WASHINGTON — A White House aide who traveled with President Biden to Scotland tested positive for the coronavirus this week and remains in quarantine abroad, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a medical issue.
The aide tested positive on Tuesday after taking a lateral flow test, which was a daily requirement to attend the United Nations climate summit held in Glasgow, but has not shown any symptoms of Covid-19. President Biden was not in close contact with the aide, the official said.
The aide has taken subsequent tests, but those came back inconclusive, the official said. The aide remains in quarantine in Scotland, and is waiting on the results of a PCR test.
Mr. Biden tested negative for the virus on Tuesday, the official said. The president, who is 78, received a booster shot in September.
Aides who had close contact with the person who tested positive traveled separately from the president from Scotland to the United States, the official said, and have tested negative since. The positive case was first reported by Bloomberg.
On Sunday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary who stayed behind from the trip at the last minute because of a family emergency, said that she had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Thanks to the vaccine, I have only experienced mild symptoms, which has enabled me to continue working from home,” Ms. Psaki said on Sunday.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House principal deputy press secretary, traveled on the trip while Ms. Psaki stayed home and went into quarantine, and has been holding press briefings at the White House this week.
Mr. Biden traveled abroad with a large delegation that included his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken. The president’s entourage also included several press officials who interacted both with other White House officials and with numerous journalists covering the trip.
In July, after a White House staff member tested positive for the virus, Ms. Psaki warned that there would be more breakthrough cases and said that precautions were in place to protect the president.
transcript
0:00/1:11
–0:00
transcript
Europe Faces ‘Real Threat’ of Virus Resurgence, W.H.O. Official Says
Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s regional director for Europe, said the region was back at the epicenter of the pandemic as infections approached near-record levels.
-
Today, every single country in Europe and Central Asia is facing a real threat of Covid-19 resurgence or already fighting it. The current pace of transmission across the 53 countries of the European region is of grave concern. Covid-19 cases are once again approaching record levels. With the more transmissible Delta variant continuing to dominate transmission across Europe and Central Asia. We are at another critical point of pandemic resurgence. Europe is back at the epicenter of the pandemic, where we were one year ago. The difference today is that we know more and we can do more. Hospitalization admission rates due to Covid-19 more than doubled in one week based on W.H.O. Europe’s latest data. According to one reliable projection, if we stay on this trajectory, we could see another half a million Covid-19 deaths in Europe and Central Asia by the 1st of February next year.
Europe is again experiencing near-record levels of coronavirus cases, and could experience half a million Covid-related deaths in the next three months, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
Europe accounted for 59 percent of the world’s newly reported coronavirus cases last week, and for nearly half the world’s Covid-related deaths, Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s director for the 53 countries in its European region, told reporters.
Dr. Kluge said that there were 1.8 million new cases and about 24,000 deaths in the European region in the past week.
“We are at another critical point of pandemic resurgence,” Dr. Kluge said. “Europe is back at the epicenter of the pandemic — where we were one year ago.”
The region is reporting an average of more than 30 new cases a day for every 100,000 people, a rate that has almost doubled since mid-September. Eighteen of the 20 countries around the world that are reporting the most new cases per day, relative to their populations, are in Europe or the part of Central Asia that the W.H.O. includes in its European region.
New reported cases reached a record high in Germany on Wednesday, when the nation recorded 33,949 new infections in a 24-hour period. Only 67 percent of the country is fully vaccinated.
Covid-related deaths in Europe are also increasing.
“If we stay on this trajectory, we could see another half a million Covid-19 deaths in Europe and Central Asia by the first of February next year,” Dr. Kluge said.
The surge in infections, driven by the Delta variant, is affecting all age groups, Dr. Kluge said, but it has been deadliest among older people. Three-quarters of those who died last week were over 65, and most were not fully vaccinated, he said.
Hospitals are being flooded with Covid patients across the region; in 43 of the 53 countries, hospitals are likely to face high to extreme stress in the next three months, the W.H.O. projected.
Dr. Kluge said the virus was surging because precautions like mask-wearing were relaxed and because too few people have been vaccinated.
Eight countries in the region have vaccinated more than 70 percent of their populations, but two have managed to immunize less than 10 percent, he said. Hospital admission rates were high, he said, in the countries where vaccination rates were low.
Outbreaks have also appeared in unvaccinated populations in countries with relatively high rates of vaccination. In Italy, which has fully vaccinated 72 percent of its population and recently imposed stringent national rules to encourage workers to get vaccinated, the city of Trieste became a hotbed of infections two weeks after thousands of vaccine skeptics gathered to protest the new rules.
Dr. Kluge also emphasized the continued need for basic precautions like mask-wearing, social distance and good indoor ventilation, and he took note of projections that 188,000 lives could be saved in Europe in the next three months if 95 percent of the population wore masks.
“We must change our tactics, from reacting to surges of Covid-19 to preventing them from happening in the first place,” Dr. Kluge said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has reached a deal with nine labor unions regarding how the city will handle unvaccinated employees under its tough new vaccination mandate. In exchange, the unions have agreed to drop their legal efforts to overturn the new policy, the city announced Thursday.
The nine unions collectively represent about 88,000 of the 160,000 employees covered by the latest mandate, which requires all city employees to get vaccinated for the coronavirus with no option to take a weekly test. The unions include District Council 37, Teamsters Local 237, the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association Local 831, and SEIU Local 300.
“We have reached an agreement that gives our members options,” said Henry Garrido, the executive director of District Council 37, the largest public employees union.
“Thank you to these unions for working with us to keep New Yorkers safe,” Mr. de Blasio said.
Since going into effect on Nov. 1, the city’s mandate has driven the vaccination rate among the city’s 370,000 workers up to 92 percent. About 9,000 employees have been placed on unpaid leave for refusing vaccination. An additional 12,000 unvaccinated employees are being permitted to work with weekly testing while they await a decision on a religious or medical exemption.
The city has been trying to reach agreements with 42 unions, but most of them have not hammered out a deal with City Hall. Those include the police and fire unions, which have pushed back the hardest against the mandate.
Under the agreements announced Thursday, union members have agreed to follow many of the same rules set up by an arbitrator to govern how the vaccine mandate is affecting the city’s teachers. The city’s vaccine mandate went into effect for about 150,000 education employees in early October.
Among the terms are strict rules that will limit religious exemptions to vaccination for city workers. Requests will only be considered for employees who are members of organized and recognized religions, accompanied by a letter from clergy.
At the city schools, that policy in practice has meant that only members of religions with known opposition to vaccination, such as Christian Science, have qualified for religious exemptions. Only 150 adults who work in the city’s schools received such exemptions, the Department of Education said Monday.
But the nine unions who reached an agreement on Thursday also won concessions, including an extension of the time employees can apply for religious exemptions until Friday, and the right to work with pay while their cases are being decided. Previously, the deadline had been Oct. 27.
Unvaccinated union members also won the right to keep their health benefits while on unpaid leave until the end of June 2022. After that, they will be terminated. This is a slightly shorter timeline than teachers received.
Pregnant women in their third trimester can also take compensatory time or sick leave rather than have to go completely unpaid. And all unvaccinated workers can come back to work at any time before July 1, 2022, if they decide to get a Covid shot.
The other five unions involved in the deal are: the Organization of Staff Analysts, Sanitation Officers Local 444, CWA Local 1180 and the Civil Service Bar Association of the Teamsters.
As new coronavirus cases surge to record levels in Latvia, the parliament on Thursday passed a law giving employers permission to fire workers who refuse to be vaccinated or to work remotely when possible, a spokesman for the legislative body said.
Officials in the Baltic country of 1.9 million people also declared a three-month state of emergency starting on Nov. 8 as new coronavirus cases soar to levels not seen there before.
As of Nov. 1, Latvia had the second worst rate of per capita infection in the European Union, after neighboring Estonia. Only slightly more than 60 percent of Latvian adults have been fully vaccinated, significantly below the European average of 75 percent, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
“Today, Latvia is at the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis, because we have lacked solidarity and a clear direction towards this common goal for society as a whole,” Daniels Pavļuts, the health minister, told members of the Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, on Thursday during the debate on the law.
On Nov. 3, the country reported 2,718 new cases in the preceding 24 hours, according to the Johns Hopkins University global Covid tracker, and a total of 3,357 have died since the beginning of the pandemic.
Mr. Pavļuts blamed a polarized political environment and rampant disinformation about vaccines, some of which had been repeated by politicians, for the resistance to vaccination in the country. “As a result, we started the autumn wave as an under-vaccinated society and today we have a medical system that works practically in wartime conditions,” he said.
The president, Egils Levits, still has to sign the new law for it to come into force. The legislation says that people without proof of vaccination or recovery from Covid, or a valid medical exemption, can be internally transferred when possible, or suspended for up to three months without pay, after which they can be fired.
Mandatory vaccines are controversial in Latvia. An estimated 5,000 people protested in Riga, the capital, in mid-August when the idea of empowering employers to fire workers for refusal was first floated. According to Latvia’s public broadcaster, 52 members of the Saeima voted in favor of the mandatory vaccination legislation, while 27 opposed it, and two abstained.
Latvia was among the first in Eastern Europe to re-impose a lockdown this autumn, which began on Oct. 19 and will last until at least Nov. 15. At the time, Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins sought assistance from other EU members in building field hospitals to cope with the growing number of Covid patients in need of urgent care.
The new rules for employers are set to take effect when the lockdown ends on Nov. 15, according to Reuters, and the law provides exceptions for those who have a medical reason not to vaccinate or have recently recovered from the virus.
Previously, vaccines were mandatory only for the health care and education sectors, as well as for social workers.
Britain on Thursday became the first country to authorize the use of an antiviral pill for Covid-19, an easy-to-use treatment that could help tame the pandemic.
The drug, known as molnupiravir and sold by the pharmaceutical company Merck, was shown in a key clinical trial to reduce by half the risk of hospitalization and death in high-risk Covid patients who were treated early in their infections. Dispensed from a pharmacy and taken at home, the drug is expected to reach many more people than treatments like monoclonal antibodies, which are typically administered intravenously at a hospital or clinic.
Britain, which has already ordered enough supplies of the pill for 480,000 people, is one of growing list of wealthy countries that have raced to lock up supplies of the drug. Merck said last week it has reached deals to sell the pills to the governments of the United States, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Serbia and Singapore.
The drug is expected to become available in the United States as soon as December, after a panel of experts meets at the end of this month to make a recommendation to the Food and Drug Administration about whether it should be authorized for high-risk Covid patients. The United States has ordered enough supply of the drug for 1.7 million patients, at a cost of about $700 per person.
Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, recommended giving the drug to people as soon as possible after a positive coronavirus test and within five days of the onset of symptoms. The full course of treatment is 40 pills over five days.
The regulator authorized the drug for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who have at least one trait — such as being over 60 years old or having obesity — that would put them at high risk for becoming severely ill from the virus.
Britain is logging an average of nearly 40,000 virus cases daily, though it has recently seen a slight decline in the number of positive cases.
So far, 75 percent of Britain’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 68 percent have been fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
Sajid Javid, the British health secretary, described the Merck pill’s authorization as a “historic day” for the country. “This will be a game changer for the most vulnerable and the immunosuppressed, who will soon be able to receive the groundbreaking treatment,” he said.
The Biden administration on Thursday set Jan. 4 as the deadline for large companies to mandate coronavirus vaccinations or start weekly testing of their workers, the government’s biggest effort yet to enlist private businesses in combating the virus.
The new rule, applying to companies with 100 or more employees, is expected to cover 84 million workers, roughly 31 million of whom are unvaccinated. It lays out details of a plan President Biden announced in September, invoking emergency powers over workplace safety.
In a separate measure that will affect 17 million more workers, nursing homes and other health care facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funds must ensure all employees are vaccinated by Jan. 4, with no option for testing. The president has previously imposed vaccine requirements on federal workers, a group that totals more than four million people, and companies that have federal contracts. (The latter group’s deadline was pushed to Jan. 4, from early December.)
But the mandate on large private businesses is the most far-reaching and potentially controversial measure in the government’s efforts to fight the pandemic. Attorneys general in at least 24 states have threatened to sue. Republican governors and some industry trade groups have opposed the requirement, and the 20 percent of U.S. adults who remain unvaccinated may take issue as well.
And the administration is considering going even further. The Labor Department said it had opened a 30-day comment period on whether it should extend the rules to smaller companies.
“While I would have much preferred that requirements not become necessary, too many people remain unvaccinated for us to get out of this pandemic for good,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
Still, with the country facing shipping delays and shortages caused by supply chain problems, the January deadline allows retailers and logistics companies, both in need of employees, to get through the holiday shopping season before instituting the requirements.
The rule does, however, instruct employers to require masks for unvaccinated workers by Dec. 5. Companies must provide paid time off for vaccinations and sick leave for side effects as needed. The requirement does not apply to remote and outdoor workers. Some major companies including Tyson Foods and United Airlines have already embraced vaccine mandates. But for many that have been fearful of resistance, the new requirement provides cover to enforce mandates and clarification on a range of questions, including who will pay for testing and whether it applies to employees who work at home.
The National Retail Federation, an industry trade group that represents American retailers including major chains, said on Thursday that a vaccine mandate from the Biden administration for large private employers would “impose burdensome new requirements on retailers during the crucial holiday shopping season.”
The new guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will cover 84 million workers, who will be required by Jan. 4 to be fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. OSHA does not require employers to pay for or provide tests, which was a concern of the National Retail Federation.
The N.R.F. expressed concern in October that the emergency order tied to the vaccinations avoided the “normal review and comment process of rulemaking.”
“Retailers have consistently requested that the administration take public comment on this new vaccine mandate,” David French, the group’s senior vice president for government relations, said in a statement on Thursday. “It is critical that the rule not cause unnecessary disruption to the economy, exacerbate the pre-existing work force shortage or saddle retailers, who are already taking considerable steps to keep their employees and customers safe, with needless additional requirements and regulatory burdens.”
Retail is the second-biggest private employment sector in the United States, after health care, and the industry is concerned about a tight labor market, particularly as it heads into a holiday season that is expected to be much busier than it was in 2020. The group wrote a letter to Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, last month, saying that any emergency order around vaccines “could significantly diminish the labor pool, particularly in some geographic areas and amongst some demographics in which vaccine hesitancy is widespread.”
Several large employers — including Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer; Amazon, the second-largest; and Target — declined to comment. Gap, the owner of Banana Republic and Old Navy, said that it had nothing new to share and pointed to a September statement about incentives it was offering to encourage vaccinations among staff, including weekly drawings to win $1,000.
A representative for Macy’s said on Thursday that its staff was strongly encouraged to get vaccinated and that it was “studying the most recent government mandate and will implement it as required.”
Corporate America has entered the next phase of its effort to counter the spread of the coronavirus. Companies of 100 or more employees have until Jan. 4 to ensure all their workers are either fully vaccinated or submit to weekly testing and mandatory masking.
The measure was announced by President Biden in September, and details were released on Thursday by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about what OSHA’s rule means for American workers and their employers.
What is OSHA’s new rule?
Private companies of 100 or more employees must require their workers to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or submit to weekly coronavirus testing and mask-wearing while in the workplace. The deadline for employers to enforce the mask mandate is Dec. 5, after which they could face stiff fines for not imposing the rule.
Which employers are covered by OSHA’s rule?
Any employer with 100 or more workers, including part-time employees but not independent contractors, will be required to adhere to the rule.
OSHA is currently considering whether to extend the rule to employers with fewer than 100 workers.
Who can claim an exemption? Who will determine those exceptions?
Employers are required to give two kinds of exemptions to the vaccine mandates: medical and religious. Exemptions for people with certain medical conditions are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Many employers require people to present a doctor’s note to qualify for this exemption. Exemptions for people with sincerely held religious beliefs are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. So far, no major religion has banned its members from taking the coronavirus vaccine.
Can employers fire workers who don’t comply?
