The US is braced for a post-Christmas surge of coronavirus cases and deaths, as the number of people killed nears 350,000, with thousands predicted to die in the coming month and doctors warning they are at “breaking point”.
New Year’s Day saw 160,606 new cases and 2,051 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, bringing the total number of cases to 20.1m and the death toll to 347,788.
Friday’s figures were down on previous days: more than 10,000 died of Covid-19 in the US in just the last three days of 2020. But given record-keeping backlogs caused by the holiday period, numbers are expected to rise again.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has projected that more than 100,000 could die in the next month alone.
UK hospitals get first batches of Oxford/AstraZeneca jab
Hospitals in the UK have began receiving batches of the newly approved Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in preparation for its rollout on Monday.
About 530,000 doses of the vaccine will be available from the beginning of next week, with already identified vulnerable groups the priority for immunisation.
One of the first hospitals to take delivery of a batch on Saturday morning was the Princess Royal hospital in Haywards Heath, part of Brighton and Sussex University hospitals NHS trust.
Dr George Findlay, the trust’s chief medical officer and deputy chief executive, said hundreds of staff members a day were expected to be vaccinated at the site.
Updated
Increased socialising around Christmas – and not a new Covid variant – has driven Ireland’s rapid transformation from having the lowest infection rate in the European Union to the fastest rate of deterioration, according to health officials.
Ireland’s top virologist, Cillian De Gascun, said late on Friday laboratories had found 16 instances of the variant, discovered in neighbouring Britain, from a sample of 169 positive cases, Reuters reports.
Philip Nolan, the head of Ireland’s Covid-19 modelling group, said the following day that he believed the variant represented between 5% and 17% of the current prevalence.
Nolan told national broadcaster RTE:
Right now we believe the UK variant is here at a relatively low level, even with that small sample… We saw an even more intense level of socialisation and viral transmission over Christmas than we might have expected and that’s what’s leading us to the really precarious position we’re in now.
He added that cases could peak anywhere between 3,000 to 6,000 a day and Ireland was set to report more than 3,000 cases on Saturday, a near doubling of its daily record.
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Officials have defended England’s vaccine regimen after details of a contingency plan to potentially mix the two approved jabs in small numbers of cases emerged.
Public Health England’s Covid “green book” recommends that “it is reasonable to offer one dose of the locally available product to complete the schedule” if the same vaccine used for the first dose is not available. But it adds: “There is no evidence on the interchangeability of the Covid-19 vaccines although studies are under way.”
Criticism erupted following the publication of a New York Times report which quoted virologist Prof John Moore, from Cornell University in the US, who said “there are no data on this idea whatsoever” and that British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess”.
The American infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci said on Friday he did he not agree with the UK’s approach of delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
On Friday, Dr Fauci told CNN that the United States would not be following in the UK’s footsteps and would follow Pfizer and BioNTech’s guidance to administer the second dose of its vaccine three weeks after the first.
