For Russians in a Pandemic, Lake Baikal Is the Place to See and Be Seen

For Russians in a Pandemic, Lake Baikal Is the Place to See and Be Seen


Generally it is foreigners who cavort at the world’s deepest lake in winter. But with many borders closed, Russians are arriving in droves to make TikTok video clips and snap Instagram pics.


ON LAKE BAIKAL, Russia — She drove 2,000 miles for this moment: Hanging out the sunroof of her white Lexus S.U.V. that glittered underneath the blinding sun, experience to smartphone selfie digital camera, bass thumping, tires screeching, cutting doughnuts more than the blue-black, white-veined ice.

“It’s for Instagram and TikTok,” stated Gulnara Mikhailova, who drove two times and two nights to get to Lake Baikal with 4 friends from the distant Siberian metropolis of Yakutsk.

It was about zero degrees Fahrenheit as Ms. Mikhailova, who will work in true estate, put on a swimsuit, climbed up onto the roof of her motor vehicle and, reclining, posed for pictures.

This is winter season on the world’s deepest lake, 2021 Pandemic Edition.

The tour guides are calling it Russian Period. Commonly, it is foreigners — many from close by China — who flock to Siberia’s Lake Baikal this time of 12 months to skate, bike, hike, run, drive, hover and ski in excess of a stark expanse of ice and snow, while Russians escape the chilly to Turkey or Thailand.

But Russia’s borders are nevertheless closed since of the pandemic, and to the surprise of locals, crowds of Russian holidaymakers have traded tropical beaches for Baikal’s icicle-draped shores.

“This period is like no other — no a person expected there to be these kinds of a crush, these types of a tourist boom,” explained Yulia Mushinskaya, the director of the historical past museum on the preferred Baikal island of Olkhon.

Individuals who do the job with holidaymakers, she said, “are just in shock.”

If you catch a second of stillness on the crescent-shaped, 400-mile-lengthy, mile-deep lake, the assault on the senses is otherworldly. You stand on 3 feet of ice so strong it is crossed safely by hefty vans, but you sense fragile, fleeting and small.

The silence around you is interrupted just about every number of seconds by the cracking beneath — groans, bangs and bizarre, techno-tunes twangs. Appear down, and the imperfections of the glass-crystal clear ice arise as pale, shimmering curtains.

Nonetheless stillness is difficult to appear by.

Though Western governments have been discouraging journey for the duration of the pandemic, in Russia, as is so normally the scenario, matters are distinct. The Kremlin has turned coronavirus-connected border closures into an option to get Russians — who have put in the previous 30 several years exploring the earth further than the previous Iron Curtain — hooked on vacationing at household.

A state-funded plan begun final August offers $270 refunds on domestic leisure trips, which include flights and resort stays. It is just one illustration of how Russia, which had 1 of the world’s best coronavirus death tolls final year, has usually prioritized the financial system more than general public wellness through the pandemic.

Some guests provide their very own smartphone tripods, jumping up and down consistently for the perfect snapshot of on their own in midair in advance of a wall of ice. Other folks pilot drones or established off brilliant-colored smoke bombs.

At sunset not long ago, a line of vacationers lay on the frozen lake on their bellies inside a natural grotto in the shoreline cliffs, getting pictures of the rose-glinting icicles hanging from the ceiling.

“Get out!” some yelled when another team arrived. “Take a hike, all of you! You’re blocking the solar!”

“The social networks have led to all this,” said a tutorial at the grotto, Elvira Dorzhiyeva. “There’s these leading spots, and it is like — ‘All I care about is that I want what I observed on line.’”

The most in-demand pictures include the clear ice, so some guides have brushes to sweep absent the snow.

Nikita Bencharov, who discovered English competing in worldwide desk tennis tournaments in the Soviet period, operates a sprawling resort sophisticated on Olkhon and estimates that in a typical year, a lot more than 70 per cent of the wintertime people are foreigners.

This 12 months, just about all his company are Russian, which has introduced a bit of a trouble. Russians who holiday vacation abroad are used to cheap, comfortable lodgings, which are challenging to find in the significantly reaches of their personal country. At Olkhon motels this season, unassuming double rooms have absent for as much as $200 a night at some of the cafes, the restrooms are unheated outdoor pit toilets.

“The foreigners are by now a little bit prepared and thank the Lord that there’s a typical mattress below, at minimum, and that they’re not sleeping on a bearskin,” Mr. Bencharov claimed. “They understand much better than the Russians exactly where they’re touring to and why.”

Many operators geared towards international tourists have scrambled to alter. On Olkhon, the after-Chinese cafe now serves borscht.

At the island’s northern idea, wherever orange cliffs tower around a blue-white labyrinth of ice formations, fleets of tour vans deposit hundreds of persons to slide and clamber all-around, and then to slurp fish soup heated by fires established specifically on the ice.

A pair from Moscow, two engineers in their 30s, reported they have been going to Siberia for the initially time. Just one mentioned he was thrilled by the landscape but stunned by the region’s poverty and felt sorry for the men and women and how they have to dwell.

About 50 miles away, at a fishing camp throughout the lake, three males bunked in a steel shack on the ice, the air inside of tinged with the scent of treated fish, damp bedding and pine-nut moonshine in a plastic bottle on the flooring. Two of the men, firefighters, mentioned they designed around $300 a thirty day period and took a number of weeks off in the slide to supplement their cash flow by harvesting pine nuts in the forest.

“We make the minimum amount and complain and complain — and that is it,” one of the firefighters, Andrei, 39, claimed. “And, what, we listen to Putin on Tv set …”

A team of music aficionados in the nearby city of Irkutsk even went ahead with their once-a-year indoor winter season music festival. 1 of the spectators, Artyom Nazarov, was from Belarus — 1 of the handful of international locations whose nationals can now effortlessly enter Russia.



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In Pictures: Pope Francis in Iraq

In Pictures: Pope Francis in Iraq


Pope John Paul II experienced to terminate plans to take a look at Iraq at the turn of this century as escalating tensions with the United States undermined negotiations with Saddam Hussein for a papal stop by. Pope Benedict XVI had to cancel his ideas mainly because of security worries.

And pretty much right until the second he boarded the papal aircraft in Rome en route to Baghdad on Friday, the Vatican cautioned that the check out by Pope Francis could be identified as off at any time.

But inspite of worries about the coronavirus and a precarious security predicament — with a armed service foundation in northern Iraq focused by a missile strike two times just before his scheduled departure — Francis held business in his motivation to take a look at the lengthy-struggling and fading Christian neighborhood in the war-torn country.

Francis has established an bold agenda that will take him from the Plains of Nineveh, exactly where Christianity traces its roots again about 2,000 years, to the northern area of Kurdistan, where his three-working day trip culminates on Sunday night with an outdoor Mass for 1000’s at Franso Hariri soccer stadium in Erbil.

As Pope Francis arrived at Rome’s Fiumicino airport to depart for Iraq on Friday morning, over, Christian families headed to the airport in Baghdad for his arrival.

Preparations right before the pope’s excursion have been ongoing, together with at Al-Tahira church in Qaraqosh, under.

Sewing the flag of Vatican Metropolis at a printing house in Erbil.

Protection members from the primary minister’s office environment carrying out precautionary steps within St. Joseph’s Church.

A police officer standing guard outside the Chaldean Catholic Church of St. Joseph in Baghdad.

A joint Kurdish and Christian orchestra and choir rehearsing at a stadium in the Kurdish city of Erbil on Monday.

Fixing the Grand Immaculate Church in Qaraqosh prior to the pope’s go to.

A piece of graffiti depicting Pope Francis on concrete partitions bordering Our Girl of Salvation Church in Baghdad.



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U.S. Reaches 500,000 Covid Deaths

U.S. Reaches 500,000 Covid Deaths


The virus has arrived at every corner of The us, devastating dense metropolitan areas and rural counties alike through surges that barreled by way of a single area and then one more.

In New York Town, much more than 28,000 people have died of the virus — or about just one in 295 men and women. In Los Angeles County, the toll is about one in 500 people today. In Lamb County, Texas, where 13,000 people are living scattered on a sprawling expanse of 1,000 square miles, the reduction is a person in 163 persons.

The virus has torn via nursing homes and other long-expression care services, spreading quickly between vulnerable people: They account for a lot more than 163,000 fatalities, about just one-third of the country’s whole.

Virus deaths also have disproportionately afflicted Individuals alongside racial lines. Over all, the loss of life level for Black People with Covid-19 has been practically two instances larger than for white Us citizens, according to the Facilities for Sickness Regulate and Prevention the dying level for Hispanics was 2.3 times higher than for white Us residents. And for Native Us residents, it was 2.4 situations higher.

By Monday, about 1,900 Covid fatalities had been currently being documented, on regular, most times — down from much more than 3,300 at peak points in January. The slowing arrived as a aid, but researchers claimed variants built it tricky to job the long term of the pandemic, and historians cautioned towards turning absent from the scale of the country’s losses.

“There will be a authentic generate to say, ‘Look how very well we’re carrying out,’” explained Nancy Bristow, chair of the background section at the University of Puget Audio in Tacoma, Clean., and author of “American Pandemic: The Missing Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.” But she warned in opposition to inclinations now to “rewrite this story into one more tale of American triumph.”



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Australia’s ‘Rebel Reverend’ Goes Viral With Barbed Liberal Messages

Australia’s ‘Rebel Reverend’ Goes Viral With Barbed Liberal Messages


He nonetheless takes advantage of the signal to connect his convictions, just with probably a very little considerably less spit and vinegar. Final Sunday, just one side of the board read “keep Gosford nuclear absolutely free,” a place not likely to stir up a lot controversy right here. The other facet, even so, showed that he nonetheless isn’t averse to throwing a partisan punch: “put much-suitable on terror checklist.”

“You get caught up in the vortex,” he reported of his time in the spotlight. “People recognize what you are stating and you grow to be one particular of those people voices.”

“Middle ground is hard,” he extra, leaning again in his chair, revealing crimson socks beneath his black and white garb. “We only hear the extremes.”

With his quick, spiky hair and tightly trimmed beard, Father Bower, 58, has something of the wombat about him — a further bristly, if normally lovable Australian of the wild. He’s not worried to swear, joke about previous hangovers or deliver a sermon barefoot. He’s a priest at residence in the muck of existence.

He grew up in an agricultural location north of Sydney, adopted and raised by cattle farmers. His adoptive father died when Father Bower was 13, and his teenage several years were being generally put in doing the job — on the land, and as a butcher. It is a history he has under no circumstances absolutely still left behind “The Moral Omnivore” sits beside religious texts on his business office bookshelf.

The dislocation of remaining adopted, a actuality he said he constantly knew but only began to entirely procedure in his 20s, motivated him to search for God and the priesthood.

“It was aspect of my lookup for id,” he mentioned. “It came with a title and a uniform.”

Many of his parishioners discovered Father Bower and the church the place he has served as rector for more than two decades by seeing the messages on the sign outside the house — not by passing by on the street, but by spotting them on Facebook.



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Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Pharmacies Will Start to Get a Big Infusion of Vaccines

Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Pharmacies Will Start to Get a Big Infusion of Vaccines


Here’s what you need to know:

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transcript

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White House Will Send Vaccinations Directly to Pharmacies

The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it would allocate a minimum of 10.5 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to states in the next three weeks, and would also send some doses directly to retail pharmacies.

Last week, we took steps to increase the amount of vaccine going to states, tribes and territories by 16 percent. Today, we are further increasing that weekly allocation by an additional 5 percent. So for the next three weeks, we will provide a minimum of 10.5 million in total doses per week across all jurisdictions. That means we have increased supply by more than 20 percent since we took office. To be clear, this is on top of the 10.5 million doses we will ship this week. I also want to be clear that we are delivering on our commitment to provide states with three weeks forward visibility into supply. This is critical, and we’ve heard strong feedback from state and local leaders that this is helping give them what they need to plan and get vaccines administered more quickly. Pharmacies are readily accessible in most communities, with most Americans living within five miles of a pharmacy. That’s why we’re pleased to announce our first phase of the federal retail pharmacy program for Covid-19 vaccinations. This is a key component of President Biden’s national strategy, offering vaccinations in America’s pharmacies. Starting on Feb. 11, the federal government will deliver vaccines directly to select pharmacies across the country. This will provide more sites for people to get vaccinated in their communities, and it’s an important component to delivering vaccines equitably.

The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it would allocate a minimum of 10.5 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to states in the next three weeks, and would also send some doses directly to retail pharmacies.CreditCredit…John Taggart for The New York Times

The federal government will send one million vaccine doses to about 6,500 retail pharmacies on Feb. 11, the beginning of a federal program that will deliver vaccines directly to as many as 40,000 drugstores and grocery stores, Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, announced on Tuesday.

The program’s launch will mark the start of a new stage in the massive vaccination campaign in the United States, gradually shifting a drive which so far has been centered in health care facilities and massive sites like stadiums to smaller, more local settings that will play a crucial role in vaccinating the general public.

While some states in recent weeks have begun using a limited number of retail pharmacies to give out some of their vaccine doses, the federal program launching next week will not cut into the doses allocated to states — and over time, it will greatly expand the number of sites where eligible people can get vaccines.

Still, the launch of the program will be slow at first — many pharmacies will not have vaccines at all or will have very limited supply, Mr. Zients said — and it will not expand the still limited number of high-risk groups that states have deemed to be eligible to receive vaccines. Eligible patients should check pharmacy websites for availability, Mr. Zients said.

Mr. Zients said that the federal government would allocate vaccines under the pharmacy program based on the population of each state and jurisdiction, as it has been doing for vaccines distributed via other channels.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also working with states to choose pharmacies in areas that are “harder to reach” and close to people at higher risk of severe Covid-19, Mr. Zients said. He added that the agency would monitor the program to make sure pharmacies are distributing doses efficiently and fairly.

Dozens of national and regional chains are participating, though not all of them will be involved in the first phase of distribution. Among them are CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Publix, Meijer, Costco, Jewel-Osco and Safeway.

CVS said on Tuesday that it would begin offering vaccines on Feb. 11 in 11 states under the federal retail pharmacy program. Walgreens said on Tuesday that it would do the same on Feb. 12 in 15 states and major metropolitan areas. Both chains had already been giving out shots in long-term care facilities and retail pharmacies in some states.

Walmart said last week that it has more than 5,000 stores across its flagship brand and Sam’s Club locations that “are operationally and clinically ready” to give out vaccines.

The Trump administration first announced the retail pharmacy program last fall.

A medical worker preparing a syringe with the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot at a vaccination center in a public hospital in Brasília on Tuesday.
Credit…Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

The vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca not only protects people from serious illness and death but also substantially slows the transmission of the virus, according to a new study — a finding that underscores the importance of mass vaccination as a path out of the pandemic.

The study by researchers at the University of Oxford is the first to document evidence that any coronavirus vaccine can reduce transmission of the virus.

Researchers measured the impact on transmission by swabbing participants every week seeking to detect signs of the virus. If there is no virus present, even if someone is infected, it cannot be spread. And they found a 67 percent reduction in positive swabs among those vaccinated.

The results, detailed by Oxford and AstraZeneca researchers in a manuscript that has not been peer-reviewed, found that the vaccine could cut transmission by nearly two-thirds.

Matt Hancock, the British health secretary, hailed the results on Wednesday as “absolutely superb.”

“We now know that the Oxford vaccine also reduces transmission and that will help us all get out of this pandemic,” Mr. Hancock said in an interview Wednesday morning with the BBC.

The results, he said, “should give everyone confidence that this jab works not only to keep you safe but to keep you from passing on the virus to others.”

The Oxford and AstraZeneca researchers also found that a single dose of the vaccine was 76 percent effective at preventing Covid-19. The data measured the three months after the first shot was given, not including an initial three-week period needed for protection to take effect.

The encouraging results, lend support to the strategy deployed by Britain and other countries to prioritize providing as many first doses of vaccines as possible, setting aside concerns that people will get their second doses later than initially planned.

The latest data do not have bearing on the debate over whether to further space out the doses of the two vaccines authorized in the United States, those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, since the data on AstraZeneca’s candidate cannot be generalized to other vaccines.

Some scientists have called on the United States to follow the lead of Britain and other countries that have opted to delay the second doses of vaccines by up to 12 weeks. But U.S. federal officials have resisted, saying such a move would not be supported by the data from clinical trials of the two vaccines currently available across the nation. Tuesday’s results could amplify pressure on U.S. health officials to delay second doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, though it has not yet been authorized by the country.

The vaccine appeared more effective when the interval between the two shots was longer than the originally intended four-week gap, the Oxford and AstraZeneca researchers found. Among clinical trial participants who got two standard-strength doses at least three months apart, the vaccine was 82 percent effective, compared to 55 percent effective when the doses were given less than six weeks apart.

A vaccination strategy that spaces out doses by three months “may be the optimal for rollout of a pandemic vaccine when supplies are limited in the short term,” the researchers wrote.

The newly released study builds on data issued late last year, which found that the vaccine was 62 percent effective when given as two standard-strength doses. In those initial findings, the vaccine’s efficacy was much higher, at 90 percent, when the first dose of the vaccine was given at half-strength.

Oxford and AstraZeneca researchers initially attributed the different levels of effectiveness to the lower strength of the initial dose. But they gradually reached a different conclusion: the amount of time between doses was the more likely explanation.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is waiting on data from a clinical trial that enrolled about 30,000 participants, mostly Americans. Results from that study are expected later this month.

The study is expected to arm AstraZeneca with enough safety data to allow it by around early March to seek authorization to provide the vaccine for emergency use.

The United States has agreed to buy 300 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, but neither the company nor the federal government has said when and in what quantities those doses will be available after the vaccine is approved.

To speed up vaccination of other eligible people, some states are reallocating doses that were earmarked for nursing homes but were not being used swiftly. Jean Riordan and her husband, Joseph, both 92, prepared to be inoculated at a vaccination site in Minneapolis in January. 
Credit…Octavio Jones for The New York Times

It did not take long for Keith Reed, a deputy health commissioner in Oklahoma, to spot a big logistical problem with the state’s vaccination rollout. Week after week, Oklahoma was allocating thousands of precious doses to a federal program for nursing home patients that was not using them all. In fact, tens of thousands of doses were sitting untouched in freezers.

So his department called an audible. It decided to stop allocating any more of Oklahoma’s vaccine supply to the federal program, a partnership with private pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens that is meant to immunize residents of long-term care facilities. Instead, they would go to distribution channels that would get them into people’s arms faster.

A number of states have made similar moves to shift supplies away from the federal effort, known as the Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program, a telling example of how chaotic the inoculation effort in the U.S. has been so far. Some of the other states include Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio.

Mr. Reed said the Oklahoma move would do no harm: Walgreens and CVS have assured him, he said, that all nursing home residents in the state who needed — and wanted — to be vaccinated would have the first of their two shots by the end of the week.

The federal program used a formula that turned out to significantly overestimate how many shots would be needed for long-term care facilities like nursing homes, whose residents are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. And another problem arose: A considerable number of residents and, especially, workers at the facilities are turning down the chance to be vaccinated.

A study released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in the first month of the program, 77.8 percent of residents and 37.5 percent of workers received the vaccine at the average long-term care facility. The study says the true rate for workers may be higher because some may have been vaccinated in other settings. But, even so, federal officials are particularly concerned about how many workers are refusing inoculation, and have been stepping up efforts to change their minds.

Mr. Reed said the doses Oklahoma was taking away from the federal program will be going to thousands of Oklahomans who are 65 or older and do not live in nursing homes.

“Our goal is to move vaccine from freezers to somebody’s arm within seven days of receiving it,” Mr. Reed said in an interview last week. “We just had a hard time with that amount of vaccine off-limits to us that was set aside for this program, when we could be using that vaccine to go straight to Oklahomans.”

