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Our real concern, the logic goes, should be for younger people who have their whole lives ahead of them and are sacrificing their economic futures to lockdowns. This collapse of the inter-generational compact has been far more effective at killing them off than any death panel dreamed up in Sarah Palin’s fevered imagination.

Similarly, ethnic and racial minorities including African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, and Native Americans have all been disproportionately affected by COVID-19

Farm and food processing workers—dominated by Latino and other immigrant workers—are another population that has disproportionately been affected by COVID-19.

That social reciprocity has broken down to this degree ought to be an embarrassment and shame to us all.

Heavily agricultural regions like California’s Central Valleyand Washington State’s Yakima Valley have seen huge COVID spikes. In response, the U.S. Department of Labor has so far levied just $29,000 in fines against two companies, Smithfield and JBS, who have combined sales of $65 billion per year.

Adding to the misery of COVID-vulnerable populations is an unfortunate, and very human, tendency to find reasons to blame disadvantaged groups for their illness.

Reviewing the data and history pandemic discrimination, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the majority of America has concluded that these groups—the poor, the minority, the imprisoned, and the elderly—are the “acceptable” losses.

Were the situation reversed and the white, middle aged, and middle/upper classes the primary victims of the pandemic—one of the features of the 1918 influenza—COVID-19 would be a true national emergency and there would be far less complaining about disrupted schools, work, and social life brought about by social distancing requirements and economic shutdowns

Last are the millions of Americans behind bars. Per statistics from the Marshall Project, there have been more than 121,000 COVID-19 cases reported among prisoners and more than a thousand deaths.

The message seems to be that Americans have abandoned e pluribus unum (out of many, one) for “everyone—or at least every group—for themselves.”

Pro-lifers have for decades protested American indifference to the deaths of millions of unborn children (another invisible and voiceless minority), and they have been right to do so. Where are these champions of human life when other weak and vulnerable populations are dying at the rate of a thousand a week or more?

In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.

84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.

The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."

The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.

Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.

"These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"

"Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.

Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'

Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.

"It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.

"I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.

The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.

President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.

"What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."

"There was a real sort of tug of war among the conservatives who wanted to continue with the status quo" and others pushing for change, said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo.

But the status quo Mori embodied was no match for the mounting pressure from hundreds of Olympic volunteers quitting in protest, a flood of complaints from the public to Japanese organizers and corporate sponsors jittery about the additional uncertainty Mori's remarks inflicted on the games.

With less than six months to go before the Tokyo Games are scheduled to kick off, more than half of Japan's population is under a state of emergency, hospitals are flooded with COVID-19 patients and vaccinations have yet to begin, although they are due to start this month.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga weighed in calling for transparency in the selection of Mori's successor, and the organizing committee said it would form a panel with equal numbers of male and female members to handle the matter.

It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen.

Without these measures in place, the past seven weeks of lockdown will have been completely pointless. As quarantine measures are lifted, the virus will continue to spread, the number of daily cases will rise and a second peak will become inevitable

this debate misses a more fundamental point: containment (the first path) is the best strategy for public health, the economy and society. The decision in early March to shift from containing to mitigating the virus was disastrous on all three of these fronts

Now, the key challenge facing the government is to replace this lockdown with a package of public health interventions involving mass testing, surveillance and real-time data to identify clusters of the virus and quarantine those who are infected.

The confusion turns on an internal struggle between two opposing camps. The first seems to think the government should attempt to get over the worst of the pandemic by allowing the virus to spread through the population, albeit at a slower pace to ease the strain on the NHS, and by creating more hospital and mortuary capacity to cope with a spike in deaths. The second camp wants to drive down the number of coronavirus cases and reduce the rate of infection – or R – to as close to zero as possible. It recognises the uniquely dangerous nature of this virus, and the emerging evidence that it can cause long-term health complications in survivors and that immunity may only be temporary.

Everyone agrees that we need to get out of the lockdown as soon as possible, but doing so will require massive investment in public health infrastructure. Countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have already built this capacity

why has the government made such little progress in building the public health infrastructure necessary to control the virus and ease the lockdown? You could be forgiven for thinking that the lockdown was simply a way to reassure the public that the government was “doing something”. We need to be asking: what measures has the government put in place to ensure we’re in a better position to release the lockdown and prevent a second wave?

