Over the past week, I settled in at home to celebrate the holidays and tuned out the news—which, as has been the case for months, was primarily about the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who follow every blow-by-blow of the virus’s spread and vaccine development, taking a break from COVID-19 news every once in a while is key to our mental health—so long as we don’t forget that the coronavirus doesn’t take vacation days.
As you watch COVID-19 case numbers coming in over the next few days, you might be tricked into thinking that the virus decided to get some rest—it will seem like cases dropped during the week of Christmas. In fact, this dip is more likely an artifact of institutional slowdown during a national holiday, and not representative of what’s actually happening in the country when it comes to the pandemic. As the Atlantic reports, m any health departments likely went short-staffed and doctors offices closed to mark the holidays, delaying reports of new COVID-19 cases. As you can see in the chart below, you only have to look to Thanksgiving weekend a month ago to see how this works; while cases dropped off from Nov. 22 to 29, they shot up drastically the following week. Almost surely, we’ll see a similar pattern in the coming weeks following Christmas and New Year’s.
Meanwhile, over the past week, major news stories about the COVID-19 pandemic continued to break. Here were some of the biggest moments:
On Dec. 23, Pfizer announced that it had reached a new deal with the Donald Trump Administration to provide 100 million more vaccine doses, bringing the total number of Pfizer-BioNTech doses coming to the U.S. to 200 million—enough for 100 million people to receive the two-shot vaccine.
In response to a new COVID-19 variant identified in the U.K. that seems to spread faster, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced on Dec. 24 that people flying from the U.K. into the U.S. must have a negative COVID-19 test prior to their flight; that rule went into effect today.
Yesterday, President Trump finally signed a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package after threatening not to sign it last week. The bipartisan legislation includes $600 direct payments for many Americans and aid for small businesses; it also renews unemployment benefits that lapsed on Saturday. Last Tuesday, Trump released a message criticizing the bill, urging lawmakers to increase direct payments to $2,000 and to cut “wasteful” items. House Democrats are expected to attempt to pass legislation to raise the direct household payments to $2,000 today, but the majority of Republicans, who control the Senate, do not support the increase, and so this aspect of the bill is unlikely to pass, according to Reuters.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly given how many people in the U.S. and in the E.U. gathered with family and friends over the holiday, we’re almost certain to see daily cases increase in the coming weeks. Only time will tell how badly the holiday season exacerbated the outbreak.
VACCINE TRACKER
The U.K. is expected to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as soon as tomorrow, the Financial Timesreports. If approved, the vaccine would be rolled out in the U.K. during the first week of January, according to the Associated Press. The head of AstraZeneca said that the vaccine is likely effective against the new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, that many experts believe is driving a surge of infections in the country.
The U.S. biotechnology company Novavax announced today that it is beginning a Phase 3 trial for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate; up to 30,000 people in the U.S. and Mexico will receive the experimental vaccine, 25% of whom will be 65 or older. The company has received funding from the U.S. federal government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine development program, and is slated to provide 100 million doses of the two-shot vaccine to the country; the company has also agreed to supply doses in other countries, including New Zealand, Canada, and the U.K.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
The Global Situation
Nearly 81 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and nearly 1.8 million people have died. On Dec. 27, there were 432,076 new cases and 7,206 new deaths confirmed globally.
Editor's note: On Nov. 25, Turkey changed its policy to include asymptomatic cases in its daily numbers. On Dec. 10, the country provided a large case dump to bring the total historical reporting in line with this new standard. However, the data are not yet available to accurately distribute this increase retroactively. The result is a significant anomaly that impacts the charts and maps both for Turkey, and, due to the country’s large case numbers, the world.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here is every country with over 1.5 million confirmed cases:
The European Union officially began its mass vaccination campaign yesterday, launching an effort to vaccinate 450 million people across its 27 member states, according to NPR. The European Medicines Agency authorized the Pfizer-Biotech vaccine on Dec. 21, and the first vaccines were delivered to member states Saturday. Although the entire E.U. planned to begin vaccinating patients on Sunday in a show of unity, some vaccines were given out early, per NPR; in Italy, where nearly 72,000 people have died after contracting the virus, 10,000 doses were given on Saturday, according to the New York Times.
During a media briefing today, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged countries to increase genomic sequencing of COVID-19, warning that new variants of the virus could pose threats in 2021. Tedros praised the U.K. and South Africa for tracking the spread of new variants, noting, “Only if countries are looking and testing effectively will you be able to pick up variants and adjust strategies to cope.”
Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan, who reported on the initial outbreak in Wuhan, has been jailed for four years for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," her defense lawyer, Zhang Keke, told CNN earlier today. China has clamped down on independent reporting on the outbreak to control the narrative about the state’s handing of the virus, according to international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 19.1 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 333,000 people have died. On Dec. 27, there were 150,092 new cases and 1,209 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
In spite of the rapid spread of COVID-19 and urgent warnings by the CDC to stay home, many Americans chose to fly over the holidays. Some 1.3 million people were screened at airport checkpoints across the country yesterday, the most since March 15, according to the Transportation Security Administration. Yesterday was the sixth time in the last 10 days more than 1 million people have passed through airport checkpoints.
New York has launched a criminal investigation into whether health care provider ParCare Community Health Network fraudulently obtained COVID-19 vaccines and diverted them to the public, violating priority guidelines set by the state, according to Bloomberg. The company’s CEO allegedly said that the vaccine would be available to anyone who is a “health care worker, are over 60, or have underlying conditions,” diverging from state guidelines, which say that only frontline healthcare workers and nursing home staff and residents should be vaccinated.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Dec. 28, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Companies Gamble on Work-From-Home Future
Companies that produce consumer goods are planning for more of their customers to keep working from home after the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reports. For instance, Kimberly-Clark Corp. is altering a factory to make toilet paper for homes rather than offices, and General Mills has created a new Cinnamon Toast Crunch manufacturing line as COVID-19 has boosted demand for comforting foods, like cereal, that people can easily eat at home. Read more here.
Turning to Indigenous Mourning Ceremonies During Loss
After the death of her mother, Terese Marie Mailhot resisted turning to the traditional mourning ceremonies of her Nlaka’pamux people. But after two of her friends passed away during the pandemic, Mailhot found herself returning to those time-honored traditions of expressing grief, she writes for TIME. Read more here.
Why COVID-19 is Devastating Los Angeles
COVID-19 is running amok in Los Angeles in part because the county has a high poverty rate, overcrowded housing and widespread homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Times. Other factors: it has two of the largest ports in the U.S. and is a major manufacturing center. Read more here.
History May Be Fueling Black Americans’ Distrust of COVID-19 Vaccine
A history of medical racism may be contributing to lower numbers of Americans of color enrolling in vaccine trials and a higher rate of vaccine skepticism among Black Americans—despite the fact that a disproportionate number of people in this community have gotten sick or died from COVID-19. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Tara Law and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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