Coronavirus live news: US tops 140,000 daily cases as world suffers record death toll
Incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain says president-elect Joe Biden will appoint a “Covid coordinator” who will lead the administration’s pandemic response.
Klain, speaking on MSNBC on Thursday night, said the individual will have “direct access” to the president and will brief him daily on the pandemic. They will also have a team of people underneath them, who will coordinate vaccine distribution, address supply chain disruptions and improve access to testing.
Klain served in a similar role in 2014 under President Barack Obama, when he was the administration’s Ebola response coordinator.
His comments illuminate how the incoming Biden administration is considering addressing the pandemic when he enters office next year.
This week, he announced a panel of doctors and public health experts tasked with turning his campaign trail proposals for tackling Covid-19 into actionable plans.
The surge of new coronavirus cases appears to be slowing in Germany and France, generating hopes that the two European heavyweights are beginning to regain control over the pandemic, AP is reporting.
But authorities have said that hospitals are crowded and are likely to face further strain in the coming weeks with numbers of confirmed cases hitting records and contact-tracing efforts being overwhelmed even in Germany, which was credited with handling the pandemic’s first cases well and is still in better shape than most of its neighbours.
Germany embarked on its four-week “lockdown light” on 2 November. Restaurants, bars, sports and leisure facilities have closed, but schools and shops remain open.
One death in four in France is linked to Covid, and there were more virus patients in French hospitals as of Thursday than there were during the peak of the country’s first epidemic in the spring.
But the number of people infected per 100,000 has been dropping for 10 days, and the number of virus patients is hospitals is expected to peak early next week.
President Donald Trump has publicly disengaged from the battle against the coronavirus at a moment when the disease is tearing across the US at an alarming pace, AP is reporting.
Trump, fresh off his reelection loss to president-elect Joe Biden, remains angry that an announcement about progress in developing a vaccine for the disease came after election day.
Aides say the president has shown little interest in the growing crisis, which has killed more than 240,000 Americans and infected more than 10 million people in the US, with new confirmed cases skyrocketing and hospital intensive care units in parts of the country nearing capacity.
Public health experts worry that Trump’s refusal to take aggressive action on the pandemic or to coordinate with the Biden team during the final two months of his presidency will only worsen the effects of the virus and hinder the nation’s ability to swiftly distribute a vaccine next year.
With more than 100,000 new confirmed US cases reported daily for more than a week, Trump has been more focused on tracking the rollout of a vaccine, which won’t be widely available for months.
He has fumed that Pfizer intentionally withheld an announcement about progress on its vaccine trial until after election day, according to a White House official. Pfizer said it did not purposely withhold trial results.
More on AP’s story about how a resurgence of the coronavirus in New York City is threatening to halt the nation’s biggest experiment with in-person learning.
The city’s public school system this autumn became one of just a few large, urban districts in the US to welcome students back into classrooms. A little more than a quarter of the city’s 1.1 million pupils have been attending classes in person between one and three days a week.
A few weeks ago, parents were told to send their children back to school or forfeit the option of having them return later this academic year.
But as the Sunday deadline, the city also approached the mayor’s threshold for closing all school buildings: if 3% of the Covid-19 tests performed in the city over a seven-day period come back positive. On Thursday, that citywide positivity rate was at 2.6%.
Some parents expressed frustration that they were being asked to make a decision about sending children back into classrooms, when the city itself is not even sure what will happen in the days ahead.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has insisted it is safe for children to be in school as long as officials are quick to close things down when there is a problem. If a shutdown does happen, he said, “we’re going to figure out what it takes to come back as quickly as possible”.
A quick update, courtesy of AP, on some coronavirus news across the world:
US: Trump has publicly disengaged from the battle against the coronavirus at a time when the disease is tearing across the United States at an alarming pace.
Experts are warning that Massachusetts could be headed for a bleak winter as coronavirus cases climb again and confirmed deaths surpass 10,000.
A resurgence of the coronavirus in New York City is threatening to halt the nation’s biggest experiment with in-person learning
Asia: South Korea has reported its biggest daily jump in covid-19 cases in 70 days as the government begins fining people who fail to wear masks in public.
Singapore: Volunteers spend Sundays to help Singapore’s less fortunate.
Good morning, Amelia Hill here taking over the reins in the northern hemisphere to bring you the news that matters across the globe.
As beleaguered Croydon council declared effective bankruptcy on Wednesday afternoon its interim chief executive, Kathryn Kerswell, sent an ominous wake-up-call memo to staff: “Too many of us are still operating like business as usual,” she warned, “and are not facing up to our new reality that we are actually in a financial crisis.”
