Parts of California will enter strict restrictions in reaction to the threat posed to hospitals by the pandemic.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced potential new restrictions for a large swathe of California, citing the possibility of hospitals being overrun as COVID-19 cases rise. In regions where intensive care unit capacity drops below 15%, residents will be required to stay home unless they are engaged in essential activities.
Newsom is dividing California into five separate regions to enforce the order. While no region yet faces an ICU shortage, health officials say that some could reach it as soon as next week. A stay-at-home order would last three weeks.
“If we don’t act now, our hospital system will be overwhelmed,” Newsom said Thursday.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in California have increased steadily since the start of November and reached a record high on Wednesday, with more than 9,300 new patients admitted. An average of 8,208 patients have been hospitalized daily over the past week, compared with a seven-day average of 3,164 new hospitalizations each day on Nov. 3, according to COVID Tracking Project data.
“We really all need to step up,” Newsom said. “We need to meet this moment head-on, and we need to do everything we can to stem the tide, to bend the curve.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued a new stay-at-home order Wednesday, saying that the city “is now close to a devastating tipping point, beyond which the number of hospitalized patients would start to overwhelm our hospital system.”
The order requires people to remain in their homes and to congregate with no one outside their household. People who are homeless are exempt from the requirement.
“My message couldn’t be simpler: It’s time to hunker down,” Garcetti said. “It’s time to cancel everything, and if it isn’t essential, don’t do it.”
Businesses in Los Angeles that require in-person attendance must cease operations, with exceptions for essential businesses, including healthcare operations, grocery stores, organizations and businesses that provide food, shelter, and social services, gas stations and auto repair shops, and banks.
To date, more than 14 million cases and over 275,000 deaths due to COVID-19 have been confirmed in the United States. The true number of infections is much higher than reported because many people don’t bother to get tested, have only mild symptoms, or never experience symptoms at all.
The test positive rate has been on the rise for the past week. The average daily rate of tests coming back positive during the week ending on Thanksgiving was 9.5%, compared with a seven-day average of 10.5% on Wednesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a wide-reaching coronavirus immunization campaign with the vaccine approved by government scientists without completing rigorous studies to ensure safety and efficacy, the Associated Press reported. Putin said that roughly 2 million doses of the vaccine that government researchers have named Sputnik V have been produced or will be produced within the next few days.
“This gives us the opportunity to start … large-scale vaccination, and, of course, as we agreed, first of all of the two risk groups — doctors and teachers,” Putin told government officials. He directed Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova to “organize the work in such a way so that large-scale vaccination starts by the end of next week.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city has hit the highest test positivity rate since May. The city already blew past the 5% positivity rate warning marker in October.
“It’s quite clear at this point that this second wave is right upon us,” de Blasio said Thursday.
President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Obama administration official Jeff Zients and former Obama Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to lead his coronavirus response team, Politico reported.
Zients will coordinate the administration’s response to the pandemic. His responsibilities will include overseeing a surge in testing. Murthy will return to his role as surgeon general, but he will also be a medical expert and public face of the response. He has been deeply involved in the formulation of Biden’s coronavirus plans.
Top government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had the first “substantive discussions” with the incoming Biden administration Thursday. Fauci said he and Biden’s “landing team” will set priorities for curtailing the outbreak, having already gotten a late start after President Trump delayed the transition team’s access to privileged information about the pandemic.
Biden said later Thursday that he asked Fauci to remain in his position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and become his “chief medical adviser” and “part of the COVID team.”
“You have to make sure, as he points out, that you don’t have to close down the economy like a lot of folks are talking about, if, in fact, you have clear guidance,” Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Biden revealed how he planned to issue an executive order that requires masks in all government buildings and said he’d make a plea to the public asking citizens to wear a medical mask for 100 days.
After criticizing the United Kingdom’s process for approving the COVID-19 vaccine, Fauci clarified to the BBC that there was “no judgment on the way the U.K. did it.”
“I have a great deal of confidence in what the U.K. does both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint,” Fauci said.
Earlier Thursday, Fauci said the British government “really rushed through that approval.”
“You know, I love the Brits. They’re great. They’re good scientists,” Fauci said in an interview with CBS News on Thursday. “But they just took the data from the Pfizer company. And instead of scrutinizing it really, really carefully, they said, ‘OK, let’s approve it. That’s it.’ And they went with it.”
With so many people skeptical of a COVID-19 vaccine, he suggested, it would have been unwise for the Food and Drug Administration to have moved at the speed of the U.K.
“I think that the credibility of our regulatory process would have been damaged,” he said.
The eight leading coronavirus vaccine contenders, including those from Pfizer and Moderna, were not developed with cell lines from aborted fetuses, researchers at the anti-abortion think tank the Charlotte Lozier Institute reported.
The group praised the companies Pfizer and Moderna for making vaccines without the controversial cell lines while still noting that both vaccines were tested with abortion-derived cell lines. The group also warned that using aborted fetal cell lines in any capacity would further erode public confidence in the vaccine and dissuade people from getting it.
Facebook will now remove false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
On Thursday morning, the social media giant announced it will start to remove posts that contain inaccurate information regarding coronavirus vaccines “that have been debunked by public health experts on Facebook and Instagram,” according to a press release.
The new policy, which is another way it is applying its COVID-19 misinformation policy, will look for false claims about the “safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccine.”