The religious and medical exemptions will come into play here — but when it comes to people who do not have exemptions, employers are generally free to discipline people who don’t follow their rules. They may face pushback, though, under collective bargaining agreements.
In early August, Tyson, one of the world’s largest meatpacking companies, announced that all of its 120,000 workers would need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or lose their jobs.
This aggressive push was a significant turn for a company that had been criticized early in the pandemic for failing to adequately protect workers in plants where low-wage employees typically stand elbow-to-elbow to cut, debone and pack meat, making them particularly vulnerable to the airborne virus. Tyson also had to shut some plants because of virus outbreaks, and a recent congressional report found that 151 Tyson employees died of the virus.
“We made the decision to do the mandate, fully understanding that we were putting our business at risk,” Tyson’s chief executive, Donnie King, said in an interview last week. “This was very painful to do.”
Tyson’s announcement that it would require vaccinations across its corporate offices, packing houses and poultry plants, many of which are in the South and Midwest where resistance to the vaccines is high, was arguably the boldest mandate in the corporate world. Employer requirements are taking effect without major controversy in many areas. But in others, government workers have marched through the streets in protest, while others have quit their jobs entirely.
At Tyson plants, three months after the Tyson’s mandate was announced, more than 96 percent of its work force is vaccinated; about 60,500 of those employees got their shots after the announcement.
Tyson’s experience shows how vaccine mandates in the workplace can be persuasive. It comes as the Biden administration set a Jan, 4 deadline requiring vaccines — or weekly testing — at companies with 100 or more workers.
Like other large meatpackers, Tyson lobbied the Trump administration in 2020 to issue an executive order that essentially allowed plants to stay open despite rising infections. That move followed a warning from the company chairman, John Tyson, of a coming meat shortage in the United States, even as the company and other meatpackers were exporting more pork to China than before the pandemic, an investigation by The New York Times found.
The northeastern Italian port city of Trieste, once a cosmopolitan maritime hub of the Austro-Hungarian empire, became an epicenter of protest last month as thousands of vaccine skeptics marched alongside dock workers to protest the government’s tough new plan to control the coronavirus.
Two weeks later, Trieste has emerged as a center of something else: a Covid outbreak linked directly to those protests that threatens to burden intensive care units, usher in new social-distancing restrictions and mar the reputation of a city best known as a linguistic and cultural borderland with vast ambitions for its revitalized port.
“The situation in Trieste is particularly worrisome,” said Dr. Fabio Barbone, the epidemiologist leading the effort against the spread of Covid in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, where Trieste is the capital.
The region’s president, Massimiliano Fedriga, was more blunt, saying, “It is the moment to say with clarity: Enough idiocy.”
The nationwide plan Italy adopted threatens workers with unpaid leave and fines if they fail to obtain a health certificate, known as a Green Pass. Italians are required to provide proof of vaccination, a negative rapid swab test or proof of a recent recovery from Covid-19 to go to the workplace.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Italy has mostly succeeded in containing Covid cases after having been devastated early in the pandemic, a fact that drew praise at the Group of 20 summit in Rome at the weekend.
But the Trieste outbreak shows how an unvaccinated minority — whether motivated by concerns about freedom, the right to work or unfounded conspiracy theories — can still threaten the greater public health and how difficult it can be to bring vaccine resisters into the fold.
Global roundup
Hundreds of thousands of people traveled around India this week as the country prepared to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights and one of the country’s major holidays, on Thursday.
Bazaars and malls across India filled up with shoppers as India reported its lowest number of daily coronavirus cases since February. The crowded scenes stood in stark contrast to last year’s festival, which was observed without the usual fanfare of prayers and fireworks. A year ago, the authorities deployed police officers in residential areas to restrict large gatherings and group prayers.
This year, the festival seemed to be back in full swing, prompting the mass movement of Indian migrant workers from cities and towns back to their village homes to celebrate with family.
More than 680,000 people flew from airports across the country on Monday in the lead-up to the festival, according to government officials. The surge in traffic was an apparent sign of confidence in the country’s inoculation campaign, which has successfully administered more than a billion doses of coronavirus vaccines, with 54 percent of the population having received at least one shot and 25 percent fully inoculated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
But health experts warned that large-scale gatherings could still turn into superspreader events and fuel a further wave of coronavirus infections, particularly as tourism hot spots across the country swarmed with visitors.
Dr. Hemant Thacker, who works as a physician in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, said that he was worried about the relaxed attitude.
“We should be extra careful when it comes to masks, and avoid large gatherings,” he said.
India has one of the world’s highest known death tolls from the coronavirus, recording about 35 million cases and more than 450,000 fatalities, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Experts say the true numbers are almost certainly much higher.
The Indian Ministry of Health reported 12,885 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with 461 deaths in the previous 24 hours. In May, the number of new daily cases peaked at more than 400,000, with more than 4,000 deaths per day, according to the Johns Hopkins figures.
More news from around the world:
-
Germany recorded 33,949 new coronavirus cases over a 24-hour period on Wednesday, surpassing a record set in mid-December 2020, when the country was in the throes of its second Covid wave. Vaccine refusal appears to have fueled infection hot spots in several districts this week, like Munich, in the south, where the case rate has climbed to more than 500 cases per 100,000 people per week.
-
Thousand of vaccines skeptics marched in the streets of Trieste, Italy, two weeks ago. Now, Trieste is in the throes of a Covid outbreak linked directly to those protests, which threatens to burden intensive care units, usher in new social-distancing restrictions and mar the reputation of a city.
-
Officials in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that starting on Nov. 11 the city will offer free additional doses of Covid vaccines to residents with a higher risk of severe illness. Certain people with weakened immune systems, like cancer patients, organ transplant recipients, patients with advanced stage H.I.V. and people taking active immunosuppressive drugs, will be eligible for the extra shots four weeks after their second doses, the Hong Kong authorities said in a statement.
-
South Korea said on Thursday that it would hospitalize even asymptomatic high school seniors with Covid if they are taking the country’s high-stakes college entrance exam later this month, as the drive to vaccinate younger people lags and teenagers account for nearly a quarter of all Covid patients.
With coronavirus vaccinations of children aged 5 to 11 beginning in the United States this week, parents may be wondering whether their families will now be able to gather safely for the holidays.
The dosing schedule for Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine — the one that federal regulators endorsed on Tuesday for use in those younger children — requires two shots three weeks apart. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the second shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That means that even children who get the Pfizer-BioNTech shots right away will not be considered fully immunized until the first week in December — too late for Thanksgiving on Nov. 25, or the start of Hanukkah on Nov. 28.
Still, the first shot provides some protection even before the second shot is due, and there remains plenty of time for the 29 million children in that age group to get fully immunized before Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year’s Day.
The doses that children ages 5 to 11 are eligible for are one-third the size of the doses available for adults and children over 12. The needles used are smaller, and the vaccine is packaged in smaller vials, in the hope of avoiding a mix-up with adult doses.
While several million pediatric doses should be available in the next few days, the vaccination program for children 5 to 11 will not be “running at full strength” until next week, Jeffrey D. Zients, the Biden administration’s pandemic response coordinator, said on Monday.
About 68 percent of U.S. residents 12 and older have been fully vaccinated so far, and 78 percent have received at least one dose, according to federal data.
Employment-related vaccination deadlines — get a shot or lose your job — have prompted many adults to get inoculated in recent weeks. Those last-minute recipients, though, face the same tight calendar before the holidays that the children do, since the C.D.C. says they are not considered fully vaccinated until two weeks after receiving either a second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or a single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.
For those choosing to be fully protected in time for Christmas Day, Dec. 25, here are the last dates to start being vaccinated in the United States:
-
For the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (available for adults and children 5 and older): Nov. 20.
-
For the Moderna vaccine (available for adults): Nov. 13.
-
For the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine (available for adults): Dec. 11.
Members of some Orthodox Christian churches have a little more time, because they celebrate Christmas in early January.
A woman in Florida whose father is a county commissioner running for Congress pleaded guilty on Wednesday to stealing $300,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program, a federal fund established last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic.
Damara Holness, 28, of Fort Lauderdale, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a charge that can be punishable by up to 20 years in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida said in a statement.
Her father, Dale Holness, a Democrat, is the commissioner in Broward County and was in a tight primary race this week for a seat in Congress. Mr. Holness did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night; he told The Miami Herald that he has been estranged from his daughter “for many years.”
The Paycheck Protection Program, which ran intermittently from April 2020 to May 2021, dispensed with much of the vetting that lenders typically do on business loan applications, making the processing faster but more vulnerable to fraud. An academic working paper released in August estimated that around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent, totaling $76 billion — had at least one indication of possible fraud.
As part of her guilty plea, Ms. Holness admitted that she applied for a loan for her company, Holness Consulting, and that she was lying when she wrote in the application that she had 18 employees and spent an average of $120,000 a month on payroll, according to court documents. In reality, the company had zero employees and no payroll expenses, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
After the loan proceeds were sent to her bank account in July 2020, Ms. Holness spent the next several months “creating a paper trail to make it appear as if Holness Consulting had employees and was spending the PPP money on legitimate, approved expenses,” the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Ms. Holness is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 20, 2022.
HOUSTON — The coronavirus test came back positive Saturday morning. The man who crushed the trade deadline by bringing in four outfielders who would carry his team through the World Series was now crushed himself: he had tested positive.
Alex Anthopoulos, Atlanta’s president of baseball operations and general manager, architect of one of the greatest trade deadlines in memory, now would have to stay home because of virus protocols and miss Games 4 and 5 in Atlanta and, ultimately, Game 6 here Tuesday night as his team clinched its first championship since 1995.
“I’m fully vaxxed, I don’t have any symptoms, I feel great,” Anthopoulos said by phone from his home in the Atlanta area around 2 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday as Atlanta’s celebration roared on without him at Minute Maid Park. “I was surprised. My family is fine.”
He added: “We watched the game together at home like it was a New Year’s Eve party at my house counting down the outs at home. I’d love to be there.”
Only Terry McGuirk, the club’s chairman, and Manager Brian Snitker knew about the positive test, Anthopoulos said, because “what I didn’t want was for it to become a story where the players and manager were getting asked about it. I wanted all the focus on the team.”
The players didn’t even know until after they won the title, Anthopoulos said, because “one minute of time spent with me being the topic would have been inappropriate.” It turned out he wasn’t alone: Kevin Liles, a photographer for the team, revealed a positive test Wednesday as well.
As Alaska continues to struggle with high rates of coronavirus transmission, Indigenous people from all over the state have been traveling hundreds of miles to the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage for care that is scarce or nonexistent in the vast rural areas of the state.
To help those patients feel comfortable and recover far from home, the hospital offers a menu rich with traditional foods like seal soup, smoked salmon on Pilot Bread crackers, and akutaq, a mix of wild berries and animal fats.
Those offerings can be therapeutic for both body and spirit. “The fear and the stress response in our body, of being in the hospital, is supported by nutrient-dense forest and tundra foods,” said Jennifer Andrulli, a Yup’ik professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
And they have proved popular with patients from the city as well as those from rural areas. “We have a huge population base that maybe doesn’t even eat traditional foods, but we also have folks that have never eaten anything but traditional foods,” said Amy Foote, the campus chef. “It’s reconnecting to culture for those that maybe haven’t ever been exposed to it.”
It’s illegal to sell big-game meat in Alaska, and animals like seal or whale can be harvested legally only by Alaska Native people. So the hospital’s traditional foods initiative relies on donations of those foods from around the state. But it has had some success getting commercial vendors to add ingredients as well.
“Our produce vendor was able to harvest fiddlehead ferns and beach asparagus for us, and next thing you know, Amy’s got a little fiddlehead fern pizza on the menu, and is making salads with beach asparagus,” said Cynthia Davis, the campus food services manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, which runs the hospital.
The hospital also serves the kinds of foods that any other American hospital would typically offer. But Ms. Davis noted that most patients “want comfort foods, foods that someone made for them when they were younger” — and most of the patients she serves did not grow up eating chicken noodle soup or peanut butter and jelly.
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3GLeIo6
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment