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William Nye, Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council of @c_of_e, gave a superb talk to the managers of @MethodistGB about vision, engagement and delivery. pic.twitter.com/tXOmtUIYrR

— The Methodist Church (@MethodistGB) February 21, 2018

Zeenat-ul-Razaniya has no news about the body of her deceased husband Mohammed Hilmi Kiyasdeen, who suffered from kidney failure and died on November 30 last year.

The family had taken him to the hospital, where he was due to undergo a dialysis procedure. The family was shocked to learn that Kiyasdeen would be cremated as per the regulations for those who die of coronavirus-related complications.

“We were not shown any reports to prove the status of his infection. He showed no [COVID-19] symptoms. He was in close contact with us in his last days,” Zeenat told DW, adding that she and her three children all tested negative for the virus.

“How is it possible that he had the virus? They just forcibly took away the body,” she said.

Zeenat sought a court intervention, but judges ruled in favor of Sri Lanka’s coronavirus cremation policy.

It has been a distressing experience for the family.

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#SriLanka's controversial policy to cremate the bodies of #COVID19 victims has outraged #Muslims, for whom cremation is forbidden. Critics say the decision isn't based on scientific evidence and targets minorities. @akankshasxn https://t.co/th3oLxEI17

— DW Hotspot Asia (@dw_hotspotasia) February 3, 2021

More Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine than have tested positive for the virus, an early but hopeful milestone in the race to end the pandemic.

As of Monday afternoon, 26.5 million Americans had received one or both doses of the current vaccines, according to data gathered by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. Since the first U.S. patient tested positive outside of Seattle a year ago, 26.2 million people in the country have tested positive for the disease, and 441,000 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. has been administering shots at a faster daily rate than any country in the world, giving about 1.35 million doses a day, according to data gathered by Bloomberg. While the rollout stumbled in its early days, in the six weeks since the first shots went into arms almost 7.8% of Americans have gotten one or more doses, and 1.8% are fully vaccinated.

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More Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine than have tested positive for the virus https://t.co/QZHSpL3L8S

— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) February 1, 2021

Over the summer, Angel and Diana decided to restart in-person services. They were determined to do it safely but didn’t know how.

“We didn’t have any guidelines from our local government on how to do this,” Angel said. “So, we kind of had to figure it out on our own.”

They chose to follow guidelines from neighboring Larimer County.

In mid-June, Mosaic Church began worshipping again in person at a greatly reduced capacity while continuing to stream services online. They removed every other row of chairs and asked people to leave space between families.

“We ask everybody to wear masks. We bought gallons of hand sanitizer,” he said. “We’re just trying to manage it the best we can.”

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A predominantly Latino church in Colorado has seen very high numbers of COVID-19 among congregants. They say their county has not gone far enough in implementing public health standards: https://t.co/TwWbApBSZX

— Weekend Edition (@NPRWeekend) January 30, 2021

Seven in ten (70%) U.S. adults say lowering health insurance premiums should be a high priority for President Joe Biden and his administration among key healthcare issues, followed closely by lowering drug costs (66%) and reducing the uninsured rate (63%). These results are based on a new study conducted by West Health and Gallup.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to prioritize lowering health insurance premiums and the cost of prescription drugs, but majorities of both groups agree these cost reduction goals are high priorities. In contrast, 90% of Democrats (and 60% of independents) but only 30% of Republicans regard reducing the uninsured rate as a high priority. These results come at a time when 26% of adults report there has been at least one time in the prior 12 months that someone in their household did not pursue care due to the cost, matching levels measured in early 2019.

This survey was conducted by web from Dec. 15, 2020-Jan. 3, 2021, with 3,100 adults, ages 18+, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia via the Gallup Panel, a scientifically populated, non-opt-in panel of about 110,000 adults nationwide.

Read it all.

In the latest research from West Health and Gallup, 70% of Americans say lowering health insurance premiums should be a high priority for the new Biden administration. https://t.co/qf1u9ielij

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) January 28, 2021

In an interview on BBC local radio on Wednesday, Dr Warner said that the nation ‘will obviously want answers to some of the pressing questions’ posed by the death toll so far but said it was also a day ‘to thank God for those who have kept us going’.

It came after the UK recorded a total of 100,162 deaths with Covid-19, becoming the first European nation to pass the grim milestone.

The Bishop paid tribute to NHS staff, those working in schools and universities, shopkeepers and workers and all those good neighbours who had stepped up to the plate to help others.