Everyone wants to know when the lockdown will end and life will go back to “normal”. The better question to ask is how we ease lockdown measures in the coming months and years while preventing a second wave of infections and keeping R well below one

There are a number of endings to this story. First, an accessible and affordable vaccine could become available within the next 18 months; second, the government could embark on a resource-intensive and gruelling campaign to eliminate the virus, particularly if emerging data proves coronavirus is as dangerous as diseases such as smallpox and polio; or third, antiviral therapies could become available to treat Covid-19 that make it a mild illness, so the population would gradually and safely build up natural herd immunity.

on our current path we seem destined for a disastrous ending. Lifting lockdown without the public health infrastructure in place to contain the virus will allow Covid-19 to spread through the population unchecked. The result could be a Darwinian culling of the elderly and vulnerable, and an individual gamble for those exposed to the virus. This should be avoided at all costs.

twice as many non-college-educated white men said Trump is providing helpful, rather than harmful, information on the virus; college-educated white women were more than three times as likely to say that his information was harmful rather than helpful,

“If they like him, everything he does just affirms why they like him, and if they don’t like him, everything he does reaffirms why they don’t like him.”

In last week’s national CNN poll, two-thirds of white men without a college degree said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak

While 55 percent of blue-collar men said in the CNN poll that they are comfortable returning to their normal routines, 68 percent of college-educated white women said they are not

“I think, generally, the last two months have been a good reminder that most people made up their minds about Donald Trump a long time ago, and nothing is going to change their opinion,”

non-college-educated white women exhibit more strain over the outbreak than college-educated white men. In the Navigator polling, these women were considerably more likely to say that they worry about falling behind on bills. And while a slight majority of the men in the CNN survey said they are comfortable returning to their routines, three-fifths of the women said they are not.

while these women report more unease over the pandemic, they are more likely than the men to praise Trump’s response to it. In the Navigator polling, 56 percent of the women said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared with just 44 percent of the men

education trumps gender in shaping attitudes about the president’s performance.

Operatives in both parties believe that Trump’s volatile and often-erratic pronouncements about the outbreak—such as suggesting the use of bleach and ultraviolet light to treat patients, and announcing that he is taking hydroxychloroquine—have compounded existing doubts among many well-educated white voters about his fitness for the presidency.

the 2018 exit polls generally showed the GOP suffering some erosion among blue-collar white women, with the party’s advantage slipping to 14 percentage points. The latest round of surveys suggests that, among those women, Trump has stabilized at that diminished level, leading by roughly a dozen points (or slightly less) among them.

ox News surveys last month in Pennsylvania and Michigan put Biden even among non-college-educated white women, and he led Trump among them in the latest Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.

Among nonwhite voters, gender, not education, remains the key divide

At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families

The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.

The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease

s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.

What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.

The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.

in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.

The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces.

The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.

To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected.

Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations.

Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.

Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent

even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks.

Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City.

A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones.

In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders.

by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.

Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months)

Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.

States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs — but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months

That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing.

Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.

Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent

Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control.

When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.

How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan

The Moderna vaccine is thought to be 94.5% effective against coronavirus, according to early data released by the company.

Vaccinations could begin as soon as late December, top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said, though they'll be made available first to high-risk groups like health care workers, the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions.

In April, Parton encouraged her fans who could afford it to donate to the Vanderbilt Health Covid-19 research fund. Since then, it's raised more than $100,000 of its $250,000 goal.

hey will have enough to vaccinate no more than 22.5 million Americans by January.

Based on its recent discussions, the C.D.C. committee will almost certainly recommend that the nation’s 21 million health care workers be eligible before anyone else, along with three million mostly elderly people living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Federal officials have said they plan to ship the first 6.4 million doses within 24 hours after the F.D.A. authorizes a vaccine, and the number each state receives will be based on a formula that considers its adult population.

Some participants in both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s trials have said they experienced symptoms including fever, muscle aches, bad headaches and fatigue after receiving the shots, but the side effects generally did not last more than a day.

By September, Pfizer’s trial had 44,000 participants; no serious safety concerns have been reported.

Probably. Although people who have contracted the virus do have immunity, it is too soon to know how long it lasts. So for now, it makes sense for them to get the shot. The question is when.

Mixed messages, misinformation and a relaxed attitude were spreading in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the summer, experts say. "I am glad we are less and less afraid of this virus, of this epidemic. You don't have to be afraid of it anymore," Mateusz Morawiecki, prime minister of Poland, said as he urged voters to July polls. "All of you, especially the elderly, don't be afraid, let's go and vote,” he added.

“Politicians were saying that the virus has weakened and the pandemic is over, and maybe it didn’t even exist. That put people in doubt, and led to a growing group of people who doubt the virus, its origins and consequences,” Ms. Afelt said.

Second wave lockdowns were slower and softer than those in the first wave, experts note, and in many cases they have not been strictly enforced, curbing their effectiveness, even as societies suffer economic losses and disruption. A collective exhaustion with new restrictions made it harder to get widespread support and compliance.

“There was a certain hesitancy to reintroduce the measures after the summer, because we all knew what they meant in terms of the economy and society,” said Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

“That hesitancy didn't really pay off. When you reach the levels that you see now, you have to go back to those measures anyway, but the price you pay is very high in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” he added.

The few countries that did move fast saw great benefits. Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway have kept the second wave at bay. Ireland has recorded fewer than 300 deaths since September 1, just 15 percent of its first wave total, after a tough and early second national lockdown.

Using "timestamps" that track when patients check in and out, Neprash and her team analyzed exactly how long primary care doctors spent with their patients. They compared male and female physicians not just throughout the country, but within the same practices, which helped control for regional variations in the number of patients doctors are expected to see in a day.

Female primary care physicians spent about 15% more time with patients in each visit compared to male primary care physicians. As a result, they saw fewer patients over the course of a year.

In the U.S. healthcare system where most insurance companies pay doctors based on the number of patients they see — not how much time they spend with them — this means that women physicians generated about 11% less annual revenue for their practices than their male colleagues.

This could account for why female physicians are paid less than men, Neprash argues: They actually spend more time with patients.

Often patients come in for a straightforward medical concern, and I find myself discussing how stressed out they are about child care, or how hard it's been to pay the bills on time during the COVID-19 crisis.

But by not getting down to business immediately, could I end getting paid less than male doctors?

In addition to their visits generally taking longer, women also go to the doctor more than men, and female physicians are more likely to see female patients.

In one 2016 study, researchers found that the median salary for male physicians in the United States was almost $86,000 more per year than the median salary for female physicians in the early 2010s.

That 2.4 minutes may seem inconsequential. But the New England Journal study authors argue that the extra time female physicians spend with their patients adds up quickly and has profound implications for the pay gap between women and men.

"When you look at how many minutes they are spending with their patients over a year, female physicians are spending 20 hours more — despite the fact that they're seeing fewer of them, and they're earning less money," Neprash says.

Some researchers say female doctors spend more time with their patients, because patients have higher expectations of them.

Allen says she feels it's important to ask about her patients' home lives. But that kind of small talk adds up. Many evenings she finds herself still working in the office, long after her male co-workers have gone home.

"I do wonder if some of our male colleagues second guess themselves, or go above and beyond in the ways some of us as women tend to do,"

"We know that women have longer visits in general. They're twice as likely to raise emotional content in their visits, which generally takes longer to manage."

Another study published earlier this year found that in their very first jobs after training, male physicians earned about $36,000 more, on average, than their female counterparts.

Research suggests that the extra time female doctors spend connecting with patients may have a positive impact. One study found significant differences in the practice style of female and male doctors, and found the patients of female physicians tend to be more satisfied with their care.

And a widely publicized 2016 study found that when elderly hospitalized patients are cared for by female physicians, they are less likely to die or return to the hospital compared to patients who have male doctors.

I became a primary care doctor because I like getting to know my patients as people, not just as a list of diseases. I truly believe it helps me provide better care. But getting to know them takes time, and that means squeezing fewer patients into each workday. That could mean less money for my practice. It seems to be a price that many female primary care physicians are willing to pay.

Mara Gordon is a family physician in Camden, N.J., and a contributor to NPR.

But he suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not help halt the surge, adding that it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask due to various local restrictions.

She said cases were increasing in many states with mandates, adding that communities were free to establish local regulations. 

The U.S. has reported more than 11.5 million cases and more than 250,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: 56.4 million cases and 1.35 million deaths.

As state officials and lawmakers urged the shutdown of a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Iowa, managers at the plant reportedly placed bets on how many would end up getting sick.

As COVID-19 cases pile up at a staggering rate, Republicans and Democrats remain in stark disagreement over the threat of the virus and the steps necessary to mitigate its spread.

That has surprised political scientists and public health experts who thought that, if the pandemic worsened, the partisan gap would begin to close

European officials announced a modest gain in the continent's battle against the virus.

Still, an average of 4500 lives are lost to COVID-19 in Europe every day, Kluge said.

He described further lockdowns as a last resort and said that if mask use reached 95%, lockdowns would not be needed.

Almost 100,000 long-term care U.S. residents have died in the coronavirus pandemic, and advocates for the elderly say tens of thousands more are succumbing to neglect by overwhelmed staffs and slow declines from isolation imposed as protection from COVID.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak is looking worse than ever, news from vaccine makers is fueling optimism

That means we can begin inoculating health care and other essential workers even before we’re done with the Thanksgiving leftovers,

The vaccine being developed Oxford researchers and U.K.-based AstraZeneca appears to trigger a "robust immune response" in healthy adults, including those aged 56 and older, the university said in a release.

The U.S. has become the first country to have 250,000 people die from COVID-19, nearly 19% of the global total of 1.35 million fatalities.

The death toll the virus has inflicted among Americans is more than twice as large as the number of U.S. service members who died in World War I.

Colleges are scrambling to prevent a massive spread, with some urging or requiring students to quarantine or receive a negative coronavirus test before traveling home. Without those precautions, college leaders say, students should consider abstaining from their holiday plans and instead opt for a celebration closer to campus.

Boston University's recommendation is that students either stay in Boston for the holiday or go home and not come back. Kenneth Elmore, dean of students, says the school is urging students to think of the greater good. 

As Arizona's COVID-19 trends spike, the state is giving hospitals $25 million to bolster staffing, but Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday that he won't impose a statewide mask mandate.

Ducey suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not effectively curb the spread of the virus, and emphasized that about 90% of the state is under a local mask mandate. He also said it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask.

More than 90,000 students in the state's largest school district will return to virtual learning starting Nov. 30 through the end of the semester.

The district reported about 13 cases per week when it first opened early childhood education centers. Cases have now surpassed 300 per week.

There are some reasons for this. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledging the nation's pandemic-related rodent problem, points out restaurants have reduced service, which means fewer food scraps are ending up in the dumpsters on which rats and mice often feed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging Americans to "think twice" about traveling and having indoor gatherings for the holidays.

"As we get into the colder weather, we should really think twice about these kind of dinner parties where you're not sure of whether the people that are in your bubble (are safe)," he said. "Then you're going to start seeing these unanticipated infections related to innocent home gatherings, particularly as we head into the holiday season."

While testing has been comparatively limited, the continent appears to have bucked the doomsday predictions of global health experts. The telltale signs of severe outbreaks seen elsewhere — crowded hospitals and a spike in deaths — have emerged in only a handful of African countries. Surveys done by the World Health Organization have found negligible excess mortality rates in most African countries, reducing suspicion that many covid-19 deaths are going uncounted.

even as more research emerges, public health experts caution that the explanation for why Africa’s caseload has remained low will be complicated.

“It is highly unlikely that there is a single, definitive answer as to why this is the case,” said Ngoy Nsenga, a Congolese epidemiologist and the WHO’s program manager for emergency response in Africa. “Youthful populations, warmer climates, less time indoors, less traveling, less obesity and diabetes, immunities derived from other diseases — even other coronaviruses — are all playing a part, we think. But what distinguishes Africa from other places like Brazil that might share those factors, but were still hard-hit, are our human interventions.”

Those interventions have exacted immense economic damage, however, and with many African governments not seeing uncontrolled growth in cases, they have been rolled back in many places.

Health officials, however, caution that the threat is far from over — even if hospitals aren’t filling up.

“During the holiday season, there will be a tendency for large movement from capital cities to villages, remote areas, for people to connect with families. That might drive the pandemic,”

Ndongo Dia, head of the respiratory virus diagnostic laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, isn’t sure why Senegal dodged the worst of the pandemic.

The nation has garnered widespread praise for its quick response, which included sealing its border, rolling out four-hour tests while Americans waited days for results, and imposing a curfew until infections slowed.

Beyond that, Dia said, “our luck is the composition of our population. The number of severe cases is going to be much lower compared to the northern countries, where there are more elderly people.”

Death rates have been higher in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, where a larger percentage of the population is over the age of 65. Those four countries make up two-thirds of all coronavirus deaths in Africa.

Preliminary analyses done by the WHO indicate that Africans may be twice as likely to experience covid-19 without any illness, and that more than 80 percent of cases on the continent have been asymptomatic — a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the world.

“It is not different strains — that I can refute. We have a network of laboratories all over the continent and the world,” he said. “We have sequenced from many places, we haven’t seen dramatically different strains here.”

other experts on the committee said all available evidence indicated the vaccine is safe and effective for nursing home residents and older Americans generally.

As people age, bodily defenses against pathogens weaken, and the response to vaccines also falters.

“We have a clear and present danger of Covid, and we have social isolation,” Dr. Farrell said. “We know that that’s an independent risk factor for mortality, even stronger than individual chronic diseases.”

“For many, the immune response can sometimes be diminished or dampened or delayed,”

“When you’ve come to near-death experiences twice, volunteering for a vaccine trial — it wasn’t a great sense of worry or apprehension for me,”

Some people worry, incorrectly, that the vaccine may somehow give them Covid-19. In fact, the vaccine carries instructions to make only a single protein from the virus.

Every time she gets a flu shot, Ms. Ebrani said, she feels unwell for three days, with headaches and a deep exhaustion. But she gets that vaccine anyway, because she feels healthy the rest of the year and because her doctor has told her she should.

Professional associations like the American Geriatrics Society and advocacy groups like Justice in Aging have focused more on the opposite possibility: They want to prevent older and disabled people from being arbitrarily sent to the rear of the line.

“Our ability as physicians to prognosticate is generally poor, particularly in the heat of the moment,”

In March, the Office of Civil Rights reaffirmed that the Affordable Care Act and other federal statutes prohibit discrimination, in health facilities receiving federal funds, on the basis of age, disability and other characteristics.

“It’s akin to the person who runs into a burning building or gives up the last seat on the lifeboat,” said Dr. Andrea Kittrell, an otolaryngologist in Lynchburg, Va., who created the organization in March. “There are those people who are selfless and generous and value other people’s lives as much or more than their own.”

Successful programs like Experience Corps also point to a common criticism of the fair innings philosophy: The last innings of the game can be among the most significant.

Permission to use the additional portions means the limited supply could increase by up to 40%, Politico reported.

Leading health experts say that even if all goes well, the vaccine will not be available to the general public until the end of March or beginning of April.

Inoculations began in the U.S. on Monday with health care workers and the elderly being the first in line to get it.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that a second allotment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be available to the U.S. until next June, given the combination of short supply and global demand.

"It's pretty unusual to have a full extra dose or more though — but it does seem to be there!" Erin Fox, a pharmacist at University of Utah who monitors drug shortages, told the news outlet.

However, because there are no preservatives in the vaccines, partial doses from separate vials shouldn't be combined.

There are conflicting reports about when the U.S. is poised to receive another batch of the medicine from Pfizer.

A vaccine developed by Moderna is expected to get emergency use authorization from the FDA as early as this week. Clinical data shows it is nearly as effective as the Pfizer injections.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, told NPR this week that half of all Americans would need to be vaccinated before seeing an impact on the spread of the virus, and that 75% to 85% of the population would need to be vaccinated to create herd immunity. He predicted the U.S. could begin to see early stages of herd immunity by late spring or summer.

It’s the height of American exceptionalism that we are where we are. I have family in other parts of the world where health-care workers and vulnerable elderly people are begging to get the vaccine. And here, we’re sitting on stockpiles and begging people to take the vaccine.

Do you think verification and mandates could work in the U.S. with our notions of freedom, individual liberty?

I think we need to reframe freedom here, right? I don’t agree with the statement that some people have been putting out about vaccines, that this is just about personal choice. You can say that maybe eating unhealthy food is your personal choice. But in this case, nobody should have the right to carry an infectious disease that is able to endanger others and potentially kill them. I mean, I’ve got two little kids. I’m very upset thinking about how there are other people who are choosing not to be vaccinated. And as a result, they are choosing to endanger our children. I’m sure they’re not trying to do this intentionally, but that is the end result.

I hope that people see that by not being vaccinated, they’re actually impeding societal progress too. They’re making it harder for kids to get back in school. They’re making it harder for the economy to come back. And why are we allowed to make that kind of personal choice when we do not allow people to make the personal choice to go drunk driving?

How much do you worry about hesitancy, not just around the vaccine, but mistrust of science and mistrust of public health even?

I worry about this a lot. You’ve seen what happened in Tennessee with the vaccine director being fired for trying to promote covid vaccines to adolescents. And even more disturbing, I think is that now, Tennessee health officials are being prohibited from promoting vaccines to children. Not just covid vaccines, but all other childhood immunizations. I mean, public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been before.

Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients from both sides of the river at Springfield Hospital in Vermont, said New Hampshire covid patients are now facing business as usual from insurers, suffering the same sort of financial stress that routinely affects patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments.

“The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,'' he said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.”

Hospitals also are in the position of having to resume billings and collections for individuals who may have been laid off because of the pandemic or been too sick to work, experts said.

“These waivers ended in January as we all had gained a better understanding of the virus, and people and communities became more familiar with best practices and protocols for limiting COVID-19 exposure and spread,” the company said in a statement. “Also, at this time vaccines, which are proven to be the safest and most effective way to protect oneself from COVID-19, were starting to become readily available.”Anthem took in $4.6 billion in profits in 2020, compared to $4.8 billion in 2019.

The reintroduction of cost-sharing mainly affects people with private or employer-based insurance. Patients with no insurance can have 100 percent of their expenses covered by the federal government, under a special program set up by the government for the pandemic, with hospitals reimbursed for care at Medicare rates.

Covid patients with Medicaid, the government plan for lower-income people that is paid for by states and the federal government, continue to be protected from cost-sharing, insurance specialists said

Patients on Medicare, the federal plan for the elderly, could face out-of-pocket costs if they do not have supplemental insurance.

Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October,

general, a person with Azar’s type of plan would have an in-network deductible of $1,500 and an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000,

“We still don’t know where the numbers will land because the system makes the family wait for the bills,” s

Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available.

The economic and social costs of the Chinese strategy have climbed with the rise of more easily transmitted variants. Retail sales, tourism and manufacturing have suffered from residential lockdowns, business closures and travel bans. A population that largely supported zero-Covid measures early on has tired of tight limits on the routines of daily life.

Her food is running low, she said. On Monday, Ms. Wang got her first food delivery from the government: two zucchini, a carton of milk, 10 sausages, noodles and a can of Spam. “As someone who hasn’t been infected by the virus, my biggest question is, ‘How long do we have to endure such lack of freedom?’ ” she said.

Before the latest outbreak, Mr. Xi and other top officials saw Shanghai as a model for China’s long-term goal of living with the virus, according to the people close to government decision-making. 

Shanghai, run by a close ally of Mr. Xi, never had serious problems. The few cases that had surfaced in the past two years were secured with limited apartment and neighborhood closures. Unlike the rest of China, mask-wearing wasn’t widely adopted by city residents.

in undisclosed comments to members of the Politburo Standing Committee, Mr. Xi made clear that China couldn’t back down from its stringent Covid approach, even if it meant slower economic growth, according to a person close to decision-making who was briefed on the remarks.

Then an influx of visitors arrived from Hong Kong, hoping to escape an outbreak there. Many stayed at a Shanghai hotel where officials say the virus spread in early March to the staff and beyond. At the time, city authorities said wide-ranging lockdowns wouldn’t be necessary.

A few days later, Shanghai initiated a two-stage lockdown. Speaking at a teleconference with other infectious-disease experts around that time, Mr. Wu, China CDC’s chief epidemiologist, said Shanghai didn’t act decisively enough in the latest outbreak and missed its chance to control the outbreak,

In Shanghai, people with Covid-19 are confined to home, and access to medical care for those with other illnesses has been limited. Food deliveries, arranged by local authorities, have been delayed in some neighborhoods, according to interviews with more than a dozen residents.

Local officials have reported no Covid-related fatalities. The Journal learned that at least two elder-care hospitals have been battling an outbreak, with more than 20 deaths at one of the facilities.

Thousands of users of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, have shared stories of people with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer unable to get treatment, adding to citywide feelings of helplessness.

“Fighting all the previous variants was like putting out a forest fire, it can be done,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But Omicron is like the wind. How do you stop the wind?”