Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/us/coronavirus-today.html

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The world reached a staggering milestone of more than 100 million known virus cases.

C.D.C. officials said a return to classroom instruction can be safe if precautions are taken on campus and in the community.

The first confirmed case of a Brazil-based variant in the U.S. was identified in Minnesota on Monday.

Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and vaccines in development.

Countries across the world are tightening their borders as they attempt to seal themselves off from the threat of more resilient and contagious variants of the virus.

In Europe, France is moving to impose strict border measures, Britain is considering a mandatory hotel quarantine for some travelers, and Germany is considering shutting down nearly all flights to the country. The European Union is asking for more coordinated action among member states to limit travel from high-risk areas.

Australia recently suspended its travel bubble with New Zealand for three days after a case of the South African variant slipped past New Zealand’s strict quarantine system. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said today that the country’s borders would remain closed until New Zealanders are “vaccinated and protected.”

In the United States, President Joe Biden reinstated some travel restrictions that former President Donald Trump had lifted before leaving office.

Where implemented, strict travel restrictions have been very effective at reducing the spread of the virus. But my colleague David Leonhardt, who writes The Morning newsletter, points out that the U.S. restrictions have a number of gaping holes, such as allowing U.S. citizens to return home.

“Viruses don’t care what passport you carry,” our colleague Donald G. McNeil Jr. told David.

It’s entirely possible that more contagious variants are already circulating in the U.S. because the country has no national program to sequence or detect the virus. (The Brazil variant was discovered in Minnesota hours after Mr. Biden reimposed travel restrictions.)

Still, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, travel restrictions can be useful in curbing their spread.

“Even if they are already here, the more often they are reintroduced, the more likely there could be a super-spreader event,” Dr. Moore said.

An outbreak in Hong Kong — long one of the most dense and unequal places on Earth — is exposing the city’s wealth gap and inflaming ethnic tensions.

Beneath the glimmering high rises are neighborhoods like Jordan, where more than 200,000 of Hong Kong’s poorest residents live in tenements. The average living space per person in such units is 48 square feet — less than one-third the size of a New York City parking space.

My colleagues Vivian Wang and Tiffany May report that out of 1,100 cases recorded in Hong Kong this month, more than 160 were found in Jordan. The government responded by locking down 10,000 residents in a 16-block area. Many were trapped in poorly ventilated apartments, with little choice but to work through the lockdown, despite the risks.

Many South Asian immigrants live in and around Jordan, and some locals suggested that they were responsible for the spread of the virus. Raymond Ho, a senior health official, stoked outrage after he said that Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities were fueling transmission because “they like to share food, smoke, drink alcohol and chat together.”

Meanwhile, wealthy Hong Kongers have caused outbreaks of their own or flouted social-distancing rules, without facing such severe measures.

Andy Yu, an elected official in the lockdown area, pointed out the double standard applied to his constituents: “If they did anything wrong, it is to be poor, to live in a subdivided flat, or to have a different skin color.”

Indonesia passed one million coronavirus cases, and many of its hospitals are near capacity.

Violent protests erupted for the third night in cities across the Netherlands, in response to a national 9 p.m. curfew that went into effect on Saturday.

In Britain, coronavirus deaths surpassed 100,000.

Here’s a roundup of restrictions in all 50 states.

Johnson & Johnson expects to release Covid-19 vaccine data early next week, Reuters reports.

In Israel, which has a high rate of Covid-19 inoculation, early results showed a significant drop in infection after just one shot of a two-dose vaccine, and better-than-expected results after both doses.

The drug maker Regeneron said that its Covid-19 antibody cocktail prevented illness in the family members of people who had tested positive for the virus.

In Ezra Klein’s new podcast, he spoke to Dr. Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s nominee for surgeon general and co-chairman of the coronavirus task force.

A wealthy couple from Vancouver chartered a private plane to the Yukon so that they could be inoculated with shots intended to protect Indigenous elders, The Washington Post reports.

The Flaming Lips performed to people in literal bubbles. But was it safe?

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