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Bishop of Chichester reflects as UK passes grim milestone of 100,000 Covid deaths #Chichester https://t.co/IzHVxF78GS

— PO News Hub (@PONewsHub) January 31, 2021

Americans are dying of covid-19 by the thousands, but efforts to ramp up production of potentially lifesaving vaccines are hitting a brick wall.

Vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are running their factories full tilt and are under enormous pressure to expand production or collaborate with other drug companies to set up additional assembly lines. That pressure is only growing as new viral variants of the virus threaten to launch the country into a deadlier phase of the pandemic.

President Joe Biden has said he plans to invoke the Cold War-era authority of the Defense Production Act to provide more vaccines to millions of Americans. Consumer advocates — who had called for Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act more aggressively as president — are now asking Biden to do the same.

But even forcing companies to gear up production won’t provide much-needed doses anytime soon. Expanding production lines takes time. Establishing lines in repurposed facilities can take months.

“The big problem is that even if you can get the raw material and get the infrastructure set up, how do you get a company that is already producing at maximum capacity to go beyond that maximum capacity?” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University.

Read it all.

This is a great article from @KHNews on why we it would be difficult to dial up vaccine production even more https://t.co/rE9siFlM6w

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) January 26, 2021

Even in the most devastated U.S. counties, the latest Covid-19 surge is receding, buying authorities time as they attempt to vaccinate about 330 million people.

Recent hot spots including Webb County, Texas; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Greenville and Spartanburg counties in South Carolina have seen cases trend downward in the past week, according to USAFacts, a nonprofit statistics aggregator used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among the top-five hot spots with populations of at least 250,000, only Pinal County, Arizona, saw cases increase.

Read it all.

Even in the most devastated U.S. counties, the latest Covid-19 surge is receding, buying authorities time as they attempt to vaccinate Americans https://t.co/1WmWEAQFla

— Bloomberg (@business) January 29, 2021

The coronavirus will not be defeated anywhere until it is defeated everywhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday morning, after 100,000 Covid-related deaths were reported in the UK, Archbishop Welby said that the UK, like other rich nations, must look after others as well as its own. So far, just under four million people have received the first dose of the vaccine in the UK. About 71.1 million doses have been distributed globally, mostly in the United States and China.

“It is in our own interests that all round the world the vaccine is given,” Archbishop Welby said. “The Government has been very, very good about supporting the COVAX programme; we are the biggest donor to it. . . We are one of the countries with one of the highest levels of infection and death rate in the world, and it is necessary to focus on those in need to stop it spreading.”

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LATEST. The coronavirus will not be defeated anywhere until it is defeated everywhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury @JustinWelby has warnedhttps://t.co/ARp6boUset

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 27, 2021

Two South Carolina patients are the first in the United States to be diagnosed with a mutated strain of the coronavirus, raising concerns that this more transmissible variant could become dominant here and throughout the country.

There are now a few variants of COVID-19 spreading from different parts of the world. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control announced Thursday that the two patients in South Carolina were diagnosed with the B.1.351 variant, a strain first identified in South Africa about six weeks ago.

President Joe Biden added the African country to a travel ban earlier this week in order to mitigate the spread of the virus, but the restrictions come weeks after the South Carolina patients tested positive in early January. It was only determined this week that they tested positive for this specific new variant.

One patient is from the Lowcountry and the other is from the Pee Dee, according to DHEC, and both are now ”doing well,” according to one health department official. The agency released few other personal details, citing patient privacy, but did say the two cases are not related and neither person had a known travel history.

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At a briefing, @PressSec notes that people flying to the US from South Africa (as well as all other foreign nations) need to have negative tests at least 3 days before arrival.
First US cases of South African #COVID19 variant found in SC. https://t.co/xzI0NUi2ZH

— Andy Shain (@AndyShain) January 28, 2021

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Margaret Drabble, 83, sat beneath the soaring arches of Salisbury Cathedral, swinging her legs back and forth under her chair like a schoolgirl.

Minutes earlier, in a booth near the cathedral’s entrance, she had received her first shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus. But that wasn’t why she was looking so happy, she said. Instead, it was from the elaborate organ music gently reverberating in the cathedral’s interior.

“Oh, I just love the organ,” said Drabble, a former schoolteacher. “It’s so beautiful, it almost makes me cry every time I hear it.”

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Salisbury Cathedral is joining Britain’s vaccination drive, and its organists are providing a musical accompaniment. They’re even taking requests. https://t.co/JjjfaBWyVC

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 25, 2021

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York are issuing a call to the nation to pause and reflect to remember the more than 100,000 people across the UK who have died after contracting Covid-19 and all those who know and love them.

In an open letter, Archbishops Justin Welby and Stephen Cottrell invite everyone across England – whether they have faith or not – to pause, reflect on the “enormity of this pandemic” and to pray.

Death, they insist, does not have “the last word”, and the Christian faith promises that one day “every tear will be wiped away”.

God, they write, knows grief and suffering and “shares in the weight of our sadness”.

Read it all.

#Coronavirus: @JustinWelby & @CottrellStephen invite nation to pause, #pray and remember 100,000 people ‘known to God and cherished by God’ https://t.co/pDzl4Mo8QO

— St Mary the Virgin, East Preston with Kingston (@stmarysep) January 27, 2021

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause deaths and disrupt billions of lives globally, people may turn to religious groups, family, friends, co-workers or other social networks for support. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in the summer of 2020 reveals that more Americans than people in other economically developed countries say the outbreak has bolstered their religious faith and the faith of their compatriots.

Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) report stronger personal faith because of the pandemic, and the same share think the religious faith of Americans overall has strengthened, according to the survey of 14 economically developed countries.

Far smaller shares in other parts of the world say religious faith has been affected by the coronavirus. For example, just 10% of British adults report that their own faith is stronger as a result of the pandemic, and 14% think the faith of Britons overall has increased due to COVID-19. In Japan, 5% of people say religion now plays a stronger role in both their own lives and the lives of their fellow citizens.

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NEW: More Americans Than People in Other Advanced Economies Say COVID-19 Has Strengthened Religious Faithhttps://t.co/ynWkyasexT pic.twitter.com/m8d64oDg2L

— Pew Research Global (@pewglobal) January 27, 2021

Whatever the reason, [R. B.] Holmes said the crisis has created an emergency for black people, and African American community leaders, especially pastors, have to find a way to respond. After one too many funerals in 2020, he felt compelled to action.

“Why sit here as leaders and watch our people die and our families die?”

So Holmes organized the Statewide Coronavirus Vaccination Community Education and Engagement Task Force.

The group is partnering with hospitals and the state to better distribute vaccines—as they become available—through local churches to the people who are most at risk. On January 10, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that seven predominantly black churches would each be getting 500 doses of the vaccine to distribute to people over the age of 65. The state hopes to soon expand the program quickly, distributing vaccines to about 50 churches across Florida.

Holmes said the task force has made it their mission to locate 40 primarily black churches, community centers, and colleges to be involved with distributing the vaccine by January 31. He hopes Florida’s plan is replicated throughout the country and wants the task force to become a model for how to reach the black community.

“Our plan is very systemic, very measurable, very achievable,” he said.

Read it all.

How black pastors are organizing vaccine distribution programs for their communities: https://t.co/fXfR67lRnk

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) January 24, 2021

U.S. Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are receding from recent highs, but discrete outbreaks are still raging in places such as the Texas-Mexico border and parts of Alabama. The pattern provides a preview of how the pandemic may look during the months to come.

The seven-day average of Covid-19 cases fell to 167,240, the lowest since Dec. 2, according to Covid Tracking Project data. For the first time since October, no state had more than 1,000 average daily cases per million residents, the data show.

But even as the U.S. enters its latest downswing and the vaccination push expands, the country is still a long way from herd immunity and there are dangerous hot spots across the country. Among the worst were Pennsylvania’s Forest County, where a prison outbreak has led to soaring cases; an Alabama county in the lower Appalachians; and a swath of border towns near Laredo, Texas.

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U.S. cases and hospitalizations are receding from recent highs, but discrete outbreaks are still raging in places such as the Texas-Mexico border and parts of Alabama https://t.co/V9e8zVJuu6

— Bloomberg (@business) January 25, 2021

Who really won the Cold War? Maybe China.

In 1972, Cold War logic pushed President Richard Nixon into an unlikely alliance with Mao Zedong—bringing China back into the mainstream of the world economy. In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged “end of history” hubris that blinded the West to the consequences of China’s rise.

Fast forward to 2020 and China has emerged as a major global power, its single-party rule and state-dominated economy the cause of alarm in foreign capitals—and pride in Beijing. By 2035, Bloomberg Economics forecasts, China will have overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s biggest economy and perhaps also its most powerful political actor.

China’s rise is just one part of a larger shift that’s already under way and looks set to accelerate in the decades ahead.

Bloomberg Economics has used a growth accounting framework—adding up the contributions of labor, capital and productivity—to forecast potential GDP through 2050 for 39 countries, from the U.S. to Ghana. We’ve used that data to map some of the key geographic and political shifts in store for the world economy.

The results suggest that a remarkable period of stability, stretching from the end of World War II through to the early 21st century, is coming to an end. The center of economic gravity is shifting from West to East, from advanced economies to emerging markets, from free markets to state controls and from established democracies to authoritarian and populist rulers. The transition is already upending global politics, economics and markets. This is just the beginning.

Much could happen to throw our projections off track. The Covid crisis is demonstrating how pandemics can reconfigure the global economic map. Wars, natural disasters and financial meltdowns can do the same. So could policy choices on globalization and climate change. Still, absent a crystal ball, forecasts of potential growth provide the most reliable basis for thinking about the long term.

Read it all.

An absolutely fascinating read – An Economist’s Guide to the World in 2050 https://t.co/1RUswpBD8I #economics #business #politics #law #society #developmenteconomics #sustainability #globalisation #internationaltrade #protectionism #internationalrelations

— The Mr Moosajee (@BusEconYMO_HGS) November 12, 2020

The coronavirus has swept away any idea that chaplains are optional extras or “genteel outsiders”, the president of the College of Healthcare Chaplains, Dr Simon Harrison, has said.

“In the first wave of the virus, there was a bit of the ‘Perhaps the chaplaincy should stay away for a bit until we get over this,’” Dr Harrison, who is also lead chaplain at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, said on Monday. “That has long passed.”

Staff support is significantly more embedded into the infrastructure, to the extent that some trusts have newly recruited dedicated staff chaplains.

The impact of the virus on chaplaincy teams themselves has also heightened the sense of being part of the hospital team. All were now hands-on and very busy, Dr Harrison said.

“There is a lot of fatigue and ongoing anxiety among chaplains, but collegiality is at an all-time high. Staff support feels like the direction of travel for so many more.”

Read it all.

Hospital chaplains at the core of coronavirus care https://t.co/PUgxewqvmR

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 22, 2021

Nearly all of South Carolina’s 750 long-term care facilities will be visited by pharmacists by month’s end to offer COVID-19 vaccine shots to residents most vulnerable to dying of the disease, health officials said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, hospitals are stepping up their efforts to vaccinate everyone else eligible in the first phase — which newly includes several thousand parents of medically fragile children — even as appointments for doses continue to exceed statewide supply.

Gov. Henry McMaster has warned repeatedly this week that if hospitals don’t get doses in arms faster, he’ll suspend their money-making elective surgeries so they can focus their efforts on vaccine distribution. As of Tuesday, major hospitals had more than 50,000 doses left on hand to administer.

Read it all.

#South_Carolina Hospitals pick up #COVID #vaccination efforts, but available doses can’t come close to meeting demand: https://t.co/7nX3F8QfsL

— Raymond DuBois (@Rndubois) January 21, 2021

Funeral directors in the UK have spoken of the “heartbreak” of watching hundreds of mourners grieve alone, and of their own physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion under an unprecedented workload, as deaths from the coronavirus continue to rise at catastrophic rates.

The Assistant Curate of St Peter’s, Stockton-on-Tees, and St John’s, Elton, in Durham diocese, the Revd Daniel Ackerley, has experienced all sides of the crisis. He has just been through a family bereavement. He is also the principal funeral director at John Duckworth Funeral Directors, in Sunderland.

“The last months have been the toughest and most challenging yet in my ten years as a funeral director,” he said. “Throughout the pandemic, funeral workers have gone about their vital work supporting the bereaved and taking care of those who have died, often with very little recognition.”

He, like many of his colleagues, had undertaken “record numbers of funerals” over the past nine months, all under the strain of meeting strict government limitations.

Read it all.

Funeral directors in the UK have spoken of the “heartbreak” of watching hundreds of mourners grieve alone, and of their own physical and mental exhaustion under an unprecedented workload, as deaths from #COVID19 continue to rise at catastrophic rateshttps://t.co/DR4YZeBdbD

— Hattie Williams (@hattieewilliams) January 15, 2021

South Carolina is expanding who’s allowed to give COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to get shots into arms faster amid escalating frustrations with the state’s slow rollout.

A pair of major hospitals say they could vaccinate up to 10,000 people a day — three times more than their current capacity — with added help to administer shots as shipments ramp up.

Meanwhile, the state’s public health agency is giving up on contact tracing of those infected after becoming overwhelmed with a sharp rise in COVID cases.

Read it all.

To ramp up COVID-19 vaccinations, SC expands who can give the shots https://t.co/MCF5HmVekF

— Holy City Sinner (@HolyCitySinner) January 15, 2021

The number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients was roughly flat in the U.S. this week, and likely will begin declining for the first time since September.

The numbers are now dropping compared with a week earlier in both the Northeast and Midwest, according to the Covid Tracking Project. In the West, they were up 0.8%, the least since Oct. 1 on a percentage basis. The South has the most alarming momentum, with an increase of 4.2% from seven days earlier.

Read it all.

U.S. Covid hospitalizations on cusp of first decline in months https://t.co/TN3mWZiPv2 pic.twitter.com/0L1Fn8qczD

— Bloomberg (@business) January 14, 2021

The person contacted the church as soon as they found out they had tested positive. They also provided to AHS a complete account of where they had been and who they had been near, after which AHS contacted the church and investigated the person’s potential contacts there—speaking with people, going through the worship service step-by-step and asking questions about the configuration of the chancel and nave and other details pertinent to the service.

As per instructions given to the church by AHS, Key, the church’s musical director and five choristers all self-isolated for 14 days, and then got tested for COVID-19. The person who had tested positive also followed all AHS’s protocols. By Oct. 27, all the tests had come back negative.

“This is wonderful news and is perhaps one of the only times we ALL wanted to FAIL a test (though we are all still required to isolate until November 2nd),” Key wrote in her Facebook update.

AHS had advised the church, Key added, that no one besides these people were considered to have been in close contact with the person who tested positive, so that there was no need for the rest of the congregation to self-isolate.

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The 1912 Gothic Revival styled Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Edmonton has maybe one of the finest examples of the successful use of clinker bricks in the world. Originally discarded, these wildly overfired bricks became popular about 120 years ago. pic.twitter.com/dyutTQk1tI

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) April 6, 2018

The virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran. And just after Christmas, two more elders of the Taken Alive family were buried on the frozen North Dakota prairie: Jesse and Cheryl, husband and wife, who died a month apart.

“It takes your breath away,” said Ira Taken Alive, the couple’s oldest son. “The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past.”

One by one, those connections are being severed as the coronavirus tears through ranks of Native American elders, inflicting an incalculable toll on bonds of language and tradition that flow from older generations to the young.

“It’s like we’re having a cultural book-burning,” said Jason Salsman, a spokesman for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in eastern Oklahoma, whose grandparents contracted the virus but survived. “We’re losing a historical record, encyclopedias. One day soon, there won’t be anybody to pass this knowledge down.”

Read it all.

“It takes your breath away. The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past."

The virus has killed Native American elders at particularly high rates, robbing tribes of precious bonds of language and tradition. https://t.co/CUnbqtvaL9

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 12, 2021

The Revd Andy Dovey, Lead for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust in south London, reached out to churches and faith groups in the area to raise awareness of the availability of the vaccine.

It came as NHS teams across the country booked appointments for the most vulnerable people in our society, including those over 80 who were already coming in to hospital for outpatient appointments,

“The response has been amazing,” he said.

“I am really grateful to the community of churches that have pulled together to support our congregations in these difficult times.”

Read it all.

An NHS chaplain has led a campaign identifying more than 1,000 people to be vaccinated.

In mobilising churches and communities, Rev Andy Dovey has encouraged those over 80 to book vaccination appointments.https://t.co/Eze9ae6bzX

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) January 9, 2021

In those parishes that have actively sought new ventures and parishioners, the Church of England is prospering. In Rural Ainsty, a country parish in North Yorkshire, the Reverend Richard Battersby says, ‘We have a thriving Sunday morning worship – as many and more as before lockdown. I pray with more parishioners in the morning and evening than ever before.’

Where, previously, he took separate services in four villages, they now worship together online, with Zoom services unifying the different churches. ‘They’d never worshipped together before,’ says Battersby. ‘Faith has been made more intense by the pandemic. People on their laptops can actually contribute to the service. Someone from the Congo recently contributed.’

He’s had to deal, too, with coronavirus funerals. ‘We’ve had to come up with ways that families could mourn in the right way. After the first lockdown, we could have a service for those interring ashes, who couldn’t attend a proper funeral during lockdown.’

In Battersby’s parish, the congregation’s contributions have even gone up. He talks about the Church being ‘shocked into new ways of being’ by the pandemic. ‘Churches that explored an online presence have done pretty well and have seen exponential growth,’ he says. ‘Churches that were struggling before have seen an accelerated demise. The willingness of the church leader to adopt new technology from a theological or sacramental point is crucial.’

Read it all.

Can the Church of England survive Covid?

‘We’re deemed non-essential, but that isn’t the case: we’ve served 160,000 meals during the pandemic, compared to 5,000 in the equivalent period before,’ https://t.co/X3pr9t8VCj

— Tim Dieppe (@TDieppe) January 9, 2021

Places of worship in the capital should shut immediately because of the risks of Covid infection, Sadiq Khan has said, amid signs that churches, mosques and synagogues are already closing their doors.

In a letter to the prime minister setting out his reasons for declaring a major incident in London, the mayor urged Boris Johnson to order places of worship to close, among other measures to tackle the crisis.

Under the lockdown restrictions, places of worship in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are permitted to remain open. The Scottish government has ordered them closed.

Linda Kleindienst Bruns registered for a coronavirus vaccine in late December, on the first day the health department in Tallahassee, Fla., opened for applications for people her age. Despite being 72, with her immune system suppressed by medication that keeps her breast cancer in remission, she spent days waiting to hear back about an appointment.

“It’s so disorganized,” she said. “I was hoping the system would be set up so there would be some sort of logic to it.”

Phyllis Humphreys, 76, waited with her husband last week in a line of cars in Clermont, west of Orlando, that spilled onto Highway 27. They had scrambled into their car and driven 22 miles after receiving an automated text message saying vaccine doses were available. But by 9:43 a.m., the site had reached capacity and the Humphreys went home with no shots.

“We’re talking about vaccinations,” said Ms. Humphreys, a retired critical care nurse. “We are not talking about putting people in Desert Storm.”

Read it all.

In Florida, people 65 and older, whom the state has prioritized to get vaccinated against Covid-19, have clamored to get it — only to find a fragmented and confusing health care system overwhelmed by demand. https://t.co/lhQ3F1z4sA

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 10, 2021

Britain has one of the most aggressive surveillance regimens, analyzing up to 10 percent of samples that test positive for the virus. But few countries have such robust systems in place. The United States sequences less than 1 percent of its positive samples. And others cannot hope to afford the equipment or build such networks in time for this pandemic.

In Brazil, labs that had redirected their attention from Zika to the coronavirus had discovered a worrisome mutation there as early as this spring. But little is known about the variants circulating in the country, or how quickly they are spreading.

“We just don’t know because no one is either sequencing or sharing the data,” said Dr. Nuno Faria at Imperial College and Oxford University who coordinates genomic sequencing projects with colleagues in Brazil. “Genomic surveillance is expensive.”

As the virus continues to mutate, other significant variants will almost certainly emerge. And those that make the virus hardier, or more contagious, will be more likely to spread, Dr. Read said.

“The faster we can get the vaccines out, the faster we can get on top of these variants,” he said. “There’s no room for complacency here.”

Read it all.

As the coronavirus mutates to become more contagious, scientists around the globe are pressing for a faster vaccine rollout and funding for genetic surveillance. https://t.co/6ScCBUH52C

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 9, 2021

A coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech appears to be effective against a key mutation in the more infectious variants of the virus discovered in the U.K. and South Africa, according to a study conducted by the U.S. pharmaceutical giant.

It comes as countries scramble to contain the variants that are significantly more transmissible, with public health experts anxious about the potential impact on inoculation efforts.

The research, published Thursday on preprint server bioRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed, suggested the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine worked to neutralize the so-called N501Y mutation.

The N501Y mutation has been reported in the more infectious variants. It is altering an amino acid within six key residues in the receptor-binding domain — a key part of the spike protein that the virus uses to gain entry into cells within the body.

Read it all.

🏥 A new study shows Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid vaccine appears to neutralize a key mutation of two highly contagious variants found in the U.K. & South Africa.

🗣️ “These findings are good news."

👇 Here's the full story:https://t.co/qvANvM2Mk0

— Sam Meredith (@smeredith19) January 8, 2021