When the history of the coronavirus pandemic is at last written, an unexpected class of workers may emerge as improbable heroes: data-entry clerks. As my colleague Alejandro de la Garza writes, more and more states are finding poor record-keeping is leading to troubling gaps in knowledge about who has and hasn’t been vaccinated, whether underserved communities of color are being equitably treated and even when a population has reached a level of vaccination required to achieve herd immunity. What’s needed: more clerks to enter all of that data.
There’s plenty of blame to go around and plenty of case studies of states that are dropping the ball. Iowa and Minnesota, for instance, don’t include racial breakdowns in their published vaccination data, while Missouri and Connecticut are among the states that don't publish real-time vaccination information at all. “We don’t have a timely, coordinated national public health data infrastructure to track how the vaccination is proceeding,” says Dr. Howard K. Koh, a professor of public health leadership at Harvard who served as Assistant Secretary for Health during the Obama Administration.
Having a better sense of who's being vaccinated and who isn't is vital for state health officials, who need as much information as possible to decide where to send the limited amount of doses they're receiving from the federal government. More and better data can also reveal unexpected issues that can disrupt an equitable rollout.
There are a lot of reasons so many states are failing to keep useful records. Data entry is labor-intensive and workers cost money—something states are already hard-pressed to raise in a time of national economic woes. Privacy issues too come into play, with many people who have been vaccinated reluctant to reveal their racial and ethnic affiliation.
One potential answer to this data crisis: more help from the federal government. While the Trump Administration was notorious for ignoring or obfuscating key pandemic data, President Joe Biden is taking a different approach. On his first full day in office, Biden issued an executive order that aims to improve federal collection and sharing of disease data, signaling his team will base more of its efforts on the numbers.
While 32.7 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this morning, only about 20.7 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker—representing 6.2% of the overall U.S. population.
The U.K. may soon feel the pain of exiting the European Union if the bloc follows through on a plan to forbid exports of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses from a Belgian manufacturing plant, reports the Guardian. The E.U. is facing shortages after AstraZeneca announced last week that it would only be able to produce 25% of the 100 million doses it had promised to manufacture by the end of March. That is leading Brussels to consider refusing to share vaccines to nations that are not members of the bloc—including a post-Brexit U.K. If the U.K. does not receive the promised exports, it could delay its forecast of reaching 75% herd immunity from an expected mid-July to September 1, potentially costing thousands of lives.
The White House yesterday kicked off the first of its planned regular pandemic briefings with a hard truth, conceding that it will take months before most Americans see a COVID-19 vaccine Senior official Andy Slavitt stressed that the Administration was moving with “incredible urgency and purpose” to shrink that timeline as much as possible. One strategy the administration is planning to employ: increasing the pool of medical personnel eligible to administer shots by authorizing the Department of Health and Human Services to invoke the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, or PREP, which shields health care workers from legal liability under emergency circumstances.
In Oregon, a 27-member advisory committee has been formed to consider such factors as potential recipients’ age, chronic medical conditions and high-risk employment in determining who gets to move to the front of the line, the Associated Press reports. In addition, the committee—in a nod to the structural inequities that have caused communities of color to be hit harder by the pandemic than white communities—will consider a person’s race. “It’s about revealing the structural racism that remains hidden,” said Kelly Gonzales, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a health disparity expert on the committee.
In neighboring Washington state, a scandal has erupted over vaccine prioritization, with reports that the Overlake Medical Center emailed 100 VIP benefactors, offering them appointments for COVID-19 vaccines, reports CNN. At the moment, Washington allows vaccination for anyone over 65 and those over 50 living in multigenerational households. The hospital issued an apology for the move, explaining that its intent and commitment has been to “administer every vaccine made available to us safely, appropriately, and efficiently."
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
The Global Situation
Nearly 101 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and nearly 2.2 million people have died. On Jan. 27, there were 589,484 new cases and 16,647 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:
Two weeks after arriving in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization team sent to the city to investigate the origins of the coronavirus has at least cleared quarantine and been permitted to leave their hotel and venture into the field, reports Reuters. One of the group’s first stops is likely to be the Hunan Wholesale Seafood Market, where the first cluster of cases are thought to have emerged. China is monitoring the group closely, allowing them to travel through the city only under strict medical supervision. The fact that the visit, which China had resisted, is taking place at all was seen as something of a triumph for public health and political diplomacy. Beijing has been promoting a narrative that the virus originated in Europe in 2019 and entered the country via imported frozen food.
