Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,132nd day of the pandemic as well as the birthday of Georges Jean Franz Köhler, a German immunologist who shared (with César Milstein and Niels K. Jerne) the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in developing the technique for producing monoclonal antibodies , which are pure, uniform, and highly sensitive protein molecules used in diagnosing and combating a number of diseases including cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s Disease, and SARS-CoV-2.
Remember Covid exposure apps? Neither did I really, until I noticed that the U.S. government will decommission the two cloud servers that are the infrastructure for the nation’s exposure-tracking apps that are offered by individual states. Those states that wish to maintain their apps will need to design their own tools and servers and, in some cases, redesign their apps, if they want to keep those alerts coming.
By “those states” what I really should say is perhaps one or two. California is known to be considering the issue but there has been no firm announcement.
As the world was shutting its doors and opening bottles of Clorox to ward off the Covid plague, Apple and Google, in a rare show of partnership, developed a way to use Bluetooth to log a user’s proximity in iOS- and Android-powered smartphones. This in turn enabled the creation of apps that alert those individuals who near someone who tested positive in the preceding 48 hours once the individual who tested positive tells the app to do so.
That individuals identity was not, of course, ever revealed. Indeed, the entire system was a striking example of anonymity and it worked beautifully.
While the U.S. government is pulling the plug, the technology’s co-creators – Apple and Google – are not. The two have gone on record saying that they would disable the system on a regional basis once “it is no longer needed,” in an FAQ issued in 2020. And both companies say they will continue to support state-run exposure-tracking systems once the federal system has been twilighted.
In other news we cover today, municipalities are failing to reopen their doors to the public even as Covid wanes, Amazon tells office workers to (ahem) return to the office, and sex doesn’t seem to matter in blood transfusions.
UNITED STATES
Despite an overall improvement in conditions, some state and local offices across the country continue to operate as if the world were still in the earliest throes of the pandemic. The Philadelphia library system has only restored weekend hours at some branches, the 55-person office of the New York City public advocate in the McKim, Mead & White David Dinkins Municipal Building only requires its employees to come into the office two days a week, despite holding a government job that requires direct interface with the public as its name implies, and the Maryland Home Improvement Commission, which among other tasks licenses building contractors, isn’t even located at the office officially listed as its address, while the wonderful observation deck atop City Hall in Richmond, Virginia, remains closed to the public since access to all parts of the building except the ground floor require an appointment.
GLOBAL
Health care officials in Hong Kong said that Covid testing had seven cases of the relatively new and highly infections XBB.1.16 variant among the samples collected in the city. XBB.1.16 was first detected in India at the start of 2023. While the subvariant is known to be highly transmissive, it does not cause more severe illness than earlier variants.
The family of a woman from the Philippines who died of myocarditis days after receiving a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Cominarty coronavirus vaccine booster in Singapore at the end of 2021 was given 225,000 Singapore dollars ($169,000) under that country’s Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Programme, the country’s Health Ministry said. A coroner ruled that the death of Ontal Charlene Varga was likely to have been related to the dose of vaccine she received.
TECH
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told company shareholders that he expects the company’s office workers to work from a corporate office at least three days a week.
OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS
A randomized clinical trial conducted by scientists it the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada found that the sex of a blood donor has no significant effect on the recipient’s chances of survival. Earlier retrospective studies had suggested that mixing blood between sexes could pose a possible risk.
As a historical note, in many countries, including the United States, blood was segregated by race. The head of the American Red Cross, Norman H. Davis, in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, confessed that segregating blood was “a matter of tradition and sentiment rather than of science,” although it didn’t discontinue the practice until 1950.
TODAY’S STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Monday, April 17.
As of Monday morning, the world has recorded over 685.7 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of just under 0.1 million from the previous day, and 6.84 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 658.4 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of under 0.05 million from the previous day.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Monday at press time is 20,432,360, an increase of 1,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,392,840, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 39,520, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past five months.
The United States reported 120,530 new cases in the period March 30 through April 5, a figure that is down 23% over the same period one week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll for the same period is 1,773, a figure that is down 22%. The average number of hospital admissions from Covid was 5,396 on April 10, a figure that is down 8% over the preceding 14 days. Finally, the test positivity rate is 6.4%, down 6% over the 14 days preceding April 7.
Starting on March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis.
In addition, since the start of the pandemic the United States has, as of Monday, recorded just under 106.5 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of just under 1.16 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 44.8 million, and a reported death toll of 531,141.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July, 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 39.9 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 700,811, has recorded just under 37.4 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with just under 33.6 million cases, South Korea, with just under 31 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with 25.7 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.4 million, and Russia, with just under 22.8 million.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of the past Thursday, 270.1 million people in the United States – or 81.4% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Of that population, 69.4%, or 230.5 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now 674.7 million. Breaking this down further, 92.3% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.2 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.2 million people – is fully vaccinated. In addition, 20.2% of the same population, or 52.2 million people, has already received an updated or bivalent booster dose of vaccine, while 23.3 million people over the age of 65, or 42.6% of that population have also received the bivalent booster.
Starting on June 13, 2022, the CDC began to update vaccine data on a weekly basis and publish the updated information on Mondays by 8 p.m. EDT, a statement on the agency’s website said.
Some 69.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Monday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.37 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 103,312 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 29.3% 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 start of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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