Covid live updates: First case of U.K. Covid variant confirmed in Pennsylvania

Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Wednesday that he is advising states to begin vaccinating lower-priority groups against Covid-19 if the doses they have on hand would otherwise be sitting in freezers.

U.K. extends England entry ban to travelers from 11 African countries

The United Kingdom said on Thursday it would extend a ban on travelers entering England to southern African countries in a measure to prevent the spread of a new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa.

The restriction will take effect on Saturday and remain in place for two weeks, the government said in a statement.

"Entry into England will be banned to those who have travelled from or through any southern African country in the last 10 days," the country's Department for Transport said.

The nations include Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Angola.

Two cases of U.K.'s Covid-19 variant detected in Connecticut

Connecticut on Thursday afternoon became the latest state to confirm at least one case of the Covid-19 variant first detected in the United Kingdom last fall.

Gov. Ned Lamont said two people in New Haven County, ages 15 and 25, were found to have the new strain after they were tested earlier this month. One of the patients had recently traveled to Ireland and the other to New York state, and both developed symptoms within three to four days of returning to Connecticut, Lamont added.

Contact tracers are helping to identify others who may have come into contact with the individuals in both cases.

"The U.K. variant is widely assumed to be more highly transmissible than other strains of the virus," Dr. Deidre Gifford, the state's acting commissioner of public health, said in a statement. "However, our current vaccines should be effective against this strain, and we continue to urge everyone who is currently eligible to get the vaccine to do so."

Texas logs first known case of Covid-19 variant from U.K.

Public health officials in Harris County, Texas, said Thursday they have logged the first known case in the state of the Covid-19 variant that was initially discovered in the United Kingdom.

The male patient is between the ages of 30 and 40 with no known travel history, and remains in stable condition, health officials said. Epidemiologists in Harris County, the third-largest county in the nation, said they were conducting a review with state health officials to notify those who may have come into contact with the patient.

Harris County, which is home to Houston, has seen its Covid-19 positivity rate climb above 15 percent in recent days, with nearly 250,000 confirmed cases as of Thursday, according to county data.

The new Covid-19 strain, which was first detected in England in November, is considered to be more contagious, but does not necessarily result in more severe symptoms of the coronavirus. So far, the variant has been discovered in more than a dozen countries and at least five other states, including California, Colorado, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania. 

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'Winning the lottery': How some have lucked into a vaccine

Across the U.S., there are a handful of people who have lucked into access to a Covid-19 vaccine despite not being in one of the priority groups, which are determined by state. From Northern California to Connecticut, there are reports of other individuals getting vaccinated to prevent the vaccines from going to waste.

That's what happened with David MacMillan and a friend, who were at a grocery store in Washington, D.C., on New Year's Day. The 31-year-old law student told TODAY he was passing by the pharmacy section when he noticed a pharmacist speaking to an older woman about whether she wanted to receive the Moderna vaccine that very moment. The customer looked "hesitant" and "confused" and eventually declined, MacMillan said. Then the pharmacist turned to him and his companion.

MacMillan recalled her asking, "Hey, I have two doses of the Moderna vaccine. They're going to expire, and I'm going to throw them out at the end of the day, and we close in 10 minutes. Do you want them?"

MacMillan said he was "ecstatic" at the prospect and agreed.

More than half of Covid spread comes from people without symptoms

Nearly 60 percent of all Covid-19 spread may come from people with no symptoms, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Using mathematical modeling, CDC researchers estimated that 35 percent of Covid-19 spread is from people who are contagious before they develop symptoms, called presymptomatic transmission. Another 24 percent comes from people who are truly asymptomatic, and never go on to develop symptoms. 

Such widespread asymptomatic transmission means that simply identifying and isolating people who have symptoms of Covid-19 "will not control the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2," the virus that causes Covid-19, the study authors wrote. 

Rather, the findings mean that everyday behaviors to mitigate the spread of the virus are even more critical.

"Measures such as wearing masks, hand hygiene, social distancing and strategic testing of people who are not ill will be foundational to slowing the spread," the study authors wrote, "until safe and effective vaccines are available and widely used."

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Rae Ellen Bichell and Lauren Weber, Kaiser Health News

7h ago / 10:15 PM +06

Oxygen is the latest Covid bottleneck as hospitals cope with intense demand

As Los Angeles hospitals give record numbers of Covid patients oxygen, the systems and equipment needed to deliver the life-sustaining gas are faltering.

It’s gotten so bad that Los Angeles County officials are warning paramedics to conserve it. Some hospitals are having to delay releasing patients as they don’t have enough oxygen equipment to send home with them.

“Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen in the next week or so,” said Cathy Chidester, director of the L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Agency.

Oxygen, which makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s air, isn’t running short. But Covid damages the lungs, and the crush of patients in hot spots such as Los Angeles, the Navajo Nation, El Paso, Texas, and in New York last spring have needed high concentrations of it. That has stressed the infrastructure for delivering the gas to hospitals and their patients.