The New York Times. More stuff about the coronavirus and vaccines.

May 20, 2021

An informed guide to the pandemic, with the latest developments and expert advice about prevention and treatment.

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New reported vaccine doses per day in the U.S.The New York Times

By Jonathan Wolfe

The W.H.O. announced a steep drop in new coronavirus cases in Europe over the past month, though a top agency official cautioned that “this progress is fragile.” A study found that vaccinations sharply cut the spread of the virus in U.S. nursing homes. Oregon told businesses to check the vaccination status of customers if they let them go maskless. Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and a vaccine tracker.

When doses come to you

Demand for vaccines in the U.S. is dwindling. The country is inoculating an average of about 1.8 million people a day, down from about 3.3 million in mid-April.

Part of the problem is access. Some people are encumbered by jobs or the responsibility of child care. Others struggle with dire poverty. Many are adrift, out of reach or uninformed.

So, across the country, health officials are taking vaccines on the road, sometimes even to potential patients’ doorsteps.

Searching for the unvaccinated in Lincoln, Del.Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

In Sussex County, Del., many residents live in poverty, making them more vulnerable to the virus. But a trip to a doctor or a vaccination appointment may require navigating irregular bus routes or losing a day’s wages.

In April, teams from Beebe Healthcare and local partners added workstations to a bus that had been used as a mobile library. Workers, who are able to vaccinate 50 people in several hours, listen and dispel misinformation — in English, Spanish and Creole.

The Mobile Library makes up to six stops a week in more rural parts of Sussex County, Del.Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

In New York City, Black and Hispanic residents are being vaccinated at significantly lower rates than other groups are. Now, public health officials there are reaching out to unvaccinated residents. Community groups are knocking on doors to persuade people to be inoculated, and in some cases those who agree get appointments for doses in a temporary clinic nearby.

A community organizer trying to persuade public housing residents in the Bronx to be vaccinated.James Estrin/The New York Times

To reach homeless people in Washington State, officials have set up a clinic on wheels in Pioneer Square in Seattle. Thomas Dunlap noticed the mobile clinic by chance and accepted an inoculation with relief. As did Michael Clinger, another homeless man, who said he was “sick of wearing a mask.”

The mobile clinic in Seattle was open to all.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

In rural areas, lack of access to technology and transportation during the pandemic has defined the potential for life, death or debilitating illness.

In Minnesota, the state health department and other partners transformed six city buses into clinics. Seats were removed and vaccination stations were installed. Personal protective equipment, canopies, tents and snacks have been stowed aboard. Up to eight people ride along, vaccinating 10 to 180 people at one event.

Vaccine administration volunteers celebrating a successful day of work in Foley, Minn.Liam James Doyle for The New York Times

Emily Smoak, a health department planner, said the mobile clinic teams aimed to build trust and curb the impact of the virus on communities.

“We are showing up in communities and telling people: ‘You do matter. We are not just going to leave you out of the greater process,’” Smoak said.

Vaccination campaigns in Asia

Two of China’s neighbors have enacted divergent vaccination campaigns, and their disparate results show the value of a muscular rollout.

Early in the pandemic, Taiwan shut its borders and required quarantines of nearly everyone who arrived from overseas, mostly shielding itself from the worst of the virus. But that has recently changed after enough infections have slipped by to cause localized outbreaks.

The country has reported 200 to 350 new infections a day for the past several days, after recording just 1,290 from the beginning of the pandemic until Saturday. Amplifying the concerns is the country’s slow vaccination campaign. Only about 1 percent of the island’s 23.5 million residents have been vaccinated. Scenes from the country now look like those from the early days of the pandemic, with businesses shuttered and lines around the block at testing sites. Experts say the slow pace of vaccination and more transmissible virus variants created a perfect window for a flare-up.

Mongolia, on the other hand, used its status as a small geopolitical player between Russia and China to strike deals with both countries to acquire enough doses to vaccinate its entire adult population. It’s a big victory for a low-income nation, which snapped up doses with a swiftness similar to the pace of much wealthier countries despite being late to the global rush for vaccines.

The country has been facing a forceful outbreak that began in March, but cases have been dropping during the past month, and officials are so confident about the nation’s vaccine riches that they are promising citizens a “Covid-free summer.”

Vaccine rollout

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has extended the period of time that the Pfizer vaccine can be refrigerated. Demand is high for vaccines among U.S. children ages 12 to 15, CNN reports. In an effort to increase the state’s vaccination rate, New York will hand out free scratch-off tickets for the Mega Multiplier lottery to those 18 and older who get a shot at 10 state mass vaccination sites next week. The vaccination campaign in Italy is speeding up, but it is heading smack into summer holidays, prompting fears that some would rather get away than get a shot. The Parliament of Ukraine named a new health minister who has promised to speed up vaccinations, including by trying to manufacture vaccines domestically, Reuters reported.

See how the vaccine rollout is going in your county and state.

