A quick programming note: the TIME Coronavirus Brief will be off tomorrow and Friday for the New Year's weekend. We hope that you find some time to rest, rejuvenate and connect with loved ones—in a safe, socially distanced manner, of course—and we’ll be back with you on Monday. Happy new year!
Africa Has Avoided the Brunt of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic, For Now
Early this year, some expected the coronavirus pandemic to play out something like the recent West African Ebola crisis, with rich nations using their resources to protect themselves, while developing nations in sub-Saharan Africa faced disproportionate deaths. Instead, wealthy nations like the U.S. have been brought to their knees, while much of Africa has proven comparatively resilient. As of yesterday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting about one COVID-19 case for every 500 people on the continent since the start of the pandemic, compared to one in 20 for the U.S.
As my colleague Aryn Baker reports, the continent’s experience with Ebola may have been instructive, with many doctors and citizens already aware of the risks of infectious disease. “Ebola knocked us over, but now we know not to underestimate anything; we know how important it is to prepare,” Liberian public health expert Dr. Mosoka Fallah told TIME in March. A younger population with fewer comorbidities for COVID-19—like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension—may also have played a role in keeping deaths low. Other potential factors are the limited transport networks in many sub-Saharan African countries, leading to less long-distance travel, and the region’s widespread warm weather through the winter months, enabling people to stay outside.
Whatever the cause, the African continent has, until recently, largely avoided the crippling levels of COVID-19 cases seen in other parts of the world. However, in the past couple of weeks, some African nations have begun to report worrying COVID-19 spikes. In South Africa, authorities announced new restrictions on Monday amid an alarming increase in cases.
More broadly, there are concerns that the lower case numbers on the continent seen to date may be partly due to less prevalent testing. That leaves researchers trying to understand the outbreak in Africa with lots of hypotheses and little in the way of easy take-aways. “If the data is reliable—and that is a big question mark for me—there would be multiple explanations for lower numbers, not one solid reason,” Cape Town-based clinical epidemiologist Dr Nandi Siegfried, tells Aryn.
Earlier today, Britain became the first country to authorize a vaccine developed by Oxford University and drugmaker AstraZeneca. The new vaccine isn’t proven to be as effective as shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna (the former is also authorized in the U.K.; both are authorized in the U.S.) but, it’s cheap and easily transportable, as my colleague Michael Zennie reports. That may make it the most important vaccine yet in terms of ending the global COVID-19 epidemic.
The Chinese company Sinopharm announced today that one of its experimental COVID-19 vaccines is 79% effective. The state-owned pharma giant has two vaccines in development, and in recent months has already distributed hundreds of thousands of doses as part of an emergency-use program endorsed by Chinese authorities, according to CNN. The company is now pursuing formal government approvals for its vaccine.
Localities around the U.S. are standing up drive-through vaccination operations in order to distribute new COVID-19 vaccines as efficiently as possible, my colleague Alice Park reports. “It allows us to potentially vaccinate thousands of people in a day,” says Ali Mueller, emergency preparedness coordinator for Carlton County, Minn., which is among the first jurisdictions in the nation to use the drive-through strategy.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
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. In addition, the recent dip in daily case rates in the U.S. 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. Because the U.S. is suffering one of, if not the worst outbreaks in the world, this has an outsized effect on global numbers.
The Global Situation
More than 81.9 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. 29, there were 665,098 new cases and 15,518 new deaths confirmed globally.
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:
Russia’s state statistical agency released new figures on Monday suggesting more than three times as many people may have died from COVID-19 in Russia as have been reported in official tallies, according to the New York Times. Taking into account the new data, Russia would have the third-highest total COVID-19 death count of any country, rather the eighth, as officially reported.
Nearly 10 times as many people in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus first emerged, may have been infected by the virus as are reflected in official counts of confirmed cases, CNN reports. The new estimates are the result of an antibody testing study released Monday by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The news comes as China battles an emerging series of COVID-19 clusters in advance of the massive Lunar New Year travel season.
Spain’s health minister said Monday that the country will register people who refuse COVID-19 vaccinations, and will share the list with other nations in the European Union, the BBC reports. Vaccination in the country will not be mandatory. The entire country is subject to a nightly curfew until early May. As of Monday, Spain has confirmed more than 50,000 COVID-19 deaths and 1.9 million cases, representing one of the worst outbreaks in Europe.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 19.5 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 338,561 people have died. On Dec. 29, there were 201,555 new cases and 3,725 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
And here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
Today, a Colorado man became the first person on U.S. soil to test positive for a new and potentially more contagious strain of COVID-19 that has put swaths of the U.K. under strict lockdowns, the Associated Press reports. Officials say the Colorado patient has not traveled recently and is experiencing mild symptoms.
Luke Letlow, a congressman-elect from Louisiana, died last night due to complications from COVID-19, the New York Times reports. He was 41 years old, and did not have underlying conditions that would have increased his chances of dying from the disease. Letlow was one of 3,725 Americans who died on Tuesday from the virus, surpassing the previous daily deaths record of 3,656 from Dec. 16.
President Donald Trump today sought to blame states for slower than anticipated distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, CNBC reports. “The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states. Now it is up to the states to administer. Get moving!” the President tweeted this morning. The country has little chance of meeting the administration’s goal of distributing 20 million vaccinations by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Dec. 30, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
California’s Nurses Are Stretched to the Limit
Facing a flood of COVID-19 patients, California authorized hospitals to increase legally-protected nurse-to-patient ratios in mid-December. The move has sparked protests from nurses, with unions blaming poor planning by management for staff shortages, reports NPR. Hospitals, meanwhile, say they have been given little choice. Read more here.
Repeat Hospitalizations Are a Nightmare For Recovering COVID-19 Patients
A significant portion of formerly hospitalized COVID-19 patients have been forced to return to hospitals due to longer-term complications from the disease, placing additional burdens on already-stretched health care resources and leaving the sick on seemingly endless journeys to recovery, the New York Times reports. Read more here.
PFAS Chemicals May Be Linked to COVID-19
Elevated levels of a PFAS compound called PFBA in the body have been associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes, according to a study from Denmark now under peer review, reports the Intercept. Sometimes called “forever chemicals,” PFAS compounds have been linked to health problems in exposed populations, including weaker vaccine response in children. Read more here.
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Today's newsletter was written by Alejandro de la Garza and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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