December 1: 63,750,408 cases worldwide; 1,477,230 deaths worldwide

274,386 COVID Deaths USA

December 1:  13,923,758 cases in the USA; 274,386 deaths in the USA.

Advisory Committee Recommendations

December 2: the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, voted to recommend that residents and employees of nursing homes and similar facilities be the first people in the United States to receive coronavirus vaccines, along with health care workers who are especially at risk of being exposed to the virus.

The panel voted 13 to 1 during an emergency meeting to make the recommendation. The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Robert R. Redfield, was expected to decidequickly whether to accept it as the agency’s formal guidance to states as they prepared to start giving people the shots as soon as within two weeks.

“We are acting none too soon,” said Dr. Beth Bell, a panel member and global health expert at the University of Washington, noting that Covid-19 would kill about 120 Americans during the meeting alone. [NYT article]

December 2020 COVID 19

The UK First

December 3: the NYT reported that Britain gave emergency authorization to Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, leaping ahead of the United States to become the first Western country to allow mass inoculations against a disease that had killed more than 1.4 million people worldwide.

US Single-Day Record

December 3: the United States  recorded its single-worst daily death toll since the pandemic began, and on a day when Covid-19 hospitalizations also hit an all-time high, the pace of loss showed no signs of slowing any time soon.

Not since spring, during the pandemic’s first peak, were so many deaths reported. The high point then was 2,752 deaths on April 15. On this date, it was at least 2,760.

Hospitalizations from the virus topped 100,000 — more than double the number at the beginning of November. That was a clear indicator of what the days ahead may look like, experts say.

“If you tell me the hospitalizations are up this week, I’ll tell you that several weeks down the road, the deaths will be up,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. [NYT article]

December 2020 COVID 19

December 4: the United States finished one of the very worst weeks since the coronavirus pandemic had began nine months ago.

On December 4, a national single-day record was set, with more than 226,000 new cases. It was one of many data points that illustrated the depth and spread of a virus that had killed more than 278,000 people in this country, more than the entire population of Lubbock, Texas, or Modesto, Calif., or Jersey City, N.J.

“It’s just an astonishing number,” said Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We’re in the middle of this really severe wave and I think as we go through the day to day of this pandemic, it can be easy to lose sight of how massive and deep the tragedy is.” [NYT story]

December 2020 COVID 19

1,527,144 COVID Deaths Worldwide

December 2020 COVID 19

December 8: Britain’s National Health Service delivered its first shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, opening a mass vaccination campaign with little precedent in modern medicine and making Britons the first people in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested vaccine.  [NYT story}

December 2020 COVID 19

1,553,081 COVID Deaths Worldwide

December 2020 COVID 19

December 9: the NYT reported that federal data showed more than a third of Americans lived in areas where hospitals were running critically short of intensive care beds

Hospitals serving more than 100 million Americans reported having fewer than 15 percent of intensive care beds still available as of last previous week, according to a Times analysis of data reported by hospitals and released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Many areas were even worse off: one in 10 Americans — across a large swath of the Midwest, South and Southwest — lived in an area where intensive care beds are either completely full, or fewer than 5 percent of beds are available. At these levels, experts say maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible.

“There’s only so much our frontline care can offer, particularly when you get to these really rural counties which are being hit hard by the pandemic right now,” said Beth Blauer, director of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University.

December 2020 COVID 19

December 11: the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, clearing the way for millions of highly vulnerable people to begin receiving the vaccine within days.

The authorization was an historic turning point in a pandemic that had already taken more than 290,000 lives in the United States. With the decision, the United States became the sixth country — in addition to Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico — to clear the vaccine. Other authorizations, including by the European Union, were expected within weeks. [NYT article]

December 2020 COVID 19

1,607,590 COVID Deaths Worldwide

Previous and subsequent COVID-19 posts:

• COVID 19 Pandemic Begins
• February 2020 COVID 19
• March 2020 COVID 19
• April 2020 COVID 19
• May 2020 COVID 19
• Trump/COVID 19 Begin
• Trump COVID 19 Continue
• April 2020 Trump COVID
• June 2020 COVID 19
• July 2020 COVID 19
• August 2020 COVID 19
• September 2020 COVID 19
• October 2020 COVID 19
• November 2020 Covid 19
• Winter 2021 COVID 19
• Spring 2021 COVID 19
• Summer 2021 COVID 19
• Fall Winter 2021 COVID

October 2: 34,529,384 case worldwide; 1,028,517 deaths worldwide

212,694 COVID Deaths USA

October 2:  7,497,256 cases in the USA; 212,694 deaths in the USA.

October 2: President Trump was hospitalized less than 24 hours after learning that he had the coronavirus. Aides said Mr. Trump was experiencing coughing, congestion and fever, symptoms that worsened through the day.

Mr. Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after being given an experimental antibody treatment. Officials said he would remain in the hospital for several days and canceled his upcoming campaign events. [NYT story]

October 2020 COVID 19

Pope Francis Criticizes Response

October 4: Pope Francis criticized the failures of global cooperation in response to the coronavirus pandemic in a document that underscored the priorities of his pontificate.

“As I was writing this letter, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities,” Francis said in the encyclical, the most authoritative form of papal teaching. “Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident. For all our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all,” he added.

“Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality,” the pope said.

The encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” is a reflection on fraternity and social friendship heavily influenced by St. Francis of Assisi, after whom the pope took his name. [NYT article]

1,042,989 COVID Deaths Worldwide

October 13: 38,100,378 case worldwide; 1,086,417 deaths worldwide

214,636 COVID Deaths USA

October 13:  8,038,391 cases in the USA; 220,021 deaths in the USA.

October 2020 COVID 19

Second Trial Paused

October 13: a government-sponsored clinical trial testing an antibody treatment made by the drug company Eli Lilly was paused because of a “potential safety concern,” according to emails that government officials sent  to researchers at testing sites, and confirmed by the company.

The news comes just a day after Johnson & Johnson announced the pause of its coronavirus vaccine trial because of a sick volunteer, and a month after AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial was halted over concerns about two participants who had fallen ill after getting the company’s vaccine.

The Eli Lilly trial was designed to test the benefits of the therapy on hundreds of people hospitalized with Covid-19, compared with a placebo. All of the study participants also received another experimental drug, remdesivir, which has become commonly used to treat patients with Covid-19. It is unclear how many volunteers were sick, and what the details of their illnesses were. [NYT article] (trial, see Oct 23 below)

October 2020 COVID 19

Trump Demeans Fauci

October 19: President Trump attacked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as “a disaster”  and said, despite signs that the nation was headed toward another coronavirus peak, that people were “tired” of hearing about the virus from “these idiots” in the government. [NYT article]

Chinese Vaccine

October 20: the NY Times reported that Tian Baoguo, a senior official at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, said at a news conference that Chinese vaccines had been administered to 60,000 people in clinical trials, many of them around the world, and none of them had experienced any serious adverse reactions.

 “Initial results show that they are safe,” he said.

More deaths

October 20: the NY Times reported that a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the coronavirus pandemic caused nearly 300,000 deaths in the United States through early October.

The new tally included not only deaths known to had been directly caused by the coronavirus, but also roughly 100,000 fatalities that were indirectly related and would not have occurred if not for the virus.

The study was an attempt to measure “excess deaths” — deaths from all causes that statistically exceed those normally occurring in a certain time period. The total included deaths from Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, that were misclassified or missed altogether.

Many experts believe this measure tracks the pandemic’s impact more accurately than official Covid-19 death reports do, and they warned that the death toll might continue an inexorable climb if policies are not put in effect to contain the spread.

1,086,417 COVID Deaths Worldwide

October 2020 COVID 19

October 21: the NY Times reported that according to a New York Times database, in the past seven days, seven countries — Argentina, Brazil, Britain, France, India, Russia and the United States — had reported at least 100,000 new cases of the coronavirus, helping to push total cases worldwide to more than 40.7 million,

In many cases, these countries saw numbers that were much higher than they were during the height of the pandemic in the spring.  At that point most countries locked down, stopping movement and much interpersonal contact.

October 2020 COVID 19

October 22: the Food and Drug Administration said  that it had formally approved remdesivir as the first drug to treat Covid-19, a move that indicated the government’s confidence in its safe and effective use for hospitalized patients.

The F.D.A. said the antiviral drug had been approved for adults and pediatric patients 12 years of age and older and weighing at least 40 kilograms (about 88 pounds) who require hospitalization for Covid-19. [NYT article]

October 2020 COVID 19

Most Severe Surge

October 23: the NYT reported that the United States was in the midst of one of the most severe surges of the coronavirus to date, with more new cases reported across the country on October 23 than on any other single day since the pandemic began.

Since the start of October, the rise in cases had been steady and inexorable, with no plateau in sight. By the end of the day, more than 85,000 cases had been reported across the country, breaking the single-day record set on July 16 by about 10,000 cases.

Trials Resumed

October 23: the late-stage coronavirus vaccine trials run by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson resumed in the United States after the companies said that serious illnesses in a few volunteers appeared not to be related to the vaccines.

Federal health regulators gave AstraZeneca the green light after a six-week pause, concluding there was no evidence that the experimental vaccine had directly caused the neurological side effects reported in two participants. The AstraZeneca news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Johnson & Johnson said that its trial, which had been on pause for 11 days, would restart after learning that a “serious medical event” in one study volunteer had “no clear cause.” In an interview, the company’s chief scientific officer, Dr. Paul Stoffels, said that no one at the company knew if the volunteer had received the placebo or the vaccine, in order to preserve the integrity of the trial.  [NYT article]

Possible Antibody Issue

October 23: the NY Times reported on a study had found some survivors of Covid-19 carried worrying signs that their immune system had turned on the body, reminiscent of potentially debilitating diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, .

The study suggested that at some point, the body’s defense system in these patients shifted into attacking itself, rather than the virus, . The patients produced molecules called “autoantibodies” that target genetic material from human cells, instead of from the virus.

This misguided immune response may exacerbate severe Covid-19. It could also explain why so-called “long haulers” have lingering problems months after their initial illness has resolved and the virus is gone from their bodies.

October 2020 COVID 19

1,150,808 COVID Deaths Worldwide

October 30: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  reported that people who contracted Covid-19 could quickly spread the virus through their households, based on a study of 101 patients in Tennessee and Wisconsin, and 191 of their household contacts.

And “substantial transmission” occurred, whether the first patient was an adult or a child, the researchers found. The transmission rate was high across all racial and ethnic groups. [NYT article]

October 2020 COVID 19

1,173,663 COVID Deaths Worldwide