Advocates for nursing home residents are watching closely for any sign that the moves will impede their vaccinations.

“If we find that older adults are not getting the vaccines that they need, then that’s concerning to us,” said Lisa Sanders, a spokeswoman for LeadingAge, which represents more than 5,000 nonprofit aging services providers.

Administering the Sputnik V vaccine in Moscow last month. A report in the medical journal The Lancet showed that the shots appeared to be safe and did not cause serious side effects.
Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

A vaccine developed in Russia, Sputnik V, has been shown to have 91.6 percent efficacy against the coronavirus, according to an analysis published in the medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday.

The peer-reviewed results, based on a clinical trial conducted on nearly 22,000 people, showed that the Sputnik V vaccine appeared to be safe and did not cause serious side effects, according to The Lancet, an early vindication for Russia, which faced international skepticism after the vaccine was approved without the release of data regarding clinical trials.

The results bring the number of vaccines whose efficacy is higher than 90 percent to three, and will leave Russia well positioned to deliver a cheap vaccine at home and abroad — two shots of the Sputnik V vaccine are necessary, each costing $10. The Sputnik V shots also do not need the deep cold storage that can make some other vaccines logistically challenging to use widely.

The study comes after the vaccine’s developer, the Gamaleya Research Institute, which is part of the Russian Health Ministry, announced in December that the vaccine showed 91.4 percent efficacy.

When a Russian health care regulator approved the vaccine in August, becoming the first in the world to do so even though the shots had yet to complete clinical trials, experts raised concerns that the authorities were trying to hastily approve a vaccine without due safeguards.

But researchers at the Gamaleya Institute had gone ahead months earlier: The head of the team that developed the Sputnik V vaccine, Denis Logunov, along with some colleagues, administered the vaccine to themselves as early as April, according to a New Yorker investigation.

Ian Jones of the University of Reading and Polly Roy of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who are both virology professors, wrote in The Lancet, “The development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticized for unseemly haste, corner cutting, and an absence of transparency.”

“But,” they added, “the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated.”

Russia began its vaccination campaign in December, and around 50 countries have pre-ordered the vaccine. Use of the Sputnik V vaccine in more than a dozen countries, including Algeria, Hungary, Iran and Venezuela, is set to begin this week.

Mexico, which has pre-ordered more than 7 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, has approved it for emergency use, Hugo López-Gatell, the deputy health minister who is leading the nation’s coronavirus response, said at a news conference on Tuesday evening.

In December, the Gamaleya Institute announced that it had partnered with the drug maker AstraZeneca to try to combine their vaccines and see if the mixture could increase efficacy.

Dining outdoors at Cafe du Soleil on the Upper West Side in Manhattan last month.
Credit…Clay Williams for The New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Tuesday that local governments could begin to provide coronavirus vaccines to restaurant workers, just one day after he dismissed a debate over expanding vaccine eligibility as “a cheap, insincere discussion.”

Taxi drivers and residents at facilities for the developmentally disabled can also be vaccinated, he said.

Mr. Cuomo linked the changes to an increase in the vaccine doses allocated to New York State by the federal government. On Tuesday, the Biden administration said it would bump the supply given to states by 5 percent, which resulted from an expected increase in manufacturing.

“Now there’s additional flexibility,” Mr. Cuomo said. “And I’m leaving it up to the local governments to make a determination of what fits their situation best.”

The debate over whether restaurant workers should be eligible for the vaccine was kicked off last week, when Mr. Cuomo said he would allow restaurants to New York City to resume indoor dining on Feb. 14.

The governor barred indoor dining in the city in December among concerns over a second wave of the coronavirus. At the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had released recommendations that described eating at indoor restaurants as a “particularly high-risk” activity, and state contact tracing data suggested that restaurants and bars were the fifth main source of new infections in New York.

Still, while hospitalizations and the seven-day average positive test rate have been trending downward in recent weeks, both remain higher than they were when Mr. Cuomo closed the restaurants. New York City is at an extremely high risk level for coronavirus, according to an assessment by The New York Times and public health experts.

With indoor dining set to restart just as more infectious variants are spreading across the country, many were concerned that restaurant workers returning to their jobs would be putting themselves at increased risk.

On Monday, Mr. Cuomo dismissed the suggestion of expanding eligibility, saying the state did not have the vaccine supply necessary to loosen its criteria and that calling for it to do so was a “cheap, insincere discussion.”

“Yes, I would like to see restaurant workers eligible,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It makes total sense. But what does eligibility mean when you don’t have the supply necessary?”

On Tuesday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said that he believed that restaurant workers should be eligible to receive the vaccine immediately.

“Restaurant workers now are going to be in enclosed places with people eating and drinking,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Every doctor on this line or anyplace else will say that’s an area of concern.”

A vial of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine with 10 doses. Moderna is seeking to pack 15 doses into a vial in the future.
Credit…Cooper Neill for The New York Times

The upstart drugmaker Moderna is asking U.S. regulators to allow it to increase the amount of coronavirus vaccine put into each vial by as much as 50 percent, arguing that it can speed vaccines to patients by clearing away a simple manufacturing bottleneck: Getting medicine into bottles.

The Food and Drug Administration could decide within a few weeks how much more vaccine Moderna, the developer of one of the two federally authorized Covid-19 vaccines, can put into its vials. Moderna says it can raise the number of doses per vial from 10 to as much as 15.

The company has already been ramping up production of its vaccine, only to find a bottleneck in the bottling, capping and labeling process. With F.D.A. approval, more doses could start going into each bottle quickly, a welcome boost to the campaign to curb a pandemic that has killed more than 440,000 people in the United States alone. In a statement late Monday, Ray Jordan, a Moderna spokesman, said the constraint on dosage per vial was limiting Moderna’s output.

The Moderna proposal is part of a broader push by the Biden administration to speed vaccine distribution, including by clearing away obstacles in the “fill and finish” phase of manufacturing. Although the nuts-and-bolts stage receives less attention than vaccine development, it has been identified for years as a constraint on vaccine production.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said that the federal government would allocate a minimum of 10.5 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to states for the next three weeks, a bump of five percent resulting from an expected increase in manufacturing.

At a White House news conference, Mr. Zients framed the increase in doses as an accomplishment of the Biden administration, saying that “we have increased supply by more than 20 percent since we took office.” But the uptick in production has long been expected as the companies that make two federally authorized vaccines, one from Pfizer and BioNTech and the other from Moderna, have scaled up their efforts. Last week, the companies increased their supply to the U.S. by 16 percent.

Governors were informed of the increase on a call Tuesday morning so that they would have more time to plan for vaccinations, Mr. Zients said, with at three weeks of notice for new allocation numbers — a cornerstone of a new effort by the Biden administration to improve a distribution system mired in uncertainty and confusion over limited supply and unused doses.

“That allows them to plan accordingly and know what staffing to have,” he said. “I think historically, there had been fluctuation. We are very attuned into not having that fluctuation.”

Moderna has discussed the possible change of the number of doses in vials with the F.D.A. but has not yet submitted manufacturing data to support it, people familiar with the discussions said. Federal regulators may be receptive to the idea of more doses in each vial, but could balk at the notion of a 50 percent increase.

The industry standard has long been 10 doses per vial, and federal regulators may be concerned that the extra punctures by needles of the rubber covering of the vial and the time required to extract more doses could increase the risk of contaminating the vaccine with bacteria. Moderna’s proposal to the F.D.A. for the dose increase was first reported by CNBC.

Packing more vaccine into each Moderna vial is one of a number of options White House and health officials are exploring as they push to expand production before the spring, when officials are expecting a renewed surge of infections from emerging variants of the virus.

The maker of the other federally approved vaccine, Pfizer, is unable to increase the amount of vaccine in its vials because its manufacturing is geared toward a particular size of vial that can hold only about six doses. But Moderna’s vial is big enough to hold more than the 10 doses now allowed.

Asked about Moderna’s proposal, a White House spokesman on Monday said that “all options are on the table.”

Among other efforts, Mr. Zients said that the government had now ensured that specialized syringes were shipped out with Pfizer’s vials so practitioners could extract a sixth dose from them. Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, told investors Tuesday that the company was now two months ahead of schedule and expected to deliver a total of 200 million doses for Americans by the end of May instead of the end of July. The acceleration is at least partly because the government has decided to count Pfizer vial as six doses instead of five.

Prashant Yadav, who studies health care supply chains with the Center for Global Development in Washington, said Moderna might be able to “relatively quickly” make more of its vaccine if it received the green light to add doses to each vial.

But he said it would not be an instant change. “I don’t think Moderna has a surplus sitting around,” he said.

Mr. Yadav said the finish-and-fill process is intensely automated, devoted to warding off contamination and precise to the microgram. At top speed, as many as 1,000 vials of vaccine can be filled per minute, he said.

He said a 15-dose vial carries a trade-off: It could lead to more wasted doses if the health care professional runs out of people to get inoculated and has to throw out the rest of the doses. But in the midst of a raging pandemic, experts said, that may well be a risk that federal health officials would be willing to take.

Researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark analyzing coronavirus samples for the variant B.1.1.7 last month.
Credit…Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix, via Reuters

A fast-spreading coronavirus variant first observed in Britain has gained a worrisome mutation that could make it harder to control with vaccines, Public Health England reported on Monday. And on Tuesday, a team of researchers reported an experiment suggesting that this mutation might make vaccines somewhat less effective against the variant.

The variant, known as B.1.1.7, first came to light in December. Researchers determined that it had rapidly become more common across Britain in just a couple of months.

Its spread appears to occur because of its improved ability to infect people. Experiments in test tubes suggest that some of its mutations allow the B.1.1.7 variant to hold on to cells more tightly than other coronaviruses.

Since B.1.1.7’s discovery in Britain, the variant has been reported in 72 other countries. The United States confirmed its first case of the B.1.1.7 variant on Dec. 29, but is conducting little of the genomic sequencing necessary to track the spread of new variants that have caused concern. Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 467 samples of the variant in 32 states. Officials in New York City said on Tuesday that they had identified 13 cases of the variant and were ramping up testing capacity to detect more.

In its latest analysis, Public Health England estimated that the variant’s rate of infection is 25 percent to 40 percent higher than that of other forms of the coronavirus. Some preliminary evidence suggests that it may also cause more deaths.

Several lines of evidence suggest that vaccines will work against the B.1.1.7 variant. On Thursday, the vaccine maker Novavax announced that its British trial found no evidence that B.1.1.7 could evade the vaccine’s defenses.

But in South Africa, where a variant called B.1.351 has surged to dominance, the Novavax and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have both been less effective in trials.

That variant has been reported in 31 countries so far. In the United States, it has turned up in Maryland and in South Carolina.

Scientists suspect that the B.1.351 variant’s partial escape from vaccines is largely thanks to a single mutation, called E484K. Experiments indicate that the E484K mutation makes it harder for antibodies to grab onto the virus and prevent it from entering cells.

Now it turns out that some B.1.1.7 coronaviruses in Britain also have the E484K mutation.

To search for new mutations, British researchers reviewed the 214,159 genomes of coronaviruses that the United Kingdom has sequenced as of Jan. 26. In its report, Public Health England said that they found 11 samples of the B.1.1.7 variant that also had the E484K mutation.

Since that analysis, more of these viruses have come to light. NextStrain, a website where scientists gather and analyze coronavirus genomes, now identifies 16 B.1.1.7 variants that carry the E484K mutation.

These B.1.1.7 coronaviruses gained the mutation thanks to random copying errors as they multiplied inside of people. The evolutionary tree of the coronaviruses suggests that 15 of the variants descend from one common ancestor that gained the E484K mutation. Meanwhile the sixteenth variant seems to have gained the same mutation on its own.

Commenting on Monday’s report, Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., said that it was impossible yet to say whether the E484K mutation would make these coronaviruses not only more contagious but more resistant to vaccines. “It’s much too early to speculate whether it will, so we’ll have to wait for data,” he said.

Just because the E484K mutation helps the B.1351 variant, the one initially found in South Africa, evade antibodies doesn’t mean it will do the same in other variants. That’s because mutations don’t have a fixed effect. The impact of a single new mutation to a virus depends on the other mutations that the variant already carries.

But in a report posted online Tuesday, Rajiv Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues reported an experiment they ran to address exactly this question. They combined the E484K mutation with other key mutations found in the B.1.1.7 variant, the one initially found in Britain. The addition of the E484K mutation made it difficult for antibodies to block the viruses. The researchers wrote that they “observed a significant loss of neutralizing activity.”

However, Dr. Gupta and his colleagues used antibodies taken from people who had received just the first of two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. It remains to be seen whether the B.1.1.7 variant with the new mutation, E484K, can evade antibodies after a full vaccination.

Nicholas Davies, a mathematical biologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, cautioned that with so few of these new coronaviruses, it’s hard to say whether they will become more common than ordinary B.1.1.7 variant.

But it is striking that the same mutation, E484K, has now been documented arising several times in Britain, as well as in South Africa. Meanwhile, in Brazil, yet another variant has also gained the same E484K mutation on its own.

Dr. Davies speculated that the mutation may give the virus an advantage when it is spreading in populations where a lot of people have already been sick with Covid-19. It may be able to evade their antibodies to other variants. “E484K may well convey a fitness advantage in settings where there is existing immunity,” Dr. Davies said.

If so, the virus may be providing the world with a dangerous new example of a common theme in evolution. A good solution can arise more than once — such as flight, which evolved in birds, bats, and insects. Evolutionary biologists call this repeated pattern convergence.

“It’s not great to see this mutation in the B.1.1.7 lineage, although I think it’s no surprise at all,” said Dr. Andersen. “We should expect that to happen.”

Dr. Gupta argued on Twitter that the best defense against this convergence is vaccination. By making it harder for coronaviruses to get from person to person, they will have fewer chances to gain the E484K mutation or other dangerous changes.

“We need to continue vaccinating and drive down transmission,” Dr. Gupta wrote.

A Covid-19 patient from Lisbon arrived at a hospital in Funchal, on the island of Madeira, Portugal, on Friday.
Credit…Duarte Sa/Reuters

Portugal, struggling to contain an outbreak that has led to the highest death rate in Europe, has rapidly filled the beds in intensive care units established for Covid-19 patients and is being forced to create spaces by diverting spaces meant for other critical care patients.

With emergency rooms overwhelmed, particularly in the capital region of Lisbon, hospitals have asked patients to try to treat themselves at home, and the government has reached out to other European countries for assistance.

Some patients have also been airlifted to island hospitals or moved to hospitals in regions not as badly affected.

For those who do show up at hospitals in Lisbon, they are finding a system on the brink, with scores of people lining up outside and waiting to be diagnosed in idling ambulances parked outside.

“We are managing the full capacity of the country,” Pedro Siza Vieira, the Portuguese economy minister, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. While new infections appeared to be falling in some regions, the outbreak in Lisbon was still raging.

“We are looking at a couple of weeks that will be difficult,” he added.

Mr. Siza Vieira himself contracted Covid-19 last month, and about a third of the government’s ministers have also caught the illness recently, or had to isolate after being in contact with a person who had Covid-19.

Portugal, a nation of about 10 million on the Iberian Peninsula, is in the grips of its worst crisis of the pandemic, and 5,000 people died in January.

During the first wave of Covid-19, Portugal was one of the success stories of Europe, after applying a strict lockdown that helped keep its death toll low, particularly in comparison with neighboring Spain.

But since Christmas, Portugal has faced a surge in infections and fatalities.

Government officials have said that the crisis has been amplified by the spread of the Covid-19 variant first discovered in Britain. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of Portugal told a recent news conference that the variant accounted for more than 50 percent of new infections in his country.

Mr. Siza Vieira, the economy minister, said on Tuesday, “We don’t have evidence of the Brazilian variant being significantly active in Portugal while we have evidence that the U.K. variant explains more than half of new cases, particularly in the Lisbon area.”

However, British officials have expressed their own concern about the spread in Portugal of the variant first discovered in Brazil, leading Britain to announce travel restrictions on its European neighbor.

The travel ban was part of wave of new border closures around the world as countries raced to vaccinate their populations while trying to limit the spread of new variants.

Whatever is driving infections in Portugal, new cases are only now starting to show signs of slowing after a national lockdown was reinstated in mid-January.

The defense minister in Germany, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, said that the country was preparing to dispatch army personnel and equipment to Portugal, noting that all of those deployed would be vaccinated.

And Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria announced on Twitter that his country would welcome some patients transferred from Portugal, without detailing how many.

Ricardo Baptista Leite, an opposition lawmaker in Portugal who is also a medical doctor and head of the public health department at the Catholic University of Portugal, said he was grateful for the support.

“We now have international aid coming in to try to save as many lives as we can,” he said. “But the time will come to assess what went wrong.”

The Covid Tracking Project, hosted by The Atlantic magazine, was run by a small team of employees and lots of volunteers.

The Covid Tracking Project, one of the most trusted sources of coronavirus-related public health data in the U.S., announced this week that it will shut down soon, with its last daily updates coming on March 7, the anniversary of its founding.

Hosted by The Atlantic magazine and run by a small team of employees and scores of volunteers, the project is one of a number of nongovernmental efforts that sprang up over the past year to track and document with hard data the scope and trajectory of the coronavirus epidemic, one of the worst public health crises in the nation’s history, as well as the contours of the government response.

It was particularly noteworthy for keeping close tabs on coronavirus hospitalizations, as well as data on testing and newly reported cases in individual states and the nation.

The project’s co-leaders, Erin Kissane and Alexis Madrigal, said in a statement posted to its website that the federal government was now providing more of the essential real-time pandemic data than the project has been offering. They also noted that a number of nongovernment sources were still delivering “outside checks on federal public health data.” Among the sources they mentioned were a federal vaccine tracker website and a county-level hospitalization tracker run by the University of Minnesota.

“Although substantial gaps and complexities remain, we have seen persuasive evidence that the C.D.C. and H.H.S. are now both able and willing to take on the country’s massive deficits in public health data infrastructure, and to offer the best available data and science communication in the interim,” they wrote, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Coronavirus Tracking Project’s data has been cited extensively by researchers, by the news media (including The New York Times), and by the government itself. The project grew out of an article that Mr. Madrigal, a staff writer for The Atlantic, reported in March along with a colleague, Robinson Meyer.

At that time, Trump administration officials were boasting about setting up a robust testing program. The journalists called every state, and could only verify that 1,895 people had been tested up to that point.

Bloomberg Businessweek wrote in November that the project was “in some ways the quintessential pandemic-era startup, existing almost entirely on Slack, the workplace messaging platform.” The headline called the participants, many of whom have never met in person, “data heroes.”

Mr. Madrigal, in an interview on Tuesday, seemed to agree.

“It’s been a real source of strength to see all these different people pull together, even at a time when the country was flailing,” he said.

After the project’s final daily update on March 7, Mr. Madrigal and Ms. Kissane said, the project would spend two more months on “documentation, analysis and archival work” before shutting down entirely in May.

global roundup

A shipment of Russia’s Sputnik V Gam-COVID-Vac vaccine will arrive in Iran this week.
Credit…Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Iran announced on Tuesday that its first batch of Covid-19 vaccine, Russia’s Sputnik V, would arrive on Thursday. It coincided with a study published Tuesday in a British medical journal that the vaccine was safe and effective.

The news could not come at a better time for Iran. Vaccines, like everything else in the Islamic Republic, have been politicized and subject to disinformation from the top down.

Iran’s supreme leader has declared a ban on importing American- and British-made vaccines, saying they could not be trusted. The Iranian health ministry canceled a batch of donated Pfizer doses and said it would import vaccines from Russia and China and co-develop a vaccine with Cuba.

For weeks, senior Iranian health officials have publicly argued over whether it was safe to inoculate Iranians with the Russian vaccine because it had not been approved by the World Health Organization or any Western medical agency.

Before the Lancet study said that Sputnik V had a 91.6 percent efficacy rate against the coronavirus, several high-profile Iranians had expressed skepticism about it, including Iran’s top infectious disease official and the head of Parliament’s health committee. And 98 physicians from Iran’s largest union of medical workers wrote a letter last week to President Hassan Rouhani urging him not to purchase the “unapproved and unsafe” Sputnik vaccine.

Other health officials pushed back defending the Russian vaccine, including the health minister and his former spokesman.

On Twitter, a hashtag trending in Persian was #buysafevaccines, as many Iranians declared they would reject Russian- and Chinese-made vaccines.

In other news from around the world:

  • New Zealand’s drug regulator said on Wednesday that it had provisionally approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine but added 58 conditions, most of which require the manufacturer to supply extra data. Pfizer said last week that the first of the 1.5 million vaccines on order were expected to arrive before the end of February. New Zealand’s director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, has said that the country will be “ready to start vaccinating people as soon as a vaccine arrives.”

  • The state of Victoria, Australia, declared the coronavirus “technically eliminated” on Wednesday — for the second time — after a month in which no new cases were recorded. The state government also announced a rollout plan for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that is scheduled to begin in late February. Frontline health workers will be among those included in the first phase, and nine vaccination hubs will be established at the state’s major hospitals. “This is a significant day in the response of the Victorian community to the pandemic,” said Martin Foley, the state’s health minister. “It turns a corner.”

  • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said on Tuesday that his government had signed a tentative deal with Novavax to produce the company’s coronavirus vaccine at a government facility in Montreal, once the drug and the site are approved by domestic regulators. Canada has a separate agreement to purchase 52 million doses of the Maryland-based company’s drug, but its regulators have so far only approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Novavax is expected to deliver results from its Phase 3 clinical trials in the United States in March, and to deliver 100 million doses for use there later this year.

A prisoner at the Camp 5 and 6 detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2019.
Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

A military judge on Tuesday indefinitely postponed the arraignment of three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who were scheduled to make their first court appearance in 17 years of detention, finding that the coronavirus pandemic made it too risky to travel to the Navy base.

The Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali, who has been held since 2003 as a former leader of a Southeast Asian extremist group, and two accused accomplices were scheduled to appear at the war court on Feb. 22. But Col. Charles L. Pritchard Jr., the military judge who was to travel to Guantánamo this week, ruled that “the various counsels’ belief that their health is at significant risk by traveling” to the base in Cuba was reasonable.

Colonel Pritchard is the most recent military judge to join the Guantánamo military commissions bench, and the latest to postpone a proceeding as too risky in nearly a year of cancellations over the coronavirus. Pretrial hearings in the death-penalty case against five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have been delayed for a year.

The judge, court staff and lawyers bound for the hearing began a quarantine in the Washington area over the weekend before a charter flight to the base on Thursday.

Once there, the passengers were to be individually quarantined for 14 days under a plan devised by prosecutors to protect those living on the base of 6,000 residents and at the prison from the threat of infection.

The case had been dormant throughout the Trump administration, but on the second day of the Biden administration, a senior Pentagon official appointed under the Trump administration who had been put in charge of the military commissions approved the prosecutions.

The defendants include Mr. Hambali, who is charged as Encep Nurjaman and is the former leader of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah, and his accused accomplices, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, who are Malaysian.

The three men were captured in Thailand in 2003 and are charged with conspiring in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people, and the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, which killed at least 11 people and wounded at least 80. They spent their first three years in the C.I.A.’s secret prisoner network before they were transferred to Guantánamo for trial in 2006.

Andrew Yang in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn after announcing his candidacy for mayor in January. He had been campaigning extensively in person despite the pandemic.
Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Andrew Yang, who ran for president last year and is now a leading New York City mayoral candidate, announced on Tuesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

“After testing negative as recently as this weekend, today I took a Covid rapid test and received a positive result,” Mr. Yang said in a statement. “I am experiencing mild symptoms, but am otherwise feeling well and in good spirits. I will quarantine in accordance with public health guidelines and follow the advice of my doctor.”

More than perhaps any rival in the race, Mr. Yang has been campaigning extensively in person despite the pandemic, holding numerous events outdoors since announcing his candidacy last month.

His approach has generated voter enthusiasm and attracted media attention, but with clear risks. A member of his staff tested positive less than a week after he announced his candidacy.

Two other mayoral candidates, Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller whose mother died of complications from Covid-19, and Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, have had to quarantine recently, though they have generally been more cautious about in-person campaigning.

An entrepreneur with no previous experience in electoral politics, Mr. Yang mounted a long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 that raised his public profile and won him many fans, especially among younger voters. But he never became a significant factor in the race, and dropped out after the New Hampshire primary.

In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Yang said, “I will continue to attend as many virtual events as possible,” and said he looked forward to hitting the trail again “when the time is right.” He said his campaign has begun the contract-tracing process.

Joseph Cruz, a pharmacy manager, preparing a dose of Pfizer’s vaccine at a community center in Teaneck, N.J., last month.
Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

The drug maker Pfizer expects its Covid-19 vaccine to generate $15 billion in revenue this year, executives said Tuesday on a call with investors to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter earnings in 2020.

Pfizer and other companies have struggled to keep up with the demand for their vaccines, as the United States and countries around the world are scrambling to vaccinate as many people as possible to combat the spread of more contagious variants.

In comments to investors on Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, said Pfizer had delivered 29 million doses to the United States by the end of January, and 65 million doses worldwide, and that it expected to manufacture up to 2 billion doses by the end of the year. It shares profits with BioNTech, the German company that developed the vaccine.

Dr. Bourla also said Pfizer now expects to deliver the 200 million doses, for about $4 billion, that it had promised to the United States two months ahead of time, by May instead of July. That accelerated timeline can be attributed in large part to Pfizer now counting six doses in every vial of vaccine that it ships instead of five — after health care providers learned they could extract an additional dose using special syringes.

“We foresee no issues with delivering the commitments we have made,” Dr. Bourla said.

And, in an indication that the coronavirus may be here to stay, Dr. Bourla said he expects the vaccine to become a standard part of its business, given the likely need for booster shots to address waning immunity to the virus as well as variants that could reduce its effectiveness.

Pfizer has said that preliminary tests of its vaccine against more contagious variants have shown that it continues to be effective, but suggested that a third shot of the same vaccine may be needed, and the company has also not ruled out changing its vaccine to address the new variants. Moderna, which has developed a similar vaccine, has said it is already working on an adapted booster shot.

“We believe it is increasingly likely that a durable Covid-19 vaccine revenue stream, like is happening in flu, is a potential outcome,” Dr. Bourla said.

Captain Tom Moore at his home in September.
Credit…Dylan Martinez/Reuters

Tom Moore, the 100-year-old British Army veteran whose charity walks raised $45 million and made him a national symbol of pluck during the coronavirus pandemic, died on Tuesday.

His death was announced on his Twitter account.

Mr. Moore, nicknamed Captain Tom by the British press, had been treated for pneumonia in recent weeks and tested positive for the coronavirus last month, his daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, said on Twitter on Sunday. He was taken to a hospital because he needed help breathing, she said, and his condition then deteriorated.

Dapper, spry and droll, Mr. Moore ambled his way into the hearts of people across Britain 82 steps at a time — the number it took to cover the length of a brick patio beside his garden in Marston Moretaine, a village an hour north of London. He did 100 laps before turning 100 last April. With backing from donors including Prince William, who called him a “one-man fund-raising machine,” Mr. Moore quickly raised 32.8 million pounds, or $45 million, for the National Health Service.

In the process, Mr. Moore became a pop-culture phenomenon, with television appearances, a book deal, a chart-topping song and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, 94, who came out of seclusion to bestow the honor in July.

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said he would vote to move forward with the budget process.
Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Democrats on Tuesday took the first step to push through President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, using a budgetary maneuver that could eventually allow the measure to become law without Republican support.

The move advanced the two-track strategy that Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders are employing to speed the aid package through Congress: show Republicans that they have the votes to pass an ambitious spending bill with only Democratic backing, but offer to negotiate some details in hopes of gaining Republican support.

“We are not going to dilute, dither or delay,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on the Senate floor. “There’s nothing about the process itself that prevents bipartisanship.”

The party-line vote of 50 to 49 set the stage for Democrats to advance Mr. Biden’s plan through budget reconciliation, which would allow it to pass with a simple majority vote, bypassing the need for Republican support. (Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, was absent and did not vote.)

“They’ve chosen a totally partisan path,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said of Senate Democrats.

The vote came the day after 10 Republican senators met at the White House with Mr. Biden seeking a smaller, $618 billion package they said could win bipartisan backing.

Some Republican senators considered Mr. Biden receptive to their proposals, but said his chief of staff, Ron Klain, shook his head dismissively during the Republicans’ presentation, according to a participant in the meeting.

Senate Democrats could approve the budget resolution as soon as Friday. On Tuesday, a key Democratic senator announced he would support it: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who is a crucial swing vote, said he would agree to move forward with the budget process “because we must address the urgency of the Covid-19 crisis.”

“I will only support proposals that will get us through and end the pain of this pandemic,” Mr. Manchin said in a statement.

Mr. Manchin also reiterated his opposition to Mr. Biden’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which could force Democrats to drop it from their legislative package.

The budget resolution would instruct congressional committees to draft legislation that could include Mr. Biden’s stimulus proposal, which includes $1,400 direct payments for many Americans, funding for vaccine distribution, reopening schools and other measures.

More than 100 Democratic lawmakers are also urging Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Mr. Schumer to repeal a business tax break as part of the economic aid package. The tax cuts in question — which center on so-called net operating losses — were included in a rescue bill Congress passed in March 2020, as the pandemic spread and the nation was in the midst of a recession.

On Tuesday, an influential business group that had welcomed Mr. Biden’s initial proposal urged him to work with Republicans on a compromise — and to scale back his plans, including providing less aid for the unemployed and scrapping a call for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

San Quentin State Prison had no reported cases of Covid-19 before the state transferred 122 inmates there in May. Since then, more than 2,240 San Quentin inmates have been sickened with the virus and 28 have died, according to state data.
Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

California state prison health authorities created a “public health disaster” by pressing lower-ranking prison workers to hastily transfer inmates between prisons in the middle of a coronavirus outbreak, according to a watchdog report released this week.

