President Biden thanked vaccinated Americans on Tuesday for doing their “patriotic duty” and urged unvaccinated people to “go get the shot,” saying that “it’s never been easier.” About half of the eligible population has received at least one injection.
As new infections decline in the United States, India is battling a massive surge, recording more than 300,000 new cases for the sixth day in a row Tuesday. Biden has discussed sending vaccine doses to India in response to the worsening crisis.
Apple iOS update includes bloodless syringe emoji to be more vaccine-friendly
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s new iOS software update contains important privacy upgrades, the ability to unlock your phone while wearing a mask if you also own an Apple Watch, and — appeasing the clamoring voices on the Internet — a more vaccine-friendly syringe emoji.
The shot emoji has become one of the mobile-friendly symbols to represent coronavirus vaccines, an increasingly popular conversation point as 141 million people in the United States have now received at least one dose.
Some complained about the previous emoji, which had two drops of blood dripping from its point. The new version simply shows a sleek syringe, sans blood.
Users can see the emoji when they update to the new iPhone operating system, iOS 14.5.
“The new syringe emoji is FINALLY coming to iOS next week,” one user tweeted. “Now we can all look a little less unhinged when we’re celebrating our vax status.”
India breaks global record for new covid-19 cases for sixth day in a row as more countries pledge support
India reported more than 300,000 new confirmed covid-19 cases for the sixth day in a row Tuesday as the country battles a brutal wave of illnesses that’s overwhelmed its health-care system.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, called the situation in India “beyond heartbreaking.” He warned that many countries in the world “are still experiencing intense transmission,” with more new cases globally in the past week than in the first five months of the pandemic.
India’s new cases have helped push global infection rates to record levels. The country announced 323,144 new infections over the past 24 hours, a 10 percent drop from the day before, but experts warned that this may be more a function of a drop in testing than a sign the new wave is abating.
An additional 2,771 people have died, a number also considered a vast undercounting amid reports that many likely covid-19 deaths are being officially attributed to underlying causes or going unrecorded.
Coronavirus has crushed India’s health system. Patients are on their own.
NEW DELHI — When Rehmat Ahsan began to have trouble breathing last week, his family went from hospital to hospital in India’s capital looking for a bed in a covid-19 ward. Everywhere they tried was full.
Then they started a new search — for the oxygen that might save his life.
Ahsan’s older brother said he found an oxygen cylinder from a private vendor for $350, five times the normal price. It lasted eight hours. When he tried to refill the cylinder, he found hundreds of people waiting in line.
By the time he found more oxygen several hours later, Ahsan was struggling for every breath. Later that afternoon, he died at home.
In India’s devastating second wave of coronavirus infections, patients and their families are on their own, fighting to save their loved ones in an overwhelmed system where ambulances, hospital beds, oxygen, medicine and even cremation grounds are in short supply.
CDC says fully vaccinated Americans can go without masks outdoors, except in crowded settings
Federal health officials said Tuesday that fully vaccinated people can go without masks outdoors when walking, jogging or biking, or dining with friends at outdoor restaurants — a milestone development for tens of millions of pandemic-weary Americans after more than a year of masking up and locking down.
President Biden touted the relaxation of restrictions as another reason for people to get vaccinated, urging them to move forward not just to protect themselves and those around them, but so they can live more normally, by “getting together with friends, going to the park for a picnic without needing a mask.”
Biden had set July 4 as a target for when people could get together for backyard picnics with a sense of normalcy, and both the new mask guidance and his remarks were geared to encouraging people to continue getting the shots.
Montgomery County ties reopening decisions to vaccination levels
Coronavirus infections in the region continued a two-week decline Tuesday, as local officials sought to keep boosting inoculations among reluctant populations.
Montgomery County became the first jurisdiction in the area to tie reopening decisions to vaccination rates, with the County Council voting to relax caps on the size of indoor gatherings and the capacity of retail establishments because 50 percent of all residents have received at least one vaccine dose.
Officials said they would ease those restrictions — some of the toughest still in place in the region — effective 5 p.m. Tuesday. The county’s new rules allow gatherings of 50 people indoors and 100 people outdoors, and 50-percent capacity inside retail businesses.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) lifted indoor and outdoor capacity limits on most businesses more than a month ago, but Montgomery and Prince George’s counties were among the jurisdictions that kept stricter rules in place.
Brazil rejects Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, citing safety concerns
Brazilian health regulators have issued a scathing rebuke of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, rejecting the shot’s approval in a decision late Monday that could affect its use elsewhere in the world.
The ruling from Brazil’s Health Regulatory Agency, or Anvisa, cited a range of concerns with the vaccine’s development and production, including what it said was a lack of quality control and efficacy data, as well as little if any information on the shot’s adverse effects.
It was not the first time that health authorities have raised concerns about Sputnik V, which was hailed as “safe” and more than 91 percent effective in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet in February.
Earlier this month, Slovakia’s pharmaceutical regulator scrapped a batch of Sputnik V doses it said did not share “the same characteristics and properties” as those examined by the Lancet.
Biden urges unvaccinated people to ‘go get the shot'
President Biden urged Americans who’ve yet to be vaccinated to “go get the shot” Tuesday, asserting that “it’s never been easier.”
Appearing outside the White House, he thanked Americans who have been vaccinated for doing their “patriotic duty” as he promoted updated federal guidance that fully vaccinated Americans can go without masks outdoors except in crowded settings.
“The vaccines are about saving your life but also the lives of the people around you,” he said. “But they’re also about helping you get us get back to closer to normal and our living more normal lives, getting together with friends, going to the park for a picnic without needing a mask.”
Biden had set July 4 as a target for when people could get together for backyard picnics with a sense of normalcy.
“I … want to thank everyone who has gotten the vaccine for doing your patriotic duty and helping us get on the path to Independence Day,” Biden said in remarks on the North Lawn of the White House.
He arrived at the podium wearing a mask. He returned to the White House without one, saying he didn’t have to put it on until he got back into the building.
Real ID requirement for air travel delayed amid pandemic-related lag at motor vehicle branches
Americans will have two more years to obtain a Real ID driver’s license or identification card, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday.
The new deadline for when U.S. air travelers will be required to present the Real ID credential to board a domestic flight will be May 3, 2023. Implementation was scheduled to take effect in October.
Postponing the enforcement of the last phase of the Real ID Act will give motor vehicle departments across the nation more time to process the new credentials after many were closed or reduced services because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Vaccinated? Great. But wear a mask when indoors or in crowds, experts say.
More than 94 million Americans are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Despite so many invigorated immune systems, the populace still needs to keep wearing masks, public health specialists say. The country is not yet so protected it can forgo face coverings everywhere. Case counts have spiked in some hot spots.
But indoors and in busy public spaces, where it might be unknown who is vaccinated or is at risk for severe disease, everyone should continue to wear masks, the agency said.
Those guidelines “are absolutely appropriate for this moment in time,” said Megan Ranney, an emergency medicine physician and professor at Brown University. “There just aren’t enough of us who have immunity yet for it to be safe to take those masks off in public.”
In first 100 days, Biden refashions himself as transformational leader amid pandemic and other crises
As a Democratic primary candidate, Joe Biden told debate viewers he understood that most Americans “are looking for results, not a revolution.” He promised wealthy donors that, in a Biden administration, “nothing would fundamentally change.” And he declared to rallygoers that he saw himself “as a bridge, not as anything else,” to a new generation of Democratic leaders.
Then the coronavirus changed everything.
By the time Biden ascended to the presidency, he had refashioned himself as a transformational leader — a president prepared to fundamentally overhaul the role of government in society on behalf of the nation’s working men and women.
