Covid Live Updates: Biden Administration Plans to Stop Turning Away Immigrants Under Public Health Rule in May
President Biden appealed to Congress for key aid, warning that U.S. progress is at stake. He also got his second booster. In Asia, Hong Kong is running out of coffins as it faces a surge in deaths.
The Biden administration is expected to announce plans this week to lift an emergency public health order that has restricted immigration at U.S. land borders since the beginning of the pandemic, according to people familiar with the planning.
The change, which is to take effect in late May, will allow migrants entering the country to once again seek asylum without being quickly turned back because of public health concerns during the pandemic.
Officials are anticipating that the lifting of the order, known as Title 42, will draw even more migrants from Central America and other regions to the southwest border, where the number intercepted by border officials has already broken records in recent months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued the order and is responsible for deciding when to lift it, had been under increasing pressure from Democratic members of Congress and human rights advocates to do so.
The stakes are high, from both a humanitarian standpoint and a political one. Democrats do not want the southwest border to appear out of control in the months ahead of the midterm elections, which would fuel more Republican attacks on the Biden administration’s border policies.
But public health experts have said the order, meant to prevent migrants from spreading the coronavirus in the United States, has no grounding in science and that migrants do not pose a serious transmission risk, especially at this point in the pandemic.
Homeland security officials on Tuesday described contingency plans for managing as many as 18,000 encounters a day at the border once the order is no longer in place. Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other federal agencies, and state and local officials, the department is prepared to have on standby additional personnel, buses and planes, medical assistance, and temporary facilities for processing migrants.
Since October, border officials have apprehended 900,000 undocumented migrants at the southwest border, according to the Homeland Security Department. During the 2021 fiscal year, undocumented migrants were caught a record-breaking 1.7 million times. The number of illegal crossings went up significantly after President Biden took office compared with the previous year, when numbers were down, in part because of the pandemic. Currently, border officials are apprehending about 7,000 undocumented migrants a day on the southwest border.
The Biden administration has defended the continued use of the order, citing the C.D.C.’s assessment that lifting it would pose a public health threat during the pandemic. But critics say the public health order has been used as an immigration control tool.
President Biden stepped up the pressure on Congress to approve billions of dollars in emergency coronavirus relief aid, using a speech at the White House on Wednesday to warn that U.S. progress against Covid-19 would be at severe risk if Congress fails to act right away.
“This isn’t partisan. It’s medicine,” Mr. Biden declared. At the end of his remarks, he rolled up his sleeve to get his second booster shot, in keeping with a recent move by federal regulators to clear the shots for Americans older than 50.
Mr. Biden also highlighted a new one-stop-shopping coronavirus website, covid.gov, aimed at helping Americans navigate access to testing, treatment, vaccines and masks, and to assess the risk of Covid-19 in their neighborhoods. The site went live Wednesday morning.
The website, and Mr. Biden’s speech, are part of a broader effort to ease the nation out of pandemic crisis mode and usher in what experts are calling the “next normal” — a phase in which Americans will learn to live with the risk of Covid-19 and to adjust behavior like mask wearing based on whether cases and hospitalizations are rising or falling.
That strategy depends on the availability of vaccines and therapeutics, though, and the administration says it is out of money for both. The White House has been pleading with Republicans in Congress to approve $22.5 billion in emergency aid to purchase new vaccines and therapeutics, and to reimburse doctors who care for uninsured Covid-19 patients.
The federal government said recently that a fund established to reimburse doctors was no longer accepting those claims for testing and treatment “due to lack of sufficient funds.”
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers expressed optimism that a deal could be struck before Congress leaves next week for a two-week April recess, with meetings and private talks set to continue on Wednesday. But it remains unclear how the package will be paid for — a crucial Republican demand that has delayed passage.
“We’re looking at all the pots of money that hasn’t been spent,” said Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah. “And we’re going to provide some flexibility between ourselves and the Democrats on those buckets, but we’re making progress and hopefully we’ll get there soon.”
Mr. Romney has been leading talks with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who warned of dire consequences if a deal is not reached. “If Covid comes upon us again, another variant, and we are not prepared and it takes two, three months to get going and by then the new variant has its tentacles deep in our society, woe is us,” Mr. Schumer said.
While new coronavirus case reports have been falling in the United States, a highly transmissible Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 has driven a surge in cases in Europe, and many experts expect that the United States may soon see the same. Should that occur, it will be the first major test of the country’s new strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact.
Around the country, state and local governments have relaxed restrictions like mask and vaccine mandates. White House and federal health officials have been making the case for weeks that Americans now have the tools — testing infrastructure, masks and other mitigation strategies, and drugs and vaccines — to live with the threat of the virus.
On Tuesday, federal health officials cleared second booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines for everyone 50 or older and for many people with certain immune deficiencies, at least four months after their first booster. They described the move as an effort to bolster waning immunity against severe disease before another surge can take hold.
In his State of the Union address, Mr. Biden announced a new “test to treat” initiative — a network of pharmacies and other sites where people can be tested for the coronavirus and then receive antiviral drugs if they test positive. More than 2,000 sites are participating, the White House said. The covid.gov website features a “test-to-treat” locator tool to help people find participating locations.
Under a banner saying “Find Covid-19 guidance for your community,” the website asks users to enter the name of the county in which they live. It then identifies whether the risk of Covid-19 in that county is low, medium or high, depending on factors including the number of hospitalizations and available hospital beds.
The site also links to other government websites, including vaccines.gov and covidtests.gov, that help users access vaccines and find nearby testing sites.
Tracking the Coronavirus ›
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyWASHINGTON — President Biden received a second booster shot against the coronavirus on Wednesday afternoon, a day after federal health officials cleared an additional booster dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines for people over 50 and for many of those who have compromised immune systems.
Officials said that people in those two categories could get another shot at least four months after they received their first booster. Mr. Biden received a Pfizer-BioNTech booster in late September.
Earlier in the day, the White House said Mr. Biden, 79, would be getting a Pfizer shot as his second booster on Wednesday. The president got his shot after making remarks about the status of the fight against the pandemic, in which he highlighted a new website.
Mr. Biden and his top public health advisers have repeatedly urged people to get fully vaccinated with the initial two-shot regime required with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. And they have said that everyone should get boosted because the initial vaccination’s effectiveness against infection from the virus diminishes over time.
In taking the shot, the president is hoping to encourage a population that is already weary of the fight against Covid-19 and over the vaccines. Officials said far fewer people have received booster shots than original vaccinations.
Lawmakers and their staffs on Capitol Hill were informed on Wednesday that they too were now allowed to receive a second booster dose, if they are older than 50 or meet other criteria.
As Americans shed masks and return to offices and restaurants, officials in states across the country are scaling back the most visible public health efforts to address the coronavirus pandemic: free state-run testing and vaccination sites.
States like Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and Ohio have also stopped releasing daily data on virus hospitalizations, infections and deaths.
The cutbacks are coming at a time when the virus appears, at least for now, to be in retreat in the United States as a whole, with cases falling swiftly in recent weeks. But the more transmissible version of the Omicron variant, known as BA.2, is already surging in Europe and Asia and has become the dominant cause of new cases in the United States, and the statistics have started to edge upward once again in several states, including New York.
And Americans still lag behind many other countries in vaccination. Only about 65 percent of Americans have completed an initial vaccination so far, and less than one-third have had a first booster shot. With protection waning overt time, federal authorities announced on Tuesday that people 50 or older could get a second booster shot.
If the United States is in for another surge, public health officials said, it could be difficult to quickly restore the vaccination and testing sites and other measures that are now being shut down. But may local officials say they cost too much to keep open when demand is low, and federal support is drying up.
“If people aren’t walking in the door, it burns a lot of cash to have a fully staffed testing center,” said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine. “So I can understand why states and localities are closing them. We’re going to have to find a way to be flexible.”
Maintaining that flexibility may prove challenging.
“I’m concerned about what’s next,” said Robert Spencer, chief executive of Kintegra Health, which operates health centers across central North Carolina. Noting that Kintegra's mobile testing and vaccination clinics have relied on federal reimbursement that is longer available, he said, “When I shut it down, and all these people go find other jobs, and the next variant comes along, will I be ready?”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyThe highly contagious Omicron subvariant known as BA.2, which led to a surge of coronavirus cases in Europe, is now the dominant version of the virus in new U.S. cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday.
Last week, the World Health Organization reiterated that BA.2 was the dominant version of Omicron around the world, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said she anticipated it would soon become dominant in the United States.
Scientists have been keeping an eye on BA.2, one of three genetically distinct varieties of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which was discovered by South African researchers in November.
BA.2 was first identified in the United States in December, and it accounted for about 55 percent of new U.S. cases in the week ending Saturday, according to C.D.C. estimates on Tuesday. The figures are rough estimates subject to revision as more data comes in, as happened in late December, when the agency had to significantly decrease its estimate for the nationwide prevalence of the BA.1 Omicron variant. Before that, the Delta variant had been dominant since July.
Cases of Omicron can only be confirmed by genetic sequencing, which is performed on just a portion of samples across the country. The C.D.C.’s estimates vary in different parts of the country. BA.2 was found in a high proportion of samples in the Northeast, and a lower proportion of samples in the Midwest and Great Plains.
BA.1, which became dominant in late December, was almost entirely responsible for the record-shattering spike in U.S. cases this winter, but earlier this year, BA.2 started to account for a larger proportion of new infections. Its rapid growth is attributed in part to eight mutations in the gene for the spike protein on the virus’s surface, which are not found in BA.1.
While BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, it has not been shown to cause more severe illness and vaccines continue to protect against the worst outcomes. Many U.S. health officials have said they expect case numbers to rise without a major surge caused by BA.2, but other scientists worry that the nation isn’t doing enough to prevent another possible surge.
In the U.S., the seven-day average of new cases has dropped significantly from the height of the Omicron BA.1 surge. Though the decrease has slowed in recent days, the average has hovered this past week at about 30,000 cases per day, a level last seen in July, according to a New York Times database.
Covid hospitalizations plummeted in the last two weeks by about 35 percent, to about 18,000 per day. Intensive care unit hospitalizations have fallen, too — by about 42 percent, to under 3,000.
And about 750 coronavirus deaths are being reported each day in the U.S., the lowest daily average since before the Omicron variant took hold late last fall. The last time the rate was this low was in mid-August.
In some European countries, the rise of BA.2 came at the same time as a surge in new cases. In the Asia-Pacific region, Hong Kong, South Korea and New Zealand, all of which suffered relatively little from earlier variants, are now getting walloped by BA.2.
Vaccines continue to protect people against severe disease, especially those who received a booster, experts have repeatedly said.
Global Roundup
Hong Kong is scrambling to import more coffins as the Chinese territory struggles to handle the surge in deaths during the latest wave of the pandemic.
More than 90 percent of all the deaths linked to the virus since the pandemic started happened in the past 30 days, putting a strain on mortuaries, funeral homes and the local government. The number of bodies at public mortuaries has risen “exponentially,” said Carrie Lam, the chief executive, this week. Hong Kong has recorded about 7,400 deaths tied to the virus since 2020.
Hong Kong officials have already brought in 2,170 coffins from mainland China and have ordered at least 1,000 more that were expected to arrive this week, the city’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said.
The pandemic’s death toll in Hong Kong has also put the city’s crematories under pressure. Daily cremation sessions have more than doubled to 300 this month, the department said last week.
While funeral and cremation services have been overwhelmed, it appears that worst is behind Hong Kong. Cases and deaths are declining. The average number of new daily cases in the past week has dropped 85 percent from the peak earlier this month. And deaths have declined 34 percent from the seven-day average two weeks ago.
Still, about 186 people have died from the virus each day on average in the past seven days. There are about 7.5 million residents in Hong Kong.
To speed up the process of identifying bodies and helping families claim them, the city has deployed civil servants and retired medical staff to public mortuaries, Mrs. Lam said on Sunday.
In other global news:
Starting Sunday, Macau, the Chinese territory west of Hong Kong, will require people ages 18 and up arriving from outside the region, including mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, to have received a third dose of the coronavirus vaccine before entry if their second dose was administered more than seven months ago.
