Summary;
- Global cases near 106.3MM
- US deaths decline alongside cases, hospitalizations
- China sees no new cases local cases for first time in nearly 2 months
- California sees fewest new deaths in months
- France hopes to vaccinate 4MM by end of February
- Quebec first province in Canada to top 10K deaths
- Chicago schools strike deal with teachers unions
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New research published Monday suggested that AstraZeneca's COVID jab, developed in partnership with Oxford, is even less effective than we believed.
We previewed the data over the weekend, and now millions are worried that the EU might be planning to use this to extend their lockdowns, while scientists continue to slam Brussels for its perceived slowness in rolling out the jabs.We haven't heard much about COVID-19 treatments in a while, which isn't surprising, considering that the last COVID treatment that appeared to show any kind of promise was remdesivir, which - as we later learned - was mostly ineffective, despite all that trial data.
Well, on Monday, local press in Israel published a report claiming that a new treatment, tested on a small number of patients, cured some 97% of them.
In China, officials reported no locally transmitted cases for the first time in nearly two months on Monday, while the number of cases rose slightly to 14 on Feb. 7, up from 12 a day earlier. All were infections "attributed to" overseas; 7 of the cases were in Shanghai, the rest in southeastern Guangdong Province. South Korea also reported a notable pullback, with the lowest number of new daily cases since late November, while the government has eased social distancing restrictions in the face of growing criticism from the business community.
Globally, the number of new cases ticked higher day-over-day on Sunday....
...while the number of new deaths declined day over day once again, reaching the lowest daily level since the final week of 2020.
As concerns about the efficacy of some western vaccines rise, Oxford issued another statement reminding the British public that the jab is effective against the UK mutant strain, known as B117.
That should come as modest relief to Britons as the UK finally catches up to Israel, making it the major country with the largest percentage of its population to have been
In the US, meanwhile, the trends of falling cases and hospitalizations have been joined by falling deaths.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.5M tests, 96k cases, 81,439 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 1,471 deaths. pic.twitter.com/4Y0v3YEcVS
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking)
In other news, Dr. Fauci warned Americans not to delay their second does of the coronavirus vaccine after other health experts suggested recently there may be a benefit to delaying the second dose, allowing more people to earlier their first jab earlier.
Here's some more news from overnight and Monday morning;
- California reported 295 new fatalities, the lowest this month and below the rolling 14-day average of 510, the health department said on its website. New cases numbered 15,064, compared with the 14-day average of 16,198. The total number of Covid-19 cases now tops 3.3 million, with 43,942 deaths.
- France aims to vaccinate up to 4 million by the end of this month, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said in an interview on CNews, without clarifying if this target included the shots from both Pfizer and Moderna.
- Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province by population, has become the first region in the country to record more than 10,000 Covid-19 deaths, reporting 32 fatalities on Sunday. The milestone was passed as hospitalizations have started to decline in the last two weeks, Health Minister Christian Dube said on Twitter
- Chicago Public Schools reached a “tentative agreement” with its teachers to resume in-person learning later this week, but union members still need to review its framework to make a deal final.
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Finally, as far as worries about declining vaccine efficacy go, new data show the B117 variant is 35-40% more transmissible, according to a recent study, and “will likely become the dominant variant in many US. states by March, 2021, leading to further surges of Covid-19 in the country, unless urgent mitigation efforts are immediately implemented." All of this points to the possibility that COVID's continuing evolution could make it impossible to truly extinguish it.