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What else we’re following

The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a move by Republicans to relax mask-wearing in the chamber, The Washington Post reports. Colorado made it illegal to post personal information about public health workers and their families amid a rise in online harassment, The Washington Post reports. The Times examined the legacy of Dr. Wu Lien-Teh, a Chinese doctor who helped change the course of a plague epidemic in the early 20th century and promoted the use of masks as a public health tool. Overwhelmed lenders and panicked borrowers are in a frenzy to grab the remaining money in the Paycheck Protection Program. The Times’s Opinion section created a chatbot that can help you talk to vaccine-hesitant friends (in a kind and nonjudgmental way).

What you’re doing

Walking while unmasked Smiling at passing strangers Can the end be near? — Melissa Ray, Oakland, Calif.

An interesting fact: Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is a Muslim moron. The stupid fucking asshole who murdered 10 people did it for Allah. Muslims are scum. The United States should never let these Muslim subhumans enter this country.

News Alert March 25, 10:26 a.m. EDT

Boulder shooting suspect will be held without bail, judge rules in first court appearance days after supermarket rampage Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the suspected gunman in this week’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., that killed 10 people, made his first court appearance in what authorities anticipate will be a lengthy court process. Read more

A fucking idiot decided to kill lots of people because he thought that would be fun. 10 people dead including a police officer. Any lunatic can get a gun in Idiot America.

        New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

A 21-year-old man was charged with 10 counts of murder after a shooting in a Colorado grocery store on Monday. The victims have been identified.

Tuesday, March 23, 2021 10:59 AM EST

Police Chief Maris Herold read the names of the 10 victims who had been killed at a news conference. They included Officer Eric Talley, a 51-year-old officer with the Boulder Police Department. Chief Herold said police officers had run into the King Sooper grocery store within minutes of the shooting and had shot the suspect at least once. The suspect was taken into custody and is now in stable condition, she said.

Read the latest

This is interesting because I live in Illinois. "Record numbers of daily infections are reported in six states, including Ohio and Illinois."

New York Times

Record numbers of daily infections are reported in six states, including Ohio and Illinois.

Reports of new infections poured in at alarming levels on Saturday as the coronavirus continued to tear through the United States. Six states reported their highest-ever infection totals and more than 76,000 new cases had been announced by evening, one day after the country shattered its single-day record with more than 85,000 new cases.

The country’s case total on Saturday, which was sure to rise through the evening as more states reported data, was already the second highest in a single day. Case numbers on weekends are often lower because some states and counties do not report new data, so the high numbers on Saturday gave reason for alarm.

“This is exploding all over the country,” said Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, whose state is among 16 that have added more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch. “We’ve got to tamp down these cases. The more cases, the more people that end up in the hospital and the more people die.”

Officials in Alaska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico and Illinois announced more new cases on Saturday than on any other day of the pandemic.

Rural areas and small metropolitan regions have seen some of the worst outbreaks in recent weeks, but by Saturday, many large cities were struggling as well.

The counties that include Chicago, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Anchorage and El Paso all set single-day records on Saturday. Across the country, hospitalizations have grown by about 40 percent since last month, and they continued to rise on Saturday. Around Chicago, where new restrictions on bars and other businesses took effect Friday, more than twice as many cases are now being identified each day than at the start of October.

“This moment is a critical inflection point for Chicago,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot has said.

States in the Midwest and Mountain West have been reporting some of the country’s most discouraging statistics, but worrisome upticks are occurring all over. New cases have emerged at or near record levels recently in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arkansas and New Mexico.

“Over the next week, two weeks, three weeks, please be extremely conservative in deciding how much time to spend outside of the home,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico said Friday as she imposed new restrictions on businesses. “The visit to friends can wait — it’s not worth your life, or theirs.”

Experts worry that the growing numbers in need of hospital care will only get worse if cases continue to mount, especially in rural areas where medical facilities could be quickly overwhelmed.

The high case count in part reflects increased testing. With about one million people tested on many days, the country is getting a far more accurate picture of how widely the virus has spread than it did in the spring.

But public health officials warn that Americans are heading into a dangerous phase, as cooler weather forces people indoors, where the virus spreads easily. It could make for a grueling winter that tests the discipline of the many people who have grown weary of masks and of turning down invitations to see family and friends.

New York Times - An orange sky

Smoke from wildfires turned the sky orange over San Francisco.

The West, ablaze

In Oregon, wildfires have incinerated several communities this week, and thousands of people have evacuated their homes. In Washington State, a fire hit the town of Malden so quickly that deputies drove through the streets screaming for residents to leave. In Colorado, a 100,000-acre blaze was slowed only by a rare September snowstorm.

And in California, residents are coping with the worst wildfires on record. Smoke blotted out the sun yesterday in San Francisco, and ash fluttered down from the sky. “The sky had a faint orange glow that some said evoked a nuclear winter,” Thomas Fuller, The Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, told us. Jill Cowan, a Times reporter in Los Angeles, said, “The smoke and the poor air quality are just oppressive.”

Life across much of the American West is pretty miserable right now — and global warming is at least partly to blame. Climate change has increased the frequency of very hot days, droughts and, by extension, wildfires.

Charlie Warzel, a Times Opinion writer based in Montana, has argued that this extreme weather would receive even more attention if it were happening on the East Coast, where the nation’s capital is and much of the media is based. “I’ve wondered what coverage of climate would be like if the East really experienced how apocalyptic these feel,” he wrote. (He has also written a piece explaining what it’s like to live through a wildfire.)