“We’re still learning about the rates of myocarditis and pericarditis,” CDC safety expert Tom Shimabukuro said, according to Bloomberg News. “As we gather more information we’ll begin to get a better idea of the post-vaccination rates and hopefully be able to get more detailed information by age group.”
The Food and Drug Administration has allowed the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which uses mRNA technology, to be administered on children as young as 12 during the pandemic.
Here are some significant developments:
Chile imposes new lockdown in capital as cases spike
The Chilean capital Santiago was set to enter a full lockdown beginning Saturday amid an alarming rise in new coronavirus cases and despite a soaring vaccination rate.
The number of new cases nationwide topped 7,700 Thursday as patients flooded hospital wards and ICU capacity in the greater Santiago region reached 98 percent, Reuters reported.
The agency quoted Jose Luis Espinoza, the president of Chile’s National Federation of Nursing Associations, as saying that his members were “on the verge of collapse."
Chile has fully vaccinated about 58 percent of its population of 19 million, while 75 percent have received at least one dose. The immunization drive, however, has relied almost entirely on the Chinese-made CoronaVac vaccine, which has proved less effective than other Western-made shots such as those developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
According to Chile’s Health Ministry, more than 20 million vaccine doses have been administered, more than 15.8 million of which were the CoronaVac vaccine. Another 3.6 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses were used, as well as a smaller number of the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot.
Reuters cited the Health Ministry as saying that among the new cases between Wednesday and Thursday, 73 percent were people who had not been fully inoculated. About 74 percent were under the age of 49, the report said.
In April, the University of Chile published a study that the authors said showed that CoronaVac, which is made by China’s Sinovac Biotech, was more than 56 percent effective two weeks after the second dose. But a first dose provided just 3 percent protection.
Experts in Chile have blamed the recent surge in cases on a mix of factors, including pandemic fatigue, travel, more transmissible variants and subpar protection from CoronaVac.
South Africa ‘technically’ enters third coronavirus wave, public health institute says
The country’s rolling seven-day average caseload reached nearly 6,000 on Thursday, the institute said, a benchmark the government previously set to monitor a potential third wave after a devastating surge earlier this year.
“South Africa technically entered the third wave today,” the NICD said in a statement, adding that hospitalizations were also on the rise.
According to the World Health Organization, the number of new infections in South Africa jumped by nearly 29 percent over the past seven days.
The previous wave was driven by the more virulent beta variant that is now dominant there. Beta also showed some resistance to available coronavirus vaccines, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot available through the United Nations-backed Covax initiative, which seeks the equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide.
South African authorities have struggled to ramp up a national vaccination campaign, fully inoculating less than 1 percent of the population of some 58 million, according to Our World in Data, which tracks publicly available figures.
South Africa is the pandemic’s hardest-hit nation in Africa, with more than 1.7 million total infections and over 57,000 deaths.
N.Y. legislature passes bill to make forging vaccination cards a felony
New York state lawmakers passed a bill Thursday that would make forging a coronavirus vaccination card a felony. The bill now heads to the desk of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) for approval.
The legislation, which would punish anyone who falsifies a coronavirus vaccination card or passport with up to four years in prison, comes amid a boom in businesses requiring or incentivizing vaccinations. Reports of people faking the documents have also increased.
“We’re using vaccine cards and passports to make everything safer from baseball to Broadway,” said state senator Anna M. Kaplan (D), one of the bill’s sponsors. “But the system relies on individuals being truthful about their vaccination status in order to keep everyone safe. We’re already seeing anti-vaxxers spread tips online for how to create fake cards in order to get around vaccination mandates, and we need to put a stop to this effort to defraud the public so that our recovery from the pandemic can keep moving forward.”
In April, state attorneys general urged Twitter, eBay and Shopify to crack down on the sale of fake or illicit vaccine cards.
Making or buying fake vaccination cards is also against federal law.
“By misrepresenting yourself as vaccinated when entering schools, mass transit, workplaces, gyms, or places of worship, you put yourself and others around you at risk of contracting covid-19,” the FBI warned earlier this year.
China invites Taiwanese to get vaccinated
Beijing has invited residents of Taiwan to visit China for vaccinations in a move that seems certain to infuriate the democratically elected government in Taipei.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement Friday that Taiwanese residents were welcome to be inoculated as long as they followed social distancing measures, Reuters reported. While Beijing has shut its borders to most international travelers, it claims sovereignty over the self-ruling island of Taiwan; Taiwanese holding certain permits can still enter the People’s Republic.
The World Health Organization recently authorized the Chinese-developed Sinopharm and Sinovac shots for emergency use during the pandemic, despite doubts about their effectiveness against symptomatic infection.
While China has administered more than 800 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, Taiwan is off to a sluggish start. The island of roughly 23.5 million people, which had been a model of coronavirus containment until a recent spike in infections, has only inoculated about 3 percent of its population.
Taiwan recently received over 1.2 million doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines from Japan. The United States, Taiwan’s most important ally, has also pledged at least 750,000 shots.
Beijing has offered to send Chinese-made vaccines to Taiwan, which bars imports of Chinese pharmaceutical goods. In its statement, the Taiwan Affairs Office urged Taipei to “quickly remove artificial obstacles for mainland vaccines being sent to Taiwan and allow the broad mass of Taiwan compatriots to receive the safe and highly effective mainland vaccines.”
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has accused Beijing of blocking at least one vaccine deal that her government had hoped to sign with a European drugmaker.
The Taiwan Affairs Office said that at least 62,000 Taiwanese were vaccinated by Beijing as of May 31, though opinion polls in Taiwan have shown that only a small minority would opt for Chinese-made shots.
Rates of anxiety and depression among college students continue to soar, researchers say
College students are feeling more anxious and depressed as they sleep less and spend more time on their phones, researchers said after spending four years monitoring the behaviors of young people.
Dartmouth College researchers began tracking 217 students when they entered the school as freshmen in 2017 in the hopes of understanding how they behave. They’ve seen students’ stress levels rise and fall, usually in tandem with midterm and final exams. But since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety have soared — and have showed no signs of coming down, said Andrew Campbell, a researcher and computer science professor.
The research points to how the public-health crisis is affecting young people and raises questions about what will be done to support them, a group that struggled disproportionately with mental health issues for years before the pandemic set in.
Federal government will maintain expansive work-from-home policies after the pandemic
The Biden administration on Thursday told federal agencies that more employees can return to their offices as the threat of the coronavirus pandemic ebbs, but it also laid out a permanent work-from-home expansion that will drastically alter the federal government’s workplace culture.
Federal agencies no longer have to limit the number of staffers allowed in their offices to 25 percent occupancy, the administration said in the first major announcement on pandemic staffing it has issued since January.
But the 20-page memo to federal agencies also maintains what started as an experiment in March 2020 to contend with the public health crisis — for the immediate future and potentially the long term.
A fully vaccinated cruise set sail in the Caribbean. Two passengers just tested positive for the coronavirus.
When the Celebrity Millennium departed St. Maarten in the Caribbean on Saturday “with celebration and fanfare,” the cruise was hailed as a milestone both for the cruise line and the embattled North American cruise industry.
With sailings from the United States still paused, the voyage was seen as a way for Americans to return to a favorite vacation pastime at least relatively close to home. But despite a requirement that all passengers over 16 be vaccinated, the celebratory cruise couldn’t avoid the virus that shut the industry down 15 months ago.
Two passengers who were sharing a room on the ship tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday, two days before the cruise was scheduled to end. The results came as part of required end-of-cruise testing, Celebrity Cruises said in a statement Thursday evening.
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