COVID-19’s global death toll tops 5 million people
The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.
Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middleor high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The U.S. alone has recorded over 745,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.
“This is a defining moment in our lifetime,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health. “What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don’t get to another 5 million?”
The death toll, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.
The staggering figure is almost certainly an undercount because of limited testing and people dying at home without medical attention, especially in poor parts of the world, such as India.
Hot spots have shifted over the 22 months since the outbreak began, turning different places on the world map red. Now, the virus is pummeling Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, especially where rumors, misinformation and distrust in government have hobbled vaccination efforts. In Ukraine, only 17 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated; in Armenia, only 7 percent.
“What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University. “That’s the irony of COVID-19.”
WASHINGTON — Anticipating a green light from vaccine advisers, the Biden administration is assembling and shipping millions of COVID-19 shots for children ages 5-11, the White House said. The first could go into kids’ arms by midweek.
“We are not waiting on the operations and logistics,” said coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients.
By vaccinating children, the U.S. hopes to head off another coronavirus wave during the cold-weather months when people spend more time indoors and respiratory illnesses can spread more easily. Cases have been declining for weeks, but the virus has repeatedly shown its ability to stage a comeback and more easily transmissible mutations are a persistent threat.
Today, a special advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet to consider detailed recommendations for administering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to younger children. The Food and Drug Administration already cleared the shots, which deliver about one-third of the vaccine given to adults. After CDC advisers make their recommendations, agency director Dr. Rochelle Walensky will give the final order.
Zients said the government has enough of the Pfizer vaccine for all 28 million children in the 5-11 age group. “We’re in great shape on supply,” Zients said during the White House coronavirus briefing.
The children’s vaccination drive is expected to start later this week and go into full swing by next week. Parents will be able to go to vaccines.gov and filter on vaccines for children 5-11 to find a location near them that is offering the shot.
WASHINGTON — With inflation at its highest point in three decades, the Federal Reserve is set this week to begin winding down the extraordinary stimulus it has given the economy since the pandemic recession struck early last year, a process that could prove to be a risky balancing act.
Chair Jerome Powell has signaled that the Fed will announce after its policy meeting Wednesday that it will start paring its $120 billion in monthly bond purchases as soon as this month. Those purchases are intended to keep long-term loan rates low to encourage borrowing and spending.
Once the Fed has ended its bond purchases by mid-2022, it will then turn to a more difficult decision: When to raise its benchmark short-term rate from zero, where it’s been since COVID-19 hammered the economy in March 2020. Raising that rate, which affects many consumer and
business loans, would be intended to make sure inflation doesn’t get out of control. But it would carry the risk of discouraging spending and undercutting the job market and the economy before they’ve regained full health.
“We don’t have a roadmap for what we’re going through,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. Powell has to “walk a tightrope” by supporting the recovery while not “turning a deaf ear to inflation.”
WASHINGTON — A majority of the Supreme Court signaled they would allow abortion providers to pursue a court challenge to a Texas law that has virtually ended abortion in the nation’s second-largest state after six weeks of pregnancy.
But it was unclear how quickly the court would rule and whether it would issue an order blocking the law that has been in effect for two months, or require providers to ask a lower court put the law on hold.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, two conservative appointees of former President Donald Trump, voted in September to allow the law to take effect, but they raised questions Monday about its novel structure. The law, written to make it difficult to mount legal challenges, subjects clinics, doctors and any others who facilitate abortions to large financial penalties.
“Millions and millions retroactively imposed, even though the activity was perfectly lawful under all court orders and precedent at the time it was undertaken, right?” Kavanaugh asked, one of several skeptical questions he put to Judd E. Stone II, representing Texas.
Barrett, too, pressed Stone about provisions of the law that force providers to fight lawsuits one by one and, she said, don’t allow their constitutional rights to be “fully aired.”
The justices heard three hours of arguments in two cases over whether abortion providers or the Justice Department can mount federal court challenges to the law, which has an unusual enforcement scheme its defenders argue shields it from federal court review.
KENOSHA, Wis. — A jury was selected for the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in a single day Monday, despite the turbulent political passions unleashed when he shot three people who were out on the streets of Kenosha during a protest against racial injustice.
Opening statements are set to begin this morning, with the trial expected to last two weeks.
The jury must decide whether Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as his lawyers claim, or was engaged in vigilantism when he opened fire with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle in August 2020, killing two men and wounding a third.
In an all-day session that ran well past dark, 20 people — 12 jurors and eight alternates — were selected. The court did not immediately disclose which ones will actually serve as the jury. The 20 consist of 11 women and nine men.
Jurors were not asked to identify their race during the selection process, and the court did not immediately provide a racial breakdown of the group.
Rittenhouse, now 18, faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree homicide, the most serious charge against him.
As jury selection got underway, Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder stressed repeatedly that jurors must decide the case solely on what they hear in the courtroom, and cautioned: “This is not a political trial.”