’s fatality rate from the virus is among the world’s highest, in large part because so many of its older residents are unvaccinated. (Since the pandemic started, though, Covid has killed Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, as well as in Hong Kong.) It is a dramatic turn of events for a city that had reported single-digit daily cases for much of the past two years.
For several weeks, dead bodies have been piling up at hospitals because the city’s public mortuaries, which can take up to 3,000 bodies, are full. The surge in cases has swamped ambulance services, prisons, banks and even the post office, leaving them severely understaffed. The government’s pandemic policy that requires close contacts of Covid cases to quarantine has made the situation worse.
Health officials addressed the issue of dead bodies in hospitals after several images circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp depicting silver body bags on gurneys lined up in public hospital wards. In some cases, the dead were tucked beside beds with recovering patients.
Speaking to reporters on Friday afternoon, Ms. Ho said officials had examined the photographs and had “dealt with those cases.” She said that since the photos were taken, officials had added temporary facilities to help store bodies. She also asked for patience and understanding, saying that hospitals were under “immense pressure” and in “unprecedented” circumstances.
“We are trying our very best to provide more manpower to deal with this situation,” she said, “and we ask for understanding from patients.”
Congress approved a $1.5 trillion federal spending measure on Thursday, with substantial increases for domestic and national security programs and $13.6 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine as it battles Russia’s invasion, but without a $15.6 billion emergency aid package meant to help fund President Biden’s pandemic strategy. Mr. Biden was expected to quickly sign the measure.
To clear the way for passage, Democrats had to drop some priorities, most notably the White House request for more pandemic aid. Republicans objected to spending any new federal money on the coronavirus response, prompting Democrats first to whittle down the size of that package, and then to claw back funding from existing aid programs, including money for state governments, to pay for it.
But that strategy infuriated rank-and-file Democrats and governors in both parties, who balked at yanking promised state assistance, and leaders were forced to strip the aid from the package. They vowed to try again to pass it in the coming days, but Republican support was unclear, leaving in doubt the fate of the administration’s new pandemic plan. The plan calls for the continued supply of essential Covid treatments, the development of next-generation vaccines and support for the global pandemic response.
“The bipartisan funding bill proves once more that members of both parties can come together to deliver results for the American people,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. But, she added, “we continue to call on Congress to provide the funds urgently needed to prevent severe disruptions to our Covid response.”
Over the past two years, Congress has appropriated more than $370 billion in pandemic response funds to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The bulk of that money has been directed to health care providers; less than half, about $140 billion, was for testing, therapeutics and vaccines.
The administration’s spending chart, obtained by The New York Times, shows that all of the money has been spent or is already spoken for. (That includes spending by the Trump administration.) The Biden administration had initially asked Congress for $22.5 billion in additional pandemic aid, including $12 billion for procuring treatments and vaccines and $4.25 billion to support the global pandemic response; that was whittled down to $15.6 billion.
A White House spokesman, Kevin Munoz, warned on Wednesday that if Congress did not appropriate more money, testing capacity would decline in March and the fund that pays for Covid testing and treatments for tens of millions of uninsured Americans would run dry in April.
However, Democrats did secure some additional funds for pandemic preparedness. That includes $745 million, an increase of $148 million, for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and $845 million, an increase of $140 million, for the Strategic National Stockpile, an emergency medical reserve intended to guard against infectious disease and bioterrorism threats.
Catie Edmondson and Benjamin Mueller contributed reporting.
Last June, a meeting of the Dutchess County Legislature in New York’s Hudson Valley quickly turned heated over how to spend some of the county’s $57 million in federal pandemic relief aid.
Residents and Democratic lawmakers implored the Republican majority to address longstanding problems that the pandemic had exacerbated. They cited opioid abuse, poverty and food insecurity.
In the end, the Legislature voted 15 to 10 to devote $12.5 million to renovate a minor-league baseball stadium that is home to the Hudson Valley Renegades, a Yankees affiliate.
Cities and counties across the United States have found themselves in the surprisingly uncomfortable position of deciding how best to spend a windfall of federal relief funds intended to help keep them afloat amid deadly waves of Covid-19 infections.
The pandemic prompted the largest infusion of federal money into the U.S. economy since the New Deal. President Biden and President Donald J. Trump got Congress to approve roughly $5 trillion to help support families, shop owners, unemployed workers, schools and businesses.
A large portion of the aid went to state, local and tribal governments. The largest chunk came from Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion recovery bill, the American Rescue Plan, which earmarked $350 billion. That money is just beginning to flow to communities, which have until 2026 to spend it.
“We’ve sent you a whole hell of a lot of money,” Mr. Biden said during a meeting with the nation’s governors in January.
In many cases, the money has become an unusually public and contentious marker of what matters most to a place — and who gets to make those decisions.
Stimulus bills approved by Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by Covid-19.
Here’s a breakdown, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington that has maintained the most comprehensive tally of pandemic financial support.
$1.8 trillion went to individuals and families, including stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, the child tax credit expansion, food assistance, delayed student loan payments and child care block grants.
$1.7 trillion supported businesses, through measures like the Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, loosened limits on tax-deductible losses and aid to airlines and restaurants
$745 billion went to state and local aid, via the American Rescue Plan and the CARES Act, along with support for elementary and secondary education and transit, an increased federal share of Medicaid payments and other measures.
$482 billion was funneled into health care, including grants to providers; purchases of and funds for the development of vaccines and Covid treatments; Medicaid coverage and Medicare changes; and a variety of other initiatives.
$288 billion went to other programs, including disaster spending, housing programs, payments to farmers, grants to colleges and universities, and support for transportation programs and defense agencies.
Economists largely credit these financial jolts with helping the U.S. economy recover more quickly than it otherwise would have from the largest downturn since the Great Depression: The pandemic recession was the shortest on record, lasting only three months.
“What the money did was to basically make sure that when we could reopen, people had money to spend, their credit rating wasn’t ruined, they weren’t evicted and kids weren’t going hungry,” said Louise Sheiner, an economist with the Brookings Institution. “It is a lesson that if you don’t want a recession to have really long-lasting bad effects you spend a bunch of money and you prevent it.”
Yet as the anniversary of the American Rescue Plan approaches, and nearly two years after the government effort began with the CARES Act, the full impact of the spending remains unclear. Some of the money has yet to be distributed. Some of the aid has been criticized as wasteful or has resulted in alleged fraud. And some economists, along with a lot of Republican lawmakers, say the flood of cash has helped fuel inflation.
Just as the global economy was on track to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and global sanctions against Moscow are rippling through logistics and supply chains, creating bottlenecks in the transport of goods and commodities and threatening fresh economic pain for countries and businesses near the conflict zone.
Transport companies, maritime insurance executives and industry analysts say the two-week-old war, combined with uncertainty fueled by the sanctions, is causing backups of ships at some ports and could lead to longer delays in shipments, especially around Europe.
The cost of transporting cargo delivered by sea, land and air, which had already jumped during the pandemic, is also under pressure as global oil prices surged past $130 a barrel this week.
“We thought we experienced a bounce-back from Covid in January and February,” said Detlef Trefzger, the chief executive of Swiss-based Kuehne+Nagel, one of the world’s largest transport companies, which delivers cargo by ship, air, rail and truck. “But the Ukraine-Russia crisis is a huge setback,” he said, “and it will be a long-lasting setback.”
The most visceral blow is being felt near the heart of the war zone, in the Black Sea.
More than 100 ships and their crews have been stranded at Ukrainian ports since Russia invaded Ukraine. Missiles have hit several commercial vessels, and an explosion on or near an Estonian dry cargo vessel sank it 20 miles off Odessa, a Ukrainian port. The Russian and Ukrainian crew members all survived.
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