The pandemic — which had killed half a million Americans by the beginning of his second month in office — provided an organizing principle for Biden’s presidency and a clear mission for him to manage. But the coronavirus also exposed deep-seated inequalities, from systemic racism to a fragile middle class, just one illness or missed paycheck away from free-fall.
Citing debunked misinformation, Miami private school bans the vaccinated from attending
Last week, leaders at the Centner Academy, a private school in Miami, sent teachers an email with a stark warning: Skip the coronavirus vaccine or you’re not welcome in the classroom.
“We cannot allow recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known,” Leila Centner, the school’s co-founder, said in a letter first reported on by the New York Times.
The school’s decision alarmed public health experts and demonstrated the pervasive reach of misinformation about the vaccines, which at least 141 million Americans have received.
Under covid they couldn’t meet, so these 90-somethings in love snuck around like teenagers
When the pandemic hit last year, Bill Biega and Iris Ivers had just begun their romance.
Biega, 98, and Ivers, 91, knew the strict covid lockdown rules at the Applewood retirement community in Freehold, N.J.: Residents must stay in their own rooms at all times.
But Biega and Ivers felt like teenagers in love, and they acted every bit of it. Biega would sneak up in the elevator from the second floor to Ivers’s third-floor apartment. And Ivers was more than happy to reciprocate.
Back and forth they went, flouting the rules, until one night in March 2020 when Biega was busted by security.
“They caught me leaving Iris’s apartment one evening,” Biega said. “The security guard told me, ‘You can either live apart or live together, but you have to make your mind up right now.’”
When he was back in his own apartment, he quickly got on the phone with Ivers to tell her their covert visits had to end.
Quarter of U.S. women worse off post-pandemic, says Post-ABC poll
Women and people of color are the most likely to say they are financially worse off today than before the pandemic began, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, underscoring the struggles many Americans are still facing even as the broader economy shows signs of improvement.
A quarter of women say their family’s financial situation is worse today than before coronavirus-related shutdowns began in March 2020, compared to 18 percent of men, the poll finds. And 27 percent of non-Whites say they are worse off now vs. 18 percent of Whites.
The findings highlight the ongoing financial hardships that many families are facing a year into the global health crisis. Women and workers of color were far more likely to lose jobs when the pandemic took hold last spring and wiped out millions of service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels, spas, salons and non-urgent health-care fields.
New revelations on comments about covid deaths dog Boris Johnson
LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s problems over callous comments regarding covid dead deepened on Tuesday with new remarks linked to him about preferring further fatalities to another lockdown.
Britain’s Times newspaper published a report on its front page claiming that Johnson said in September he would rather let coronavirus “rip” than call for a second nationwide lockdown, citing economic concerns and branding countrywide shutdowns as “mad.”
British media reported Monday that the prime minister allegedly said in October, “No more [expletive] lockdowns — let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”
Opposition lawmakers, publications and social media users have blasted Johnson for what they say was his callous attitude. Labour Party lawmaker Jess Phillips tweeted that her “blood was boiling with anger” following the comments.
“When the PM reportedly said ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’, we had around 46,000 Covid deaths. His refusal to prioritise public health & act decisively led to 80,000 more deaths. Whether or not he said it, it’s the outcome his actions led to. That’s sickening,” tweeted Labour lawmaker Zarah Sultana.
On Monday, British officials and Johnson himself denied the claim, branding it “just another lie,” as the opposition Labour Party called for an urgent inquiry.
“Boris on the ropes” read Tuesday’s front page of the normally supportive Daily Mail, while the Mirror tabloid ran the headline “Not just bodies, Boris.” Broadcasters BBC and ITV also echoed the claims over his remarks.
More than 127,000 lives have been lost to the coronavirus in Britain. Johnson and his Conservative Party have faced criticism for not acting swiftly enough to curb the pandemic.
Johnson is expected to hold a cabinet meeting later Tuesday that focuses on “jabs and jobs,” rather than recent leaks and questions over his behavior, the BBC reported.
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