After opening up its borders to business travelers earlier this month, Taiwan will require customers entering places like bars and nightclubs to show proof of three vaccinations. The new rules start on Friday and will last through the end of April. Staff members at those facilities will be required to undergo rapid tests every week.
Jin Yu Young contributed reporting.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyJilin, an industrial province in northeastern China, is at the front line of the country’s latest coronavirus outbreak, leaving medical workers and migrant laborers there struggling to cope with restrictions.
Shanghai, which imposed a lockdown to stanch a coronavirus surge, has won more attention in China and abroad in part because it had appeared to be a well-run bastion against infections, and it has a large and vocal-middle class. But statistics of illness and resident accounts suggest that Jilin has been hit harder.
China is trying to follow a restrictive policy, but is now reporting nearly 9,000 cases a day, most of them in people showing no symptoms. More than 2,000 new cases were detected in Jilin on Tuesday, most of them light or asymptomatic, according to China’s National Health Commission.
While the numbers are relatively few compared with those in many countries, especially when it comes to serious illness and death, China’s stringent lockdown and quarantine policies have put a strain on local governments as cases rise and residents require hospital beds, medicine and food deliveries. All 1,150 symptomatic cases in Jilin recorded on Tuesday have been put into medical isolation, according to local health officials.
In recent days, messages have spread on China’s internet describing rural migrant workers in Jilin who have tested positive for the coronavirus and then come under quarantine. Some have complained of lack of medical treatment and economic support. They included laborers who, in a twist of irony, said they had helped build the makeshift hospitals to treat Covid patients there.
“Everyone’s panicking and they don’t know where to go,” said one of the calls for help. “Over 40 have tested positive. Where do we get treatment? Afterward who’s going to set things right with us?”
One infected worker who posted the plea online said in a telephone interview that he had been locked up in the same hospital he had just built as a day laborer, along with dozens of other infected workers. He said he had a fever and sometimes could not get medicine while medical staff members struggled to tend to 300 patients. He said that he was not being paid for his time in quarantine and would miss the spring planting season on his farm.
On Monday, officials in Hebei Province, near Beijing, confirmed that two workers who had traveled to Jilin to help build the Covid hospitals had returned home infected with the coronavirus.
At a news conference on Monday, an official from the Jilin city government — the city is a namesake of the province — acknowledged that workers on a building site for a Covid hospital there had been infected. The official said that the spread had been stopped and “the workers’ rights have been effectively protected and assured.”
Calls to Jilin province government’s press office went unanswered, and an official at the province’s health department said he did not know about the workers’ complaints.
This week, Sun Chunlan, the Chinese vice premier in charge of pandemic measures, visited Jilin. She told officials to stick to the government’s “dynamic zero” goal of minimizing infections.
“Apply rigorous measures to continue getting to grips with every task in pandemic prevention and control,” she said, according to the Jilin government website.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting and Liu Yi contributed research.
As the United States entered its third year of the pandemic, fewer Americans are reporting that they have been wearing masks in recent months, according to a poll released on Tuesday by The Associated Press and NORC.
About 44 percent of Americans reported this month that they usually wore a mask outside their home, down from about two-thirds during the peak of the Omicron wave in January, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,082 U.S. adults from March 17 to March 21.
Only about a third of Americans said this month that they still avoided others as much as possible, compared with over half of them just two months earlier. About 40 percent said in March that they continued to avoid nonessential travel, down from 60 percent in January.
People 60 and older were most likely to report that they took precautions more than two years into the pandemic, according to the poll.
Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the poll results reflected that the country was at a lull in the pandemic, with the U.S. caseloads at their lowest point since the winter Omicron surge.
“Partly it’s fatigue,” he said, “and partly it’s that they’re being authorized to take fewer precautions by the C.D.C.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested in February that most Americans could stop wearing masks.
Dr. Noymer added that the poll indicated that, now and in the years to come, “Americans are less interested in masking everywhere they go outside the home.”