The transfers in May 2020, which were supposed to shift medically vulnerable prisoners away from danger, wound up igniting deadly new outbreaks at the facilities where they were sent, including San Quentin State Prison.

The report by the California Office of the Inspector General found that authorities in the California Correctional Health Care Services, which oversees most of the state’s prison health care, ignored or overruled multiple warnings about the dangers of transferring the inmates.

“Our review found that the efforts by C.C.H.C.S. and the department to prepare for and execute the transfers were deeply flawed, and risked the health and lives of thousands of incarcerated persons and staff,” the report concluded.

San Quentin had not reported any cases of coronavirus before late May, when officials ordered the transfer of 122 inmates to San Quentin from another state prison, the California Institution for Men in Chino. Since then, more than 2,240 San Quentin inmates have been sickened with the virus and 28 died, according to state data.

Sixty-seven inmates from the Chino prison were transferred to Corcoran State Prison, where a smaller outbreak later occurred, the report said.

The inspector general found that 91 of the 122 inmates who were sent to San Quentin eventually tested positive, and two died.

In an email response to a request for comment, the state prison health care system acknowledged making “some mistakes.”

The transfers, the statement said, “were based on a thoughtful risk analysis using scientific information available in May 2020 concerning transmission of this novel disease. We have acknowledged some mistakes were made in the process of these transfers.”

The statement said the prison system had made pandemic safety improvements, including “increased testing, the use of designated isolation and quarantine spaces, and the enhanced use of personal protective equipment when indicated.”

The inspector general’s report, released on Monday, found that prison health authorities overruled dire warnings from a number of nurses and other lower-ranking health officials about the transfers, including after the authorities were informed that only three of the 189 inmates scheduled for transfer had been recently tested.

When concerns were raised about packing dozens of inmates into prison buses for a six-hour trip, a state prison health official brushed them aside, writing, “the situation appears to outweigh the risks.” The report did not name the official.

Marion Wickerd, whose husband, a prisoner at San Quentin, was infected in June, said state prison authorities needed to be held accountable.

“The transfers were inhumane, and someone needs to take responsibility for what happened,” she said. “It was wrong. It was dead wrong.”

Mary Freeman, a preschool teacher, receiving an injection of the Moderna vaccine in Mountain View, Calif., last month.
Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Almost half of U.S. states have begun allowing teachers to be vaccinated as officials decide which groups should be given higher priority for early protection against the coronavirus, a New York Times survey shows. By this week, 24 states and Washington, D.C., were providing shots to teachers of kindergarten through high school students.

How quickly states give shots from a growing but still limited vaccine supply to teachers has become a central element of the heated debate about how best to reopen school systems, just as more contagious virus variants are emerging and spreading.

In some states where many teachers are already teaching with in-person classes, teachers are not yet eligible for vaccines. And for many places where classes are mainly remote, vaccinating teachers has been a first step to returning children to classrooms, though it is not the only factor.

“This discussion is not about if we return, but how we return,” Stacy Davis Gates, a leader of the Chicago Teachers Union said recently amid a standoff in that city over whether students younger than high school — and their teachers — should return to classrooms immediately. “And how we return is with the maximum amount of safety that we can obtain in an agreement.”


Who is currently eligible for the vaccine in each state

All states are vaccinating health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, and many states have expanded eligibility to other priority groups. Click on a state for more information.

*Eligible only in some counties. Data as recent as Feb. 2.

Sources: State and county health departments.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighed in with a striking message: Children should return to classrooms because it’s safe for them to do so.

The agency said the “preponderance of available evidence” indicated that in-person instruction could be carried out safely as long as mask-wearing and social distancing were maintained. Its researchers found “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission” when proper safety precautions were followed.

There was an important caveat: Local officials also must be willing to impose limits on other settings — like indoor dining, bars or poorly ventilated gyms — to keep infection rates low in the community at large.

The debate remains far from settled, and teachers’ unions across the country have pressed for teachers to be given high priority for receiving a vaccine.

Oregon began vaccinating K-12 teachers last month, giving them an earlier spot in line than some residents of 75 years or older, who are only eligible for shots in certain counties. Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said the move was part of her plan to bring students back into the classroom during this school year.

“For every teacher who is back in the classroom, they help 20, 30, 35 students get their lives back on track,” Ms. Brown said. “They help ensure 20, 30, 35 kids have access to mental health support. They make sure 20, 30, 35 kids get breakfast and lunch several days a week. And they allow families to know their children are in good hands when they go to work.”

As part of Gov. Mike DeWine’s goal to bring Ohio students back to in-person learning either full- or part-time by March 1, Ohio began vaccinating teachers in certain counties this week. Union officials have praised that decision, but say it is not the sole answer to getting back to school safely. Children will not yet have shots, they note, nor will all adults in schools.

“Even when educators are able to be vaccinated, it will remain critically important to continue following all C.D.C. guidance to keep our schools safe and open for in-person instruction when possible,” Steve DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, said in a news release.

Motorists lined up for Covid-19 vaccinations and testing in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles a week ago. Now California is working to streamline its vaccination process.
Credit…Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

As new virus cases and hospitalizations drop and increasing attention turns to the state’s vaccine rollout, California officials are attempting a fine balancing act between speeding the process up and ensuring that vulnerable populations aren’t shut out.

On Tuesday, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of health and human services, said in a news conference that the two goals are not mutually exclusive.

“This notion that we have to make a choice between speed and equity — it’s a false choice,” he said. “We can do both.”

But as has been the case throughout the fraught vaccine distribution in the nation’s most populous state, the details of how both of those goals can be achieved are more difficult to pin down.

So far, more than 3.5 million doses of vaccine have been administered in California, Dr. Ghaly said. The rate of vaccinations statewide, he said, has been building day by day, since a holiday surge of hospitalizations. According to a New York Times tracker, that’s about 7.2 percent of the state’s population — somewhere in the middle of the pack of states.

However, the state has not yet released demographic statistics about who received the vaccines, so it’s unclear whether Latinos or other Californians of color who have been at disproportionate risk have been vaccinated at commensurate rates.

Dr. Ghaly suggested state officials were weighing several methods of incentivizing vaccine providers to specifically target vulnerable communities, including paying them to get vaccines into harder hit neighborhoods, rather than forcing residents to go to mass vaccination sites that may be farther away.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week announced that the state would revamp its vaccine distribution approach in the wake of widespread criticism that the rollout has been confusing and piecemeal.

Part of that restructuring involves a plan to enlist two of the state’s biggest health insurers, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, to help with a statewide distribution system that would prioritize equity and would help streamline a patchwork system.

And the state launched a website and data portal that officials have said will not only notify Californians when they are eligible for a vaccine and help them make appointments to do so, but would also help collect and share data with federal officials or others who may be working to allocate vaccines.

Experts have said that enlisting bigger, more experienced health care providers could help accelerate a vaccine rollout that has been hampered by the fact that it’s been implemented by already overwhelmed local public health departments.

On Tuesday, though, Dr. Ghaly repeatedly declined to share details of the partnerships, beyond that any transitions to new systems would not disrupt existing appointments.

Rhode Island has moved more slowly than most states to vaccinate its residents. A FedEx driver delivering some Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence in December.
Credit…David Goldman/Associated Press

Whether the threshold is 65 or 80, people who meet their state’s age requirement are eligible to get a Covid-19 vaccination shot in every U.S. state but one.

The exception: Rhode Island, the only state still in the first phase of its vaccination campaign, which restricts access to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities.

If Barbara Diener, 65, had known she still wouldn’t be eligible for the vaccine in Rhode Island — where she and her husband moved to be closer to family — she said they might not have moved there in November from Georgia, where anyone 65 or older can get a shot.

“We moved here three months ago from Georgia, where everyone I know has been vaccinated,” said Ms. Diener, a travel agent. “We’re a little disappointed that the state of Rhode Island, being as small as it is, just can’t get it together.”

The state health director, Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, said last week that Rhode Island was expanding eligibility slowly because the state wanted to make sure that the people most at risk are vaccinated first.

“In addition to how many people you vaccinate, who you vaccinate matters,” Dr. Alexander-Scott said. “And that’s what distinguishes Rhode Island, and how we are taking this thoughtful approach.”


Where older adults are eligible for vaccines

Most states have started vaccinating older adults, though the minimum eligibility age varies widely.

Not yet prioritizing by age

*Eligible only in some counties. Data as recent as Feb. 2.

Sources: State and county health departments.

Ms. Diener and her husband both came down with Covid-19 last March, and her husband was hospitalized for two weeks. They want to get inoculated as soon as they can. But since neighboring states are limiting vaccinations to their own residents, they have little choice but to wait.

“My doctor is in Massachusetts, because we’re so close in proximity, but I can’t get it in Massachusetts either,” Ms. Diener said.

Rhode Island’s health department said last week that it was starting to vaccinate a small number of especially vulnerable people 75 and older — people who are part of a registry indicating they need extra assistance during an emergency. In about two weeks, the department plans to start making doses available to everyone in that age group.

State residents ages 65 to 74 are forecast to become eligible at the end of the month, according to the health department’s projections.

Dr. Alexander-Scott said the state was being strategic because of its “very limited supply” of vaccine.

The state has administered about 54 percent of its available vaccine doses so far, and has given at least one of the two required shots to 6.5 percent of its population, fewer than most other states.

The Canadian Embassy in Beijing. A T-shirt made for embassy staff members who repatriated Canadians from the Chinese city of Wuhan last year has been criticized by the Chinese government.
Credit…Andy Wong/Associated Press

To hip-hop fans, it is an instantly recognizable symbol, a flying letter W that represents the Wu-Tang Clan, the New York rap collective.

To the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it suggests something else: a bat. And so, when Canadian diplomats in China ordered T-shirts with the symbol behind the word “Wuhan,” it became a minor diplomatic incident.

“The Chinese side is shocked by this and has lodged stern representations with the Canadian Embassy in China, demanding that the Canadian side immediately thoroughly investigate the incident and give China a clear explanation,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a news conference on Monday.

Bats are considered one of the possible original hosts of the coronavirus that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, and they have appeared in memes about Chinese eating habits that have been criticized as racist. The Chinese authorities have tried to play down the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan, instead pushing dubious theories that the virus may have emerged earlier in Europe, the United States or elsewhere.

A spokesperson for Canada’s foreign service told the Reuters news agency that the T-shirt did not depict a bat.

“The T-shirt logo designed by a member of the embassy shows a stylized W, and is not intended to represent a bat. It was created for the team of embassy staff working on repatriation of Canadians from Wuhan in early 2020,” the spokesperson said by email on Tuesday. “We regret the misunderstanding.”

Relations between China and Canada have been tense since December 2018, when Canada detained Meng Wanzhou, a top executive at the Chinese tech giant Huawei who was wanted on fraud charges in the United States. Two Canadian men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were arrested in China soon after in an apparent act of retaliation. They have been accused of espionage and remain held in China under isolated and harsh conditions.

Flames near a property under construction in Perth, Australia, on Tuesday.
Credit…Paul Kane/Getty Images

MELBOURNE, Australia — Just days after residents of Perth, Australia’s fourth-largest city, were ordered to stay in because of the coronavirus, some were forced to flee their homes on Tuesday as a ferocious wildfire bore down on the city’s outskirts.

The blaze northeast of Perth, which began on Monday and was fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions, was out of control by about 2 a.m. on Tuesday, officials said. Residents described a confused scramble in the middle of the night, as they were unsure where they were supposed to go in light of the lockdown rules.

“We wish it would be either one or the other, not both,” Gemma Martin, a 33-year-old hospitality worker who fled with her three children, said of the fire and the lockdown.

By Tuesday afternoon, close to 20,000 acres had been razed and dozens of properties had been destroyed.

“It’s still a very, very active and very aggressive fire and very much out of control,” said Kevin Bailey, mayor of the City of Swan, a region within the Perth metropolitan area where the blaze had done the most damage.

The fire, reminiscent of the infernos that devoured Australia’s southeast coast more than a year ago, is another reminder that as climate change spurs more frequent and intense natural disasters, Australia and other countries are likely to find themselves dealing with intersecting catastrophes.

Perth and the surrounding area were put on a strict lockdown on Sunday because of a single coronavirus case, the first one outside quarantine in the state of Western Australia in almost 10 months. The wildfire started around noon the next day, sparked by a house fire, according to Mr. Bailey, the mayor.

Ms. Martin said that while the dual disasters were overwhelming, “if anything, last year taught us to be grateful for what we do have, and to be resilient.”

The Justice Ministry in Taiwan said a man was undergoing quarantine at a friend’s home when he was abducted by debt collectors who mistook him for his friend.
Credit…David Chang/EPA, via Shutterstock

TAIPEI, Taiwan — When the authorities in Taiwan believed a man had breached mandatory quarantine rules, they acted swiftly to issue a fine of $3,500.

But in a pandemic-era twist on a classic case of mistaken identity, it turned out that the man, surnamed Chen, did not violate the rules at all.

He had in fact been kidnapped by debt collectors.

Mr. Chen had returned from Hong Kong in late October and was undergoing the required two-week quarantine at a friend’s home in the central city of Nantou when a group of debt collectors showed up one night, the Justice Ministry in Taiwan said last week. The men mistook Mr. Chen for his friend, who owed them money, then assaulted and abducted him.

Reached by telephone on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Justice Ministry said that the kidnappers brought Mr. Chen back to his friend’s home after holding him for several hours. His father reported the abduction to the police, and Mr. Chen was arrested and fined about $3,500 for violating the quarantine regulations.

Later, local officials investigating the situation found that Mr. Chen had been forced to leave his quarantine premises against his will and agreed to rescind the fine.

They said it was the first time that a virus-related penalty had been revoked.

Taiwan has imposed fines of up to tens of thousands of dollars on people who were found to have breached their mandatory quarantines, including around $33,000 for one man who went out one night last year to go clubbing.

The debt collectors have not yet been caught, according to the Justice Ministry spokesperson.

In other global developments:

  • Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan said on Tuesday that the state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other prefectures would be extended by one month, to March 7. Mr. Suga said that while new infections had declined from their peak last month, the health care system was still strained.





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Chinese Miners Pulled to Surface 2 Weeks After Underground Explosion

Chinese Miners Pulled to Surface 2 Weeks After Underground Explosion


HONG KONG — Two weeks after an explosion remaining a group of miners trapped 2,000 toes under floor in the japanese Chinese province of Shandong, at least 11 had been found alive and lifted to the floor on Sunday, a bright location in a grueling rescue hard work.

The 1st rescued miner was introduced to the surface area at about 11:13 a.m. Sunday, according to officials in Yantai, a metropolis in the vicinity of the little city where the mine is located. Rescue personnel applauded as he was introduced to the surface, in accordance to video broadcast by Xinhua, the point out-run news company. The miner, donning a very long green coat with his eyes wrapped in black fabric, was lifted into an ambulance and instantly taken to a healthcare facility.

He was “extremely weak,” the Yantai city authorities mentioned on an official social media account.

In the afternoon, rescuers ongoing bringing miners to the surface in groups of two or three. The later teams also wore eye coverings for security after this sort of a prolonged period of time without the need of sunlight, but appeared to be in much better well being than the 1st rescued miner and had been equipped to wander with guidance.

China has some of the world’s most unsafe mines, and when industry experts say ailments have enhanced in new a long time, disasters are still typical. Coal mines, with noxious and explosive gases, are the deadliest. At least 16 individuals ended up killed in a coal mine in southwestern China in September and 23 more were being killed at a coal mine in the similar city, Chongqing, in December.

Gold mining, by distinction, is commonly safer but not without the need of challenges.

The Jan. 10 blast at the Hushan gold mine in the vicinity of Yantai trapped 22 miners. On Jan. 17, rescue workers have been ready to make call by way of a slim, drilled channel. A notice sent up by the miners reported that 11 were trapped in 1 segment, one in another and 10 were unaccounted for. Four ended up hurt, and all were struggling from exhaustion in the moist and smoky tunnels.

“Hope that the rescue will not prevent,” they wrote. “We have hope, thank you!”

On Wednesday, a person of the miners died of head accidents sustained in the explosion, the condition news media claimed.

In addition to numerous holes bored to provide materials and search for missing miners, rescuers have started drilling a shaft to rescue survivors. Operate on the most important rescue shaft was predicted to get at the very least 15 times since of tons of rubble blocking the route, officers said Thursday.

But on Sunday, officers mentioned that work on the rescue shaft experienced progressed a great deal speedier than envisioned.

The first miner who was rescued Sunday was in a separate tunnel from the other 10 identified to nonetheless be alive underground. That main group has been acquiring foodstuff, h2o, drugs, clothes and other provides through boreholes.



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China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown Amid New Covid Wave

China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown Amid New Covid Wave


When a handful of new coronavirus conditions materialized this month in a province bordering Beijing — seemingly distribute at a village wedding ceremony party — the Chinese authorities bolted into motion.

They locked down two towns with far more than 17 million persons, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash tests routine of practically every single resident there, which was concluded in a matter of times.

They shut down transportation and canceled weddings, funerals and, most substantially, a provincial Communist Party meeting.

By this 7 days the lockdowns expanded to consist of a further metropolis on the edge of Beijing, Langfang, as properly as a county in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province. Districts in Beijing by itself, the Chinese capital, also shut down.

Much more than 22 million men and women in all have been purchased to continue being inside their households — double the amount affected final January when China’s central govt locked down Wuhan, the central metropolis where the virus was to start with noted, in a shift that was then found as amazing.

The flare-ups stay tiny when compared with the devastation struggling with other nations around the world, but they threaten to undercut the results the country’s Communist Party has experienced in subduing the virus, letting its economic climate to surge again right after last year’s slump and its persons to return to some thing near to usual lives.

The outbreaks, coming immediately after so extended with nominal circumstances, have improved nervousness throughout China, the place residents in most locations felt like the pandemic was a issue of the past.

New instances have also been reported in the northern province of Shanxi and the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin. Shanghai on Wednesday urged residents not to leave the town and announced that men and women who experienced traveled to dangerous regions ought to quarantine on their own at house for two months and depart only soon after passing two tests, even though all those who experienced traveled to the maximum-threat spots faced quarantine in federal government facilities.

In Wuhan, rumors swirled that the metropolis could face a new lockdown even though individuals appeared unfounded, officials significantly stepped up temperature checks on some streets.

In Shunyi, a district in Beijing’s northeast that includes Beijing Capital Global Airport as very well as rural villages, people have been requested to continue being within because a surge of scenarios just prior to the new yr. At Beijing’s principal railroad stations, workers sprayed down public areas with disinfectant.

Immediately after a taxi driver examined constructive more than the weekend in Beijing, the authorities tracked down 144 travellers for supplemental checks, in accordance to The World-wide Occasions, a state tabloid. Now everyone getting in a taxi or vehicle company in Beijing has to scan a QR code from their phone, allowing for the governing administration to immediately trace them.

The authorities has moved in advance on programs to vaccinate 50 million persons ahead of the Lunar New Year up coming month, a vacation when hundreds of hundreds of thousands of persons customarily crisscross the place to stop by their households. By Wednesday, more than 10 million doses had been distributed.

Even with the vaccinations, officials have currently warned people not to journey ahead of the holiday.

“These measures, if well implemented, can ensure that no large-scale epidemic rebound happens,” Feng Zijian, the deputy director of China’s Center for Sickness Management, stated at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

A second spherical of mass nucleic acid testing commenced on Tuesday.

“In effect, this is a sort of wartime program — applying the suggests of wartime for social manage in peacetime — and during a pandemic this wartime program performs,” explained Chen Min, a writer and former newspaper editor who goes by the pen name Xiao Shu. Mr. Chen was in Wuhan final yr when the city went into lockdown.

The nature of the country’s governance gave it the tools to tackle the epidemic — even if some actions appeared in excess of the top.

“Chinese cities enforce a household system — scaled-down ones have numerous hundred people, major types have tens of hundreds — and by shutting the gates you can lock in tens of thousands of people,” Mr. Chen stated in a telephone job interview. “Now anytime they operate into this variety of issue, they are guaranteed to utilize this method. That would be unachievable in Western countries.”

Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting. Claire Fu contributed investigate.



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Britain, Trump, Covid-19: Your Monday Briefing

Britain, Trump, Covid-19: Your Monday Briefing


(Want to get this briefing by e mail? Here’s the indication-up.)

Great morning.

We’re masking a virus warning in Britain, a obscure election danger from President Trump and Joe Biden’s Russia dilemma.

Give a huge hug

“Hug my grandmother real limited. I frequented her the moment, but I just waved at her exterior her space and then she responded by asking who I was. I reduced my mask to exhibit her my confront, and she requested me to appear closer. I reported I could not.”

Mika Amador, Manila

See family members …

“I want to go to my dwelling country, Peru, to see my mother and my dad’s ashes. He died in November, and I couldn’t give him a hug goodbye for fear of traveling there during the pandemic.”



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U.S. to Require Negative Covid-19 Test for All Travelers From U.K.

U.S. to Require Negative Covid-19 Test for All Travelers From U.K.


The United States will need all airline travellers arriving from Britain to exam unfavorable for the coronavirus within just 72 several hours of their departure, the Centers for Disorder Manage and Prevention claimed on Thursday.

The transfer comes as a new really transmissible variant of the virus, which to start with appeared in Britain, has led international locations to seal their borders to vacationers from there.

The new rule, which normally takes outcome on Monday, will use to Us citizens as properly as overseas citizens, and will need passengers to exhibit proof of a unfavorable consequence on a genetic exam, identified as a P.C.R., or an antigen exam.

“This extra testing prerequisite will fortify our security of the American general public to improve their overall health and security and make certain liable intercontinental vacation,” the C.D.C. stated in a statement.

Passengers will be necessary to“provide written documentation of their laboratory take a look at end result (in hard copy or electronic) to the airline,” the C.D.C. mentioned, introducing that “if a passenger chooses not to take a check, the airline ought to deny boarding to the passenger.”

The new rules have been a reversal for the Trump administration, which initially advised American airliners that the authorities would not have to have tests for tourists from Britain.

United Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Delta Air Strains experienced currently announced very similar policies, demanding all passengers on their flights between Britain and the United States to submit proof of a adverse exam result inside of 72 several hours of departure. British Airways experienced also been demanding damaging examination benefits for travellers arriving in New York.

Numerous of the airlines declared their insurance policies right after a need from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York that passengers arriving from London to John F. Kennedy Intercontinental Airport would need to give documentation of a detrimental check outcome.

“We just can’t enable heritage repeat by itself with this new variant,” Mr. Cuomo experienced prepared on Twitter.

Also on Thursday, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey claimed that travellers arriving at Newark Airport would require destructive assessments inside 72 hours of departure to enter.





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Turkey’s Coffeehouses, a Hub of Male Social Life, May Not Survive Virus

Turkey’s Coffeehouses, a Hub of Male Social Life, May Not Survive Virus


ISTANBUL — For a long time, Varan Suzme has frequented the Kiral Coffeehouse in the vicinity of his residence, the place guys of his Istanbul neighborhood although absent hrs chatting, sipping from small, steaming cups and playing backgammon and cards.

“Every working day I made use of to appear below,” explained Mr. Suzme, 77, a retired textile salesman. “This is our 2nd property. It is a spot I like, I see my buddies, and I am happy and I enjoy games.”

Until finally the pandemic. A lockdown before this year shut coffeehouses across the state, along with bars and dining places, and when the federal government permitted them to reopen in June, it forbade the standard games, saying they improved the danger of viral transmission.

Consumers, who are mostly center-aged and retired, stopped coming for panic of the virus, and with online games banned, coffeehouse homeowners saw business dwindle. Even prior to one more lockdown took influence this thirty day period, they experienced been fearful that the coronavirus could endanger the survival of several coffeehouses, robbing the state of an necessary hub of Turkish life.

A uniquely male maintain, the Turkish coffeehouse is every thing from a publish business to a social club, fueled by cups of espresso — or these times, as preferences improve, tea. In every single neighborhood, from Istanbul’s slim again alleys to the ancient towns spread throughout the country, it is where by adult males halt on the way to and from work, pensioners meet up with up and swap gossip, and political events campaign.

“We miss out on our close friends and participating in backgammon,” claimed Mamuk Katikoy, 70, when he lately came by the Kiral Coffeehouse in the Istanbul community of Yesilkoy for an job interview. “I have not found this man for 8 months,” he explained, greeting a 90-12 months-previous pal who also stopped by.

A number of espresso shop homeowners complained that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s religiously conservative govt was opposed to the online games due to the fact of their association with gambling, and that the ban was far more ideological than hygiene linked.

The country was now in an financial downturn when the pandemic hit, and with govt assist scarce, lots of corporations have been compelled to shut for superior.

A number of renowned cafes in the artistic community of Beyoglu have shut down in recent months. They experienced released Italian espresso to Istanbul culture — Simdi Cafe, now closed, was well-known for its 1960s-period espresso machine — and arrived to symbolize a flowering of Turkey’s mental and inventive daily life.

The traditional Turkish coffeehouse is a additional humble affair, exactly where the regulars are mainly working-course men and women, actively playing cards, backgammon and ”okey,” a recreation related to rummy, played with numbered tiles. Some coffeehouses cost for working games by the hour, when other individuals just make their money from the beverages they serve.

But with no online games, company concerning lockdowns was so very poor that most coffeehouses shut or have handful of patrons. Homeowners alert that without much more authorities support they may well have to close forever.

“Our businesses are empty,” claimed Murat Agaoglu, the head of the Turkey Coffee Homes and Buffets Federation, who predicted that 20 percent of country’s coffeehouses would go out of organization.

That could rob Turkey of a mainstay of its communities that is nearly as outdated as coffee ingesting itself. The custom spread from Arabia northward to Turkey and on to Europe in the 16th century.

The first coffeehouses in Turkey ended up launched by two Syrian merchants in the Tahtakale district of what was then referred to as Constantinople, close to the seat of energy of the Ottoman Empire and amongst the teeming alleys of the spice bazaar.

“At that moment, Istanbul was one particular of the most populous towns in the earth,” claimed Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish Research at Harvard College. “Imagine the industrial likely of this innovation. There ended up hundreds of coffeehouses in the metropolis inside of fifty percent a century. And due to the fact then, we are ready to delight in the blessed brew of this blessed bean in private or in public.”

The Ottoman sultans’ court embraced espresso drinking. Artisans crafted very small, delicate cups and slender-necked coffee pots, women of all ages began serving espresso to company in their homes, and the adult men gathered in the coffeehouses, smoking cigarettes tobacco in extravagantly very long-stemmed pipes. Afterwards the water pipe turned fashionable.

The coffeehouses designed into meeting areas where by guys of business enterprise socialized, but they also became centers of literary activity and public enjoyment. Some had examining rooms or hosted storytellers and puppeteers. Many nevertheless bear names that hark back again to their Arabic origins, “kahvehane,” meaning a coffeehouse, and “kiraathane,” this means a studying dwelling.

Inevitably, the coffeehouses turned centers for political gossip and activism, as they did across Europe, and were being periodically shut down when political agitation rose, Mr. Kafadar stated.

Over time they missing their standing in the eyes of the improved-educated urban public and little by little turned low-cost haunts for staff. “From the mid-19th century onward, modernizers related them with idleness and backwardness,” Mr. Kafadar stated.

The traditional coffeehouses, regulated by the authorities, are certified to provide tea and espresso and other tender drinks, including salep, a popular beverage made from orchid bulbs that dates from Ottoman situations.

The beverages and games, alongside one another with the costs, are detailed on the license which is posted on the coffeehouse wall. Charges are controlled and set minimal.

They serve traditional Turkish coffee, each cup brewed independently, bitter or sweet to style, and little glasses of sturdy black tea. H2o pipes are nevertheless shown between the choices, but the authorities of Mr. Erdogan banned use of them indoors additional than a 10 years ago.

For Guven Kiral, functioning a coffeehouse has been his life. He inherited his from his father and moved it to new premises in the exact community.

“This spot is like my boy or girl,” he reported. “I have a son, but it is like a 2nd son to me.”

On occupied days he would have 60 persons actively playing, he mentioned, but the pandemic has finished that, silencing the shuffle of playing cards and the sharp click on and slap of backgammon items.

“If I open, consumers arrive for a tea and they sit for a even though, but then they say ‘Sorry, there are no video games,’ and they depart,” said Mr. Kiral, who is fearful he’ll be pressured to shut down for very good. “We are hurtling downhill. The pandemic has triggered us a enormous decline.”

He shown his antivirus hygiene regime: spreading disposable tablecloths, breaking out a new deck of playing cards for each individual activity, and soaking the backgammon counters in detergent. Tables would be commonly spaced and even expanded to length customers from every other, he explained.

“The significant concern is the ban on games, the two for the clients and the persons who perform in these locations,” stated Bendevi Palandoken, head of the of the Turkish Chamber of Artisans, which represents proprietors and workers in 120,000 coffeehouses nationwide. “We want the governing administration to lighten the load with social stability premiums and cash guidance for people who are breadwinners.”

A flyer on the wall in the Kiral Coffeehouse reads: “We check with the government, really do not we subject to you?”

Mr. Kiral explained he would be heartbroken to reduce the company.

“For my regulars the initially detail will be separation. They will not see individuals any more,” he said. “We would drop our jokes, our laughter.”

On a broader amount, he mentioned the whole older era would be penalized. “The value will be to a selected age group. They will have nowhere to go.”



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