Covid-19: Virus Has Recently Infected 1 in 50 in England

Scientists are studying whether Moderna’s vaccine supply can be doubled by cutting doses in half. Germany will extend its national lockdown.

This briefing has ended.

As England re-entered lockdown on Tuesday, new figures showed that one in 50 people had recently been infected with the virus, and officials warned that some restrictions on daily life could still be needed next winter.

Speaking at a news conference, Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to focus government efforts on rolling out its strained mass vaccination program intended to prevent a surge in infections of a highly transmissible variant of the virus from overwhelming the health service.

With more than a million confirmed cases in the week ending Jan. 2, or 2 percent of England’s population, Britain is in a race against time to distribute vaccines.

Mr. Johnson was speaking on a day when the government said more than 60,000 new cases were recorded for the first time. Standing alongside him, Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said that the number of daily deaths, now averaging around 530, was expected to rise and that if people did not observe a lockdown order to stay at home, the risk was “extraordinarily high.”

He also warned that Britons might face some restrictions well into the future.

“We might have to bring a few in, in the next winter for example — that is possible — because winter will benefit the virus,” Professor Whitty said.

Mr. Johnson said that 1.3 million people had already been vaccinated and that he hoped that the most vulnerable, a group including the elderly and numbering around 13 million, could be protected by the vaccine within about six weeks, turning the tide in the battle against the virus.

“We in government are now using every second of this lockdown to put that invisible shield around the elderly and the vulnerable in the form of vaccinations,” he said.

Mr. Johnson said that England would be locked down until inoculations reached the four most vulnerable groups: residents in nursing homes and those who care for them, everyone over the age of 70, all frontline health and social care workers, and everyone who is clinically extremely vulnerable.

“If we succeed in vaccinating all those groups, we will have removed huge numbers of people from the path of the virus,” he said.

That goal, he added, could be achieved by the middle of February.

But to do that, the pace of vaccinations will need to increase drastically.

The four groups that the prime minister cited include 13.9 million people in England, according to Nadhim Zahawi, the minister overseeing the vaccine effort.

Since the campaign started on Dec. 8, fewer than 800,000 people in England had been vaccinated as of Dec. 27, the last date when data was available.

But with the introduction on Monday of the first doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca — shots that are easier to transport and do not need to be stored at very cold temperatures — British officials said that the campaign could now be ramped up.

To meet Mr. Johnson’s target, some two million doses need to be given every week.

Mr. Johnson also said he was planning a new system to ensure that those traveling to Britain had a negative coronavirus test before arrival. But he was forced to defend himself against charges that he moved too slowly to order the lockdown, and showed poor judgment by insisting over the weekend that many schools in England should reopen after the winter holiday on Monday — only to reverse that decision on Monday night.

— Stephen Castle and Marc Santora
As the coronavirus rages in California, L.A. medics are told to ration oxygen.

Patients were lined up outside the emergency room at the LAC USC Hospital in Los Angeles, on Tuesday, after they were brought to the hospital by ambulance and the fire department.
Patients were lined up outside the emergency room at the LAC USC Hospital in Los Angeles, on Tuesday, after they were brought to the hospital by ambulance and the fire department.Credit...Etienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock
Officials in California have painted an increasingly catastrophic picture of the state’s Covid-19 crisis over the past several days, precisely what they had warned was coming, as the state faces an oxygen shortage.

California has deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority to deliver and refill oxygen tanks.

In Los Angeles County, emergency workers have been told to conserve oxygen and administer the minimum amount of oxygen to keep patients’ oxygen saturation level at or just above 90 percent. (A level in the low 90s or below is a concern for people with Covid-19.)

Officials in the most populous U.S. county have said a person is being infected every six seconds in the county and one in five residents currently tested was infected with Covid-19. “Your bubble is not as safe as you think it is,” the department tweeted.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has warned that the worst was somehow yet to come: a “surge on top of a surge” driven by post-holiday infections.

As of Tuesday evening, 4,374 people with Covid-19 had died in the preceding two weeks, compared with 3,202 in the two weeks before that.

In some cases, there will be nowhere for the victims of that surge to go.

Health authorities in Los Angeles County have directed ambulance crews not to transport some cardiac arrest patients whose survival is unlikely. At some hospitals, patients are being lined up outside while workers try to find bed space.

California was already short on hospital beds before the pandemic, and I.C.U. capacity in a large swath of the state has been nonexistent for weeks.

The surge in Southern California has been so severe that industry groups themselves have called for film and television production, which had been allowed to continue even after outdoor dining was banned, to pause. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 industry workers, was joined by groups representing producers and advertisers in calling for an in-person production halt on Sunday.

Their statement noted that even if workers do not contract the virus, they are still at risk of injury from stunts, equipment failures, or falls.

“With few if any hospital beds available, it is hard to understand how a worker injured on set is supposed to seek treatment,” said David White, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director.

The Grammy Awards, one of the entertainment industry’s biggest nights, were postponed on Tuesday from Jan. 31 to March 14. A statement from the Recording Academy, which presents the awards, and CBS, its longtime broadcast partner, cited the “deteriorating” situation in Los Angeles.

— Anushka Patil
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Second doses have begun for the earliest U.S. vaccine recipients.

Sandra Lindsay received her second dose of the Covid-19 Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, three weeks after the first dose. 
Sandra Lindsay received her second dose of the Covid-19 Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, three weeks after the first dose. Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
After Sandra Lindsay became the first person in the United States to receive a Covid-19 vaccination outside a clinical trial, something unexpected happened: She acquired a fan club.

Half a dozen inspired youngsters in Lee, N.H., ranging in age from 8 to 12, each sent Ms. Lindsay a letter praising her for leading the way.

“I would like to thank you for taking the first vaccine in the U.S.A.,” 12-year-old Finley wrote. “I have had a hard time in this era. What you did was incredibly brave.” He added, “You helped everyone who was unsure, and you gave hope to those who are lonely and felt unsafe.”

On Monday, Ms. Lindsay, 52, the director of critical care nursing at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, was in the vanguard again. The requisite 21 days had passed, so it was time for her, and hundreds of other health care workers and long-term care patients at the head of the line, to receive the second half of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

By the end of the day, 118,304 people in the city had gotten a first dose of coronavirus vaccinations, and 756 had gotten a second, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Across the country, other early recipients were getting shot No. 2 as well.

Nearly all states have made getting health care workers and nursing home residents immunized a top priority. But the effort, now three weeks old, has been slower than many governors and public health officials hoped.

The federal government has shipped more than 15 million vaccine doses to states, but only 4.5 million people have received them so far. There are 21 million health care workers nationwide, and three million residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Dr. Mark P. Jarrett, chief quality officer for Northwell Health, which operates Long Island Jewish, 22 other hospitals and 800 ambulatory care sites in the New York metropolitan area, said his organization has vaccinated about 27,000 employees with either the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccines. The Moderna recipients will get their second shot after 28 days.

The two-stage nature of the vaccines will affect how fast the vaccination program progresses, Dr. Jarrett noted. “I would expect that general public inoculations could start in late February, and it will take a long time to complete,” he said. “You’re talking about millions of people, and they have to come back for second shots.”

Ms. Lindsay said on Tuesday that she had experienced no side effects from the vaccine, and that she was touched by the children’s letters, which left her “very, very emotional.”

She said she had been sure since the early days of the pandemic that she would get vaccinated as soon as she could: “Given my experiences on the front lines, and seeing the hard work of my colleagues and the suffering and death of patients, I knew back then that when it was developed, I wanted to take the vaccine.”

But even with the two shots now safely in her arm, she still worries about going to work.

“I have been a nurse for more than 26 years, and I’ve never been more scared than I am right now, even with the vaccine, because this virus is so erratic, unpredictable and does not discriminate,” she said. “You never know what you are walking into.”

— Serge F. Kovaleski
Scientists are studying if the Moderna vaccine supply can be doubled by cutting doses in half.

A medical worker receiving one of the first doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at Christ Hospital in Jersey City, N.J., last month.
A medical worker receiving one of the first doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at Christ Hospital in Jersey City, N.J., last month.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the drugmaker Moderna are analyzing vaccine research data to see if they can double the supply of the company’s coronavirus vaccine by cutting doses in half, a move that would help alleviate vaccine shortages as the country surpassed more than 21 million virus cases.

The research,