Going forward, the Covid vaccines will be one of the best ways to control the pandemic and lower caseloads, said Dr. Arnold S. Monto, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Another solution, Dr. Noymer said, was to improve indoor air quality, which the Biden administration this month said would help lower the risk of indoor aerosol transmission, the primary driver of the pandemic.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyAmericans who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine were better protected against severe illness and hospitalization during the Omicron surge if they received a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, instead of an additional Johnson & Johnson shot, according to a new study published on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report did not offer a comparison with the protection afforded by two doses of mRNA vaccines and included relatively few Johnson & Johnson recipients, making the findings difficult to interpret.
The findings broadly support the added benefit of a booster dose against the Omicron variant, which is known to partially sidestep immune defenses. Yet the report is somewhat at odds with other data collected by the C.D.C. that suggest that a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine prevented infections with the Omicron variant at least as well — if not better — than two doses of the mRNA vaccines.
Those data do indicate that people who received a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are at slightly higher risk of death than those who received two mRNA doses.
Separately, South African researchers have found that two doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine offer protection against severe illness and hospitalization that is comparable to that seen with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The C.D.C. now recommends that all adults who received one or two doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine get a booster dose of an mRNA vaccine. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster shot for all adults 50 and older, even those who already have had three mRNA doses (that is, two for full vaccination plus one booster).
In the new study, researchers analyzed data from 80,287 Covid-related visits to emergency departments or urgent care clinics and 25,244 hospitalizations in 10 states. The data were tallied from Dec. 16, 2021 to March 7, 2022, when the Omicron variant was the predominant version of the virus.
A single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had an effectiveness of 24 percent for preventing E.R. and urgent care visits, compared with 54 percent after two doses of the vaccine.
The effectiveness of a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine combined with a booster shot of an mRNA vaccine was similar to the protection from three mRNA doses, the study found. (This finding is consistent with the results from other studies of booster shots.)
Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization showed a similar trend: 31 percent for a single dose of Johnson & Johnson, 67 percent for two doses of the vaccine, 78 percent for one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine plus one of an mRNA vaccine, and 90 percent after three doses of an mRNA vaccine.
But the margins of error for these estimates overlapped, meaning that the differences may not be meaningful.
The researchers noted that the study has other limitations. The data do not include data beyond two months after receipt of the last dose on average. Other studies have suggested that the mRNA vaccines wane sharply in effectiveness against infection after an initial peak, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is performing better long-term.
The study included less data regarding Johnson & Johnson recipients than about those who got mRNA vaccines, making the comparisons less reliable. For example, the researchers recorded 164 hospitalizations among people who received two doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, compared with nearly 8,000 among recipients of three mRNA doses.
And the numbers overall were too small to parse vaccine recipients by age, sex or presence of other health conditions, all of which may have skewed the results.
Twenty-one Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Tuesday to block the federal mask mandate on public transportation.
The lawsuit comes a few weeks after the Transportation Security Administration extended its mask requirement for airplanes and other forms of public transportation through April 18. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recommended the extension, even though it suggested in February that most Americans could stop wearing masks.
In the lawsuit, the states, led by Florida, argued that the C.D.C. was overreaching its authority with the mandate and was interfering with state laws about masking.
“Every U.S. citizen should have the right to fly unmasked,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that it was time to “get back to normal life.”
Airplanes have become a battleground of sorts during the pandemic as flight crews have dealt with a surge in unruly passengers, many of whom refused to wear masks. From Jan. 1 to March 21, the Federal Aviation Administration received 961 reports of unruly passengers, of which 635 were related to masking.
Last week, the chief executives of the largest American airlines and a union that represents flight attendants from Southwest Airlines asked President Biden to let the mask mandate on public transportation expire.
The Biden administration has extended the mandate several times since it instated the requirement in February last year. The previous extensions were each several months long, but the latest extension was only for about a month, signaling that the authorities may be preparing to wind down the requirement.
Still, the attorneys general filed the lawsuit in federal court in Tampa, Fla., because the mandate was “causing chaos on public transportation,” Ashley Moody, Florida’s attorney general, said in a statement.
“It’s long past time to alleviate some of the pressure on travelers and those working in the travel industry,” she added.
In addition to Florida, 20 other states joined the lawsuit, including nine Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia); four in the Mountain West (Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Utah); six in the Midwest (Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma); and Alaska.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment