Biden Warns of 500,000 COVID Deaths by February

As President Joe Biden began to enact key parts of his ambitious pandemic response plan on Thursday, he warned Americans that the coronavirus death toll in this country could top 500,000 by February.

“Let me be very clear: Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better,” Biden said. “And let me be equally clear: We will get through this. We will defeat this pandemic.”

He tackled mask-wearing first, signing an order mandating masks in airports and on many planes, trains, ships and intercity buses, the Washington Post reported. The move follows the Wednesday signing of his first executive order, which requires masks on federal property.

That is as close to a national mask mandate as Biden’s federal powers allow, leaving it to states and municipalities to require residents to wear masks at a local level, the Post reported.

Next on the agenda: speeding up the nation’s vaccine rollout.

Biden has repeatedly promised to get 100 million COVID-19 shots into the arms of the American people by his 100th day in office. To help do so, he’s directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to begin constructing federally supported community vaccination centers, with the goal of having 100 centers in operation within the next month, The New York Times reported.

But averaging 1 million doses a day appears to be a goal that’s already beginning to be met. The average number of vaccines administered over the past week was about 936,000, according to a Post tally using data from state reports and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Thursday, the number was 1,057,369.

As of Friday, more than 17.5 million Americans have been vaccinated while nearly 38 million doses have been distributed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 2.4 million people have received their second shot.

Other parts of the Biden plan include the creation of a Pandemic Testing Board that can orchestrate a “surge” in the number and availability of coronavirus tests. Additional directives will foster research into new treatments for COVID-19, strengthen the collection and analysis of data to shape the government’s pandemic strategy; and direct the federal occupational safety agency to release and enforce guidelines to protect workers from getting infected, the Post reported.

The new plan also steers more money to states, which have complained they need more funding to test and vaccinate residents. And the White House will try to persuade Congress to cover the entire cost for states to vaccinate low-income residents on Medicaid, the Post said.

The Biden team said it had identified 12 “immediate supply shortfalls” that have been critical to the pandemic response, including N95 surgical masks and isolation gowns, as well as swabs, reagents and pipettes used in testing, the Times reported.

On Thursday, Biden authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to increase vaccine supplies. “This is a wartime undertaking,” Biden said, noting that more Americans have died of COVID-19 than in all of World War II.

But the president, who has proposed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package, will need the cooperation of Congress to carry out much of his ambitious plan, which also includes greatly expanding testing of asymptomatic people to reopen schools and businesses, the Times said. He also intends to direct the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to issue new guidance on how to safely reopen schools.

Last but not least, Biden will create a COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force to “address the disproportionate and severe impact of COVID-19 on communities of color and other underserved populations,” the Times reported.

COVID variants might lessen power of vaccines

Scientists reported this week that some new COVID-19 variants might eventually threaten the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines.

Most troubling is a variant that first surfaced in South Africa but hasn’t yet been spotted in the United States. A new lab study suggests someone might be able to get infected with the South African variant even if they’ve had COVID-19 before or have been vaccinated.

“I think we should be alarmed,” senior study author Penny Moore, an associate professor at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, told CNN. Her team’s results were published on the preprint server BioRxiv, and have not been peer-reviewed yet.

“Based on Penny’s data, it’s likely that the vaccine is going to be somewhat less effective, but how much less effective we don’t know,” David Montefiori, a virologist at Duke University Medical Center, told CNN. “This is the first time I’ve been concerned about a variant partially evading the immune response and partially evading the vaccine.”

Both experts stressed that people should still get the vaccine. It’s extremely effective against other forms of the virus, and they think it likely will still give some level of protection against the new variant.

In the study, Moore and her colleagues took blood from 44 people who’d already had COVID-19. Nearly all of their cases were confirmed to have occurred prior to September, before the variant was spotted in South Africa.

The researchers then looked to see whether their antibodies would fight off the new variant.

For about half of the 44 people, their antibodies were powerless against the new variant.

“We saw a knockout,” Moore said. “It was a scary result.”

For the other half, the antibody response was weakened, but not totally knocked out.

The analysis showed that the strongest antibody response was from those who had suffered more severe cases of COVID-19. The culprits were mutations in two different parts of the spikes that sit atop the coronavirus. The vaccines work by targeting those spikes.

“It was a two-armed escape from the immune system,” Moore told CNN.

Her team is now gathering blood from people who’ve been vaccinated to see if their antibodies can fight off the new variant.

“I think the data on people with prior infection raises all kinds of red flags for the vaccines,” she said. “We have to test it to find out.”

Still, it may not be time to panic: Montefiori thinks the vaccine will likely take a hit — but probably not a huge one.

“We have to remember, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 95% effective — that’s an extraordinary level of efficacy,” Montefiori said. “If it reduces to 90, 80, 70% effective, that is still very, very good and likely to have a major impact on the pandemic.”

A global scourge

By Friday, the U.S. coronavirus case count passed 24.6 million while the death toll passed 410,000, according to a Times tally. On Friday, the top five states for coronavirus infections were: California with over 3.1 million cases; Texas with over 2.2 million cases; Florida with over 1.6 million cases; New York with close to 1.3 million cases; and Illinois with almost 1.1 million cases.

Curbing the spread of the coronavirus in the rest of the world remains challenging.

In India, the coronavirus case count was over 10.6 million by Friday, a Johns Hopkins University tally showed. Brazil had nearly 8.7 million cases and over 214,000 deaths as of Friday, the Hopkins tally showed.

Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed 97.6 million on Friday, with nearly 2.1 million deaths recorded, according to the Hopkins tally.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the new coronavirus.

SOURCES: Washington Post; CNN; The New York Times

Source: HealthDay