Having been spared the infection and death rates the rest of the world has suffered over the past year, Africa is now going through its worst coronavirus surge since the pandemic began, reports The Wall Street Journal. For the month of January, the continent-wide death rate passed the global average for the first time. Driving the trend: the more-transmissible South Africa strain, which is spreading across the continent; lack of vaccines; and lack of money and hospital equipment to deal with rising caseloads. What’s more, the kinds of hard lockdowns that can help curb the spread of the virus are more difficult for the African economy to weather than for economies in weather parts of the world.
A lockdown is coming to Peru beginning Jan. 31, in 10 of its 25 regions, including the capital, Lima, according to CNN. The country has recorded 100,000 new cases in the past month alone, as it faces an aggressive second wave of the pandemic. Of the 1,931 ICU beds nationwide, 1,829 are occupied.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded nearly 25.6 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 429,000 people have died. On Jan. 27, there were 152,478 new cases and 3,943 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country 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:
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal is already running into headwinds in the Senate, where Republicans are balking at its cost. This has led to some speculation that the administration might be willing to split the bill in half, going for an $600 billion or $800 billion proposal first (with scaled back funding for vaccine, unemployment and food assistance), and then a follow-up bill later on reports Reuters. The White House is pushing back, however. “The needs of the American people aren’t partial; we can’t do this piecemeal,” White House economic adviser Brian Deese said in a tweet.
The recent surge in cases in Los Angeles County is increasingly thought to be associated with a new strain identified in California, known as CAL.20C, reports Business Insider. The variant first surfaced in July and was next seen in October. By December, 36% of virus samples from COVID-19 patients in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where researchers first discovered the variant, were identified as CAL.20C. There is no sign yet that the virus is deadlier or spreads more easily than other strains. And it will take more study to determine if it can evade existing vaccines. New York; Washington, D.C.; and some Pacific island nations have also reported cases of the California strain.
Worrisome news comes out of South Carolina, reports The Washington Post, where two cases of the highly transmissible South Africa B. 1.351 strain have been detected. These are the first two cases of the strain in the U.S., and while the identity of the patients is being withheld, some troubling details have been released: the two people do not know each other and neither had any recent travel history. This suggests that the virus had reached the community undetected already and is now beginning to spread.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Jan. 28, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
The Barrio and the Pandemic
The explosive surge in COVID-19 cases in Southern California has a lot of causes, but as Gustavo Arellano writes in The Atlantic, a big part of the problem may have originated in the type of barrio he calls home. The very features of some of Los Angeles’ most culturally rich Latinx neighborhoods—close social networks and multigenerational homes—are partly what the virus relies on to thrive. Read more here.
Impromptu Vaccinations—in a Traffic Jam
Public health workers in Cave Junction, Ore. were faced with a dilemma when they were driving 30 miles to administer coronavirus vaccines in nearby Grants Pass and a jack-knifed tractor trailer stalled them on a snowy road, The New York Times reports. The shots would expire in six hours and the hold-up on the road would likely take longer than that. So the workers instead went from car to car offering the vaccines to surprised drivers and passengers. Read more here
A Grim Undercount of Nursing Home Deaths
A smackdown may be developing between New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York Times reports, over extremely inaccurate tallying of COVID-19 deaths in state nursing homes. The state puts the number of such deaths at 8,500, but James suspects they could be double that, in part because residents who fell ill and were transferred to hospitals where they subsequently died were not counted. Read more here.
Ground Zero in U.K. Hospitals
As coronavirus deaths passed 100,000 in the U.K., the country’s hospitals have, as in so many other places, become places of both heroism and horror. The Associated Press has a moving look at what it’s like inside, where the pandemic feels “epic and intimate.” Read more here.
Vax En Masse
As the Biden Administration looks to vaccinate more than 100 million people over the next three months, forget the intimate appointment in your doctor’s office or a health clinic. In their place will be mass vaccination sites like stadiums and college campuses. USA Today has a look at what the great gatherings will be like. 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 Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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