Country sees virus cases hit record highs
Biden sets advisory panel; vaccine’s trial offers hope
WILMINGTON, Del. — Coronavirus cases surged to a record Monday, with the United States now averaging 111,000 newly reported infections each day for the past week and seeing rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. The virus’s surge cast a shadow on positive news about the effectiveness of a potential vaccine.
As the number of infected Americans passed 10 million and governors struggled to manage the pandemic, Joe Biden tried Monday to use his bully pulpit — the only tool at his disposal as he waits to replace President Donald Trump in 72 days — to plead for Americans to set aside the bitterness of the election and wear masks.
“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day,” Biden said in Delaware after announcing a covid-19 advisory board tasked with preparing for quick action once he is inaugurated. Biden has been projected as the election’s winner, though President Donald Trump is contesting the results.
“It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view,” Biden said. “We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few
months. Not Democratic or Republican lives — American lives.”
Hours before Biden’s remarks, drugmaker Pfizer announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing covid-19, a promising development that sent stock prices soaring. The world has waited anxiously for any sign that there will be an end to the pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people.
“It’s extraordinary,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said on CNN. “It is really a big deal.”
Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with German drugmaker BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.
The company said the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.
Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year, it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 million to 20 million people, company executives have said.
“This is a historical moment,” said Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer. “This was a devastating situation, a pandemic, and we have embarked on a path and a goal that nobody ever has achieved — to come up with a vaccine within a year.”
Biden called the development “excellent news,” but he cautioned that the country is still “facing a very dark winter.” The average daily death toll in the U.S. is inching back toward 1,000, and hospitals are strained with patients. He said Americans would need to rely on basic precautions, such as wearing masks, to “get back to normal as fast as possible.”
“It’s clear that this vaccine, even if approved, will not be widely available for many months yet to come,” Biden said. “The challenge before us right now is still immense and growing.”
He added: “A mask is not a political statement, but it’s a good way to start pulling the country together.”
Kathleen Sebelius, who served as health secretary to President Barack Obama and has advised the Biden team, said: “What he knows is there is almost 10 weeks between now and the inauguration, and those 10 weeks are absolutely critical for the health of this country.”
Sebelius said Biden “is signaling that science is back.”
ADVISORY BOARD
Biden on Monday formed a coronavirus advisory board dominated by scientists and doctors. It includes people who have served in previous administrations, many of them experts in public health, vaccines and infectious disease.
It will be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Yale University public health care expert Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Rick Bright, a vaccine expert and former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, is also on the board. He had filed a whistleblower complaint alleging he was reassigned to a lesser job earlier this year because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug pushed by Trump as a covid-19 treatment.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to serve my country & rejoin the fight against COVID-19,” Bright said Monday on Twitter. “With the leadership of President-elect Biden & VP-elect Harris, & their trust in Science, I have no doubt we’ll be able to end the pandemic & save lives. And remember, #WearAMask!”
Other advisory board members include Dr. Luciana Borio, who had senior leadership positions at the FDA and National Security Council during the Obama and Trump administrations; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who served as a special adviser for health policy in the Obama administration; Dr. Atul Gawande, a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Bill Clinton administration and a medical writer; and Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who served as an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson during the George W. Bush administration.
Biden has also vowed to consult Fauci, who offered praise for the former vice president’s new advisers.
“They’re colleagues of mine; they’re people that I’ve been dealing with for years and years,” he said. “Of course they’re qualified.”
VIRUS’S SPREAD
The sheer breadth of the challenge was striking Monday: More than 784,000 cases have been announced in the U.S. over the past week, more than in any other week of the pandemic. The country now averages 900 deaths each day, and 28 states added more cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday than in any other weeklong stretch of the pandemic. No states are reporting sustained reductions in cases.
Coronavirus hospitalizations, perhaps the clearest measure of how many people are severely ill, are approaching record levels set during earlier surges of the pandemic, according to data collected by the COVID Tracking Project. A wave of more than 59,200 patients threatened to overwhelm hospitals in communities across the country Monday.
The outlook is especially grim in the Midwest and Great Plains, where North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska had more new cases per capita over the past week than any others.
Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, tested positive for the coronavirus Monday, according to a spokesperson for the agency. He became the latest in a long list of administration officials, including Trump himself, to contract the virus.
At least three people who attended an election party at the White House last week, including Carson, have tested positive. At the event, several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns. The White House has been the site of several high-profile outbreaks in recent months.
David Bossie, an adviser to Trump who attended the election night party, tested positive Sunday, two people familiar with the diagnosis said. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, tested positive for the virus the day after the election, aides said, though he tried to keep it quiet.
Carson, a neurosurgeon who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, has defended Trump’s response to the virus and is a member of the White House virus task force. An aide said he was in “good spirits” but declined to specify his treatments.
STATES’ STRUGGLES
Even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday gained nearly 3% on news of the vaccine, the economy remained depressed by the spread of the virus. There were 10 million fewer Americans working in October than in February, according to the Labor Department, and the pace of job growth has slowed every month since June. Airlines and other tourism-related industries are nowhere close to regaining their normal levels of customers. And several indicators suggest consumers have pulled back on dining and some other activities in recent weeks as infections have surged anew.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York raised doubts that the Trump administration could handle vaccine distribution, even if a vaccine did become available in the coming weeks, suggesting that governors would have to step in.
“The Trump administration is rolling out the vaccination plan, and I believe it’s flawed,” Cuomo said Monday on “Good Morning America” on ABC. “They’re basically going to have the private providers do it, and that’s going to leave out all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when covid ravaged them.”
The wave of cases sweeping through much of the country remains largely a matter for state and local officials whose residents are divided over the need for restrictions, impatient to improve the economy and fatigued by the pandemic.
Unlike in the spring, when a vast majority of states issued stay-at-home orders for at least a few weeks, there has been no broad agreement around such sweeping measures. More than half of the states have issued mask mandates at some point this year, and some officials have tried targeted shutdowns on bars and indoor dining. But public health officials acknowledge that there is little public appetite for a return to full lockdowns.
That has left governors and mayors racing to sort through new restrictions while trying not to alienate their constituents.
In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, declared Sunday that local hospitals were full and that a mask mandate and two-week state of emergency would begin immediately.
“We are in the midst of a serious pandemic,” he said in a videotaped message that was sent to residents’ cellphones. “The number of infections in our state is growing at an alarming rate.”
Herbert, who had been slow to enact restrictions, announced new rules that would apply statewide, including canceling high school extracurricular activities and limiting social gatherings to within households. But he did not close bars or restaurants and declined to impose restrictions on churches.
In Utah, the increase in coronavirus cases — more than 2,000 new infections a day — has sent ripples of alarm throughout Salt Lake City. Stores began limiting purchases of certain items such as toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Shelves in a local Costco last weekend were low on staples such as pasta and flour.
In Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, announced a series of restrictions Monday that stopped short of any sweeping directive. People can still eat indoors at restaurants, but dining will be limited to eight people per table. Masks will be required in some businesses — but only if there is close contact between people for 15 minutes or more. Dancing at weddings will not be allowed — unless people dance at their own tables.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said Monday that he would impose more stringent restrictions on three regions of the state, including suburbs of Chicago and southern Illinois, that are seeing surges in coronavirus infections.
“The virus is winning the war by now,” Pritzker said, urging the public to wear masks. “The situation has worsened considerably in certain areas of the state.”
Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear, Katie Thomas, David Gelles, Carl Zimmer and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times; and by Will Weissert, Philip Marcelo, Aamer Madhani, Carla K. Johnson, Heather Hollingsworth, Alexandra Jaffe, Lauran Neergaard, Thomas Strong, Rob Gillies and Jamey Keaten of The Associated Press.