The methodical drip-drip erosion of council budgets in recent years had maybe inured some to the scale of the challenge now facing the south London borough. Bankruptcy came suddenly, but the origins of the council’s woes go back years, driven by heady dreams of making Croydon a major housing developer, and hampered by a culture of lax financial controls and poor governance:
The lateral flow test bought by the UK government for mass testing in Liverpool, and potentially the whole country, could miss up to half of those who have Covid-19, according to experts.
The government has great expectations of the Innova test, having signed two contracts with the California-based company behind it. Innova told the Guardian it was now shipping more than one million tests a day to the UK.
The Guardian understands the government also hopes to use the test to reduce the length of self-isolation among people identified as the contacts of those with the coronavirus.
Results of an evaluation of the lateral flow tests, which pick up the antigen of the virus from a nose or throat swab or saliva within half an hour, were released by the government on Wednesday. It said they could be used to pick up infection in people with no symptoms:
Urgent preparations are under way across the UK for the rollout of the Covid vaccine, after the momentous news on Monday that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had proven 90% effective. Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, has said the country and the NHS is gearing up for the “most important vaccination programme we’ve done for decades”. But that has raised questions about which organisations inside and outside government will be doing what to speed delivery:
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. In Trump-not-talking-about-coronavirus-but-tweeting-about-a-lot-of-other-stuff news:
The world has suffered the highest death toll of the pandemic so far, with 11,617 people dying in 24 hours, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The number of cases confirmed was also a record, at more than 666,000 in a day.
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
The US topped 140,000 daily cases, again breaking world record. As the US confirmed a world record 143,231 coronavirus cases in 24 hours, Dr. Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t believe the United States will need to go into lockdown to fight the coronavirus if people double down on wearing masks and social distancing.The nation’s top infectious disease expert says “the cavalry is coming” in the form of vaccines. He says, “Help is really on the way.”
UK confirms record new cases. Britain hit a new daily high of 33,470 confirmed coronavirus cases on Thursday. That’s an increase of 10,520 more positives reported Wednesday and pushed the total number of cases in the UK to nearly 1.3 million, AP reports.
Five passengers test positive for Covid-19 on Caribbean cruise ship. One of the first cruise ships to ply through Caribbean waters since the pandemic began ended its trip early after five passengers tested positive for Covid-19.The SeaDream is carrying 53 passengers and 66 crew, with the majority of passengers hailing from the US, according to Sue Bryant, a cruise ship reporter who is aboard the ship.
California becomes second state in US to surpass 1m Covid-19 cases. California crossed a grim milestone in its battle against the coronavirus, as the state became the second in the US to surpass 1m cases of Covid-19 on Thursday. With 1,000,631 total cases as of Thursday, California saw nearly 7,000 cases in the past 24 hours, with a seven-day test positivity rate at 5%.
Japan confirmed a record daily case increase. Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, has said there is no need to declare a second state of emergency after the country recorded a record number of daily coronavirus cases. Japan reported 1,660 infections on Thursday – including 393 in Tokyo – beating the previous record set in early August. The surge prompted the president of the Tokyo Medical Association, Toshio Nakagawa, to warn that the country had entered a “third wave” of infections.
New Zealand reopened downtown Auckland on Friday after contact tracing of a new coronavirus case revealed it was linked to a known case from a border isolation facility, reversing an earlier call for people to work from home.
Australia will not allow foreign students to return as Canberra prioritises the return of locals stuck overseas, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday. Australia has since March closed its borders to all non-citizens and permanent residents in a bid to slow the spread of Covid-19.
South Korea will begin fining people who fail to wear masks in public on Friday as it reported 191 new coronavirus cases, with daily infections continuing to creep higher, Reuters reports.
People caught without masks in public venues, including nightclubs, malls, theme parks and hair salons, face fines of up to 100,000 won ($90), while the operators of those places could pay up to 3 million won in fines.
Workers from the Seoul Metro put up a banner reading “People who do not wear masks in public will face a 100,000 won (US$90) fine”, at a subway station in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, 13 November 2020. Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP
The country had been praised for its response to the pandemic including aggressive testing and contact tracing, but has struggled to contain small cluster outbreaks, with daily cases hovering around 100 in recent weeks.
Thousands of ordinary people around Britain volunteered to take part in the Imperial College London coronavirus vaccine trial. Who are they, what motivated them to take part, and what’s it been like?
The answers – and a delightful portrait gallery – below:
