Coronavirus Daily News Brief – March 7: Biden’s SOTU, Last Day to Order Free At-Home Tests, Masks Are Off at China’s National People’s Congress

A panda at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,457th day.
THE LEDE
Public Service Announcement: Tomorrow is the Last Day to Order Free At-Home Covid Test Kits in the U.S.
The federal government’s offer for free at-home Covid test kits will soon be discontinued. The on-again/off-again offer was most recently made available in mid-November of last year, just in time for the holiday travel season.
The free test kits will continue to be available at www.covidtests.gov through March 8, 2024.
“Orders for free at-home Covid-19 tests will be suspended on Friday, March 8, 2024,” a message that first appeared on Monday of this week said on the website.
The program was introduced in late January 2022.  Deliveries are made by the United States Postal Service within seven to ten days of an order being placed.  The government will send four test kits to each residential address that places a request until the program is once again suspended at the end of the current week.
In other news we cover today, President Biden used his third State of the Union address to highlight the country’s recovery from the early days of the pandemic, it’s masks off at the National People’s Congress in China, and all of the precautions taken to avoid contracting SARS-CoV-2 quickly killed off one strain of the flu.
LONG COVID
A peer-reviewed study from researchers at Stanford University suggests that Long Covid could cause increased sensitivity to alcohol.
Scientists at Stanford’s Post-Acute Covid-19 Syndrome Clinic looked at a group of four Long Covid patients with varying demographics and documented their medical histories and alcohol consumption habits before and after contracting SARS-CoV-2.
The study suggests that the patients, despite their varying health backgrounds, share a new-onset sensitivity to the consumption of alcohol subsequent to infection, which triggers “unprecedented symptoms and similar or lower alcohol consumption levels,” the researchers said.
The three women in the study reported “overwhelming” fatigue after drinking alcohol in the same quantities as prior to contracting SARS-CoV-2. A 60-year-old man complained of headaches after drinking a quantity of alcohol similar to what he would drink before becoming infected. This patient reported “chronic, daily headaches characterized by a squeezing sensation at the top and back of the head, typically worst at night,” the study’s authors wrote.
UNITED STATES
In his third annual State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said that Americans are “writing the greatest comeback story never told” some four years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic and a devastating economic crisis.
“I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” he said before a joint session of Congress. “It doesn’t make news, but in a thousand cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
GLOBAL NEWS
In China, there are n o more face masks or social distancing rules. For the first time in almost half a decade, thousands of delegates are attending the National People’s Congress sans face masks.
Unlike in the period since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 in Wuhan, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people across the globe, China’s biggest annual political event were able to see each other’s faces while sipping tea in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
Moreso than any other country, China enacted a draconian anti-Covid policy that resulted in thousands of lockdowns from small towns to major cities, business shutdowns for months, and forced relocation of not only Covid patients but those who came in contact with Covid patients to isolation camps.
The government removed those restrictions when it appeared to be fomenting a revolt against the government.
Meanwhile, all of the masking, staying at home, and improved ventilation that helped people avoidcontracting SARS-CoV-2 appear to have killed off one known circulating lineage of Influenza B virus, known as the Yamagata virus.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Committee voted unanimously to remove the strain from the next round of seasonal flu vaccines, a move that will result in a trivalent vaccine instead of the previous quadrivalent vaccine.
On Tuesday, a panel of experts who advise the US Food and Drug Administration on vaccines voted unanimously to recommend three-strain flu vaccines that will exclude any viruses from B strains that are part of branch of the flu’s family tree called Yamagata.
Yamagata viruses were already in decline before the start of the pandemic but the precautions that were taken appear to have finished them off. They haven’t been detected since March 2020.
Already in October 2023, the World Health Organization concluded that protection against the lineage was no longer necessary in future seasonal flu vaccines and recommended that the number of lineages targeted by the vaccine be reduced from four to three.
GLOBAL STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Thursday, March 7.
As of Thursday, at press time, the world has recorded 703.97 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.01 million in the last 48 hours, and 7 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 674.93 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.03  million in the past 24 hours.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls as well as the occasional downward or upward adjustment as corrections to case figures warrant.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Thursday at press time is 22,042,177, a decrease of 10,000 in the past 24 hours. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,006,785, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 35,392, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 19 months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Thursday, recorded 111.61 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.22 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.03 million, and a reported death toll of 533,499.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States.  Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.14 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.82 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 709,963, has recorded 38.45 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are South Korea, with 34.57 million cases, as number six; Japan, with 33.8 million cases placing it in the number seven slot; and Italy, with 26.72 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.9 million, and Russia, with 24.01 million, as nine and ten respectively.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending February 24, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on February 29, 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 7.4%, and the trend in test positivity is -0.9% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 1.5%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -14.6%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 17,310, a figure that is down 8.7% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 2.1%, a figure that is down 10.7% in the same period.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Thursday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.57 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 1,885 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.7% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
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