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Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times

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A line of cars waiting for coronavirus testing at the Dodger Stadium testing location in Los Angeles on Thursday.
David Walter Banks for The New York Times

The Food and Drug Administration accelerated its timeline for issuing an emergency authorization for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine after President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the agency’s leader, to consider looking for another job if the vaccine was not approved Friday, according to a senior administration official.

Regulators had been planning to authorize the vaccine for emergency use early Saturday. But on Friday morning, Dr. Hahn told officials at the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to act by the end of the day, according to one person familiar with his directive.

It is unclear whether shaving a half-day off the timetable for authorization would speed up the delivery of vaccine shipments to sites around the country or simply placate the White House’s desire for action. Several officials said that the delivery timetable was already set.

The pressure also did not alter the outcome of the process. F.D.A. had already determined it would approve Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency authorization after an advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that it do so, according to multiple administration officials.

But it nonetheless showed that even at the 11th hour, the White House was unwilling to allow regulators the independence to work according to their own plan as they processed key documents, including instructions to physicians for use of the vaccine and a fact sheet on the product. Pfizer was also required to review certain documents to ensure accuracy.

According to the senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Mr. Meadows called Dr. Hahn to warn that he should consider looking for his next job if the authorization was not issued on Friday. The threat to the commissioner’s job was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

In a statement, Dr. Hahn denied that account. “This is an untrue representation of the phone call with the chief of staff,” he said. “The F.D.A. was encouraged to continue working expeditiously” on the Pfizer vaccine.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the F.D.A. put out an unusual statement, saying that it was moving rapidly to authorize Pfizer’s vaccine — comments that were later echoed by Alex M. Azar, the secretary of health and human services.

Minutes later, Mr. Trump lashed out at the agency and Dr. Hahn directly in a tweet, demanding that Dr. Hahn “stop playing games and start saving lives!!!” He called the F.D.A. “a big, old, slow turtle,” flush with funds but mired in bureaucracy.

Federal officials have said 2.9 million doses could be sent around the country within days of an authorization. That is only about half of the doses that Pfizer will provide in the first week. The other half will be reserved so that the initial recipients can have the second, required dose about three weeks later.

First in line to get it are health care workers and nursing home residents.

“We could see people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week,” Mr. Azar said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday.

The new vaccine could not arrive at a better time — or, perhaps, a worse one.

The day before the panel endorsed it, the United States set another record for daily virus-related deaths, breaking the 3,000 mark. And on Thursday, reported deaths neared 3,000, and the case count — at least 223,570 new infections reported — made it the second-worst day since the virus reached American shores.

President Trump at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit at the White House, Tuesday. On Friday his administration announced a plan to buy more coronavirus vaccine from Moderna.
Doug Mills/The New York Times

The federal government announced Friday that it is buying another 100 million doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine to be delivered between April and June.

The Trump administration’s purchase will boost the number of people who can be vaccinated by 50 percent, to 150 million Americans. But that still leaves the question of how and when the roughly 180 million other Americans will be covered.

Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, did not address shortfalls in announcing the new vaccine purchase late Friday.

“This new federal purchase can give Americans even greater confidence we will have enough supply to vaccinate all Americans who want it by the second quarter of 2021,” he said.

Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, said: “We continue to scale up our manufacturing capability in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”

The government signed deals last summer with Moderna and Pfizer to deliver a total of 200 million doses by next March. Because both vaccines require two doses, those contracts guaranteed enough doses for 100 million people.

No supply had been locked in the second quarter of next year, and some federal officials privately voiced concern that the government might run out of doses in March. Officials had recently asked Pfizer to sell it another 100 million doses, but Pfizer had said it could not meet that demand until about June.

The new deal indicates that Moderna is able to cover at least some of the gap. At the same time, though, doubts about the ability of other vaccine makers to demonstrate their products are safe and effective have grown, raising questions about whether the United States will be entirely dependent on supplies from Pfizer, Moderna and possibly a third company, Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson is expected to reveal the results of its clinical trials early next month.

The administration’s crash program to develop vaccines, known as Operation Warp Speed, bet heavily on Moderna, along with a handful of other vaccine makers. Its vaccine is similar to Pfizer’s, but it is easier to store and transport.

Clinical trials have shown that like Pfizer’s vaccine, it is about 95 percent effective. Unless unexpected problems emerge, the Food and Drug Administration is on track to approve it for emergency use later this month, about one week after Pfizer.

The federal government agreed last summer to purchase 100 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, locking in options to purchase up to another 400 million doses, at a cost of $16.50 a dose. Unlike the options in its contract with Pfizer, the government is allowed to call on Moderna for more doses at the government’s “sole discretion.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke at a briefing given by the Coronavirus Task Force last month.
Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

As a way to build public confidence in the federal government’s vaccine program, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, told The New York Times on Friday that he intends to “get vaccinated publicly, in the public space, so that people can see me getting vaccinated,” as soon as “the vaccine becomes available to me.”

Dr. Fauci, 79, added that he is not certain when that will be, and is leaving it up to the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, to decide. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue emergency authorization of the Pfizer vaccine as early as Friday evening.

Dr. Fauci also disclosed in an interview with The Times that a healthy 32-year-old who is close to one of his daughters died of Covid-19 — a stark reminder that the disease is deadly in the young as well as the old.

The 32-year-old who died was the brother of the boyfriend of one of Dr. Fauci’s daughters. “He’s a perfectly healthy 32-year-old guy who got Covid, got the cardiac complications and died within like a week and a half of getting infected,” Dr. Fauci said, adding, “It is really very devastating to my daughter.”

As President Trump and his allies have asserted, incorrectly, that the disease is not a threat to younger people, Dr. Fauci has repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill that there is much to be learned about the novel coronavirus, and that scientists must be humble about what they do not know.

Young people are hardly immune; in Florida, for example, more than 100 adults aged 25 to 44 died of Covid in July alone.

A study from Harvard released in September “establishes that Covid-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote Dr. Mitchell Katz, a deputy editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, in an editorial accompanying the research, adding that “while young adults are much less likely than older persons to become seriously ill, if they reach the point of hospitalization, their risks are substantial.”

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As the state grapples with a second wave of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said indoor dining would be banned in New York City starting Monday.Bryan R. Smith/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Indoor dining will once again be barred in New York City restaurants starting Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Friday, a significant reversal of the city’s reopening that comes as officials try to halt the escalation of a second wave of the coronavirus.

The decision, which Mr. Cuomo earlier this week suggested was all but certain, is a crushing blow to the city’s restaurant industry, a vital economic pillar that has been struggling all year in the face of pandemic restrictions and a national recession.

For months, New York City’s restaurant owners have warned that their businesses, many of which operate on tight margins in the best of times, are on the edge of financial collapse. Thousands of employees, many of them low-wage workers, have been laid off since March, and their jobs have yet to fully return.

Their anxieties only mounted as winter approaches and frigid temperatures threaten to deter customers from dining outdoors. Industry groups have called repeatedly for federal or state financial assistance, with restaurant and bar owners watching nervously as stimulus talks drag on in Washington.

“Another forced government closure of New York City restaurants will cause an irreversible harm on even countless more small businesses and the hundreds of thousands of workers they employ, especially if it is not coupled with financial relief,” said Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, in a statement on Monday.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement came after weeks of shifting messages and changing guidance on indoor dining, which only resumed in New York City at the end of September.

The inconsistent approach, which confused residents and business owners alike, came as Mr. Cuomo repeatedly downplayed indoor dining as a source of new infections, focusing much of his attention on parties and other indoor gatherings instead.

But on Monday, Mr. Cuomo warned that he would curb indoor dining in regions in the state where hospitalizations did not stabilize, citing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that described eating at indoor restaurants as a “particularly high-risk” activity.

On Friday, Mr. Cuomo said that contact tracing data showed that restaurants and bars were the fifth main source of new infections in the state, well behind household and social gatherings. The data is based only on those who give a response to contact tracers and does not capture every infection in the state, officials have said.

Of 46,000 cases between September and November, 1.43 percent could be linked to restaurants and bars, compared to 73.84 percent connected with private gatherings.

On Friday, Mr. Cuomo said that a state task force, which he convened following concerns that President Trump was expediting the vaccine rollout for political purposes, said that once the Pfizer vaccine was authorized by federal regulators, as was expected Friday evening, New York was ready to distribute. The governor, a third-term Democrat, had previously said no federally-authorized vaccine would be given out in New York until his task force signed off on the distribution.

Some of Mr. Cuomo’s conservative critics had described the move as a political ploy that could delay the vaccine’s delivery in New York. Mr. Cuomo, however, said on Friday that the state’s independent review would help build confidence among the public following surveys showing many Americans did not trust the vaccine’s safety.

New York State is expected to begin receiving an initial allocation of 170,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine on Sunday or Monday, Mr. Cuomo said. Those vaccines will be administered to health care workers and residents and staff at long-term care facilities. An additional allocation of vaccines from the drugmaker Moderna, which has also applied for federal for authorization for its vaccine, enough to vaccinate about 346,000 people is expected the week of Dec. 21.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced at a news conference on Friday the beginning of a center to coordinate vaccine distribution. The work of the center will involve reporting the number of people getting vaccinated, as well as working with communities to build trust in the vaccine and troubleshoot distribution issues.

The Biogen conference was held at this hotel in February.
Cody O'Loughlin for The New York Times

As many as 300,000 coronavirus cases across the United States can be traced to a two-day conference in Boston attended by 175 biotech executives in February, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The conference, convened by the drug company Biogen, was one of the earliest examples in the pandemic of what epidemiologists call “superspreading events,’’ where a small gathering of people leads to a huge number of infections. But new genetic data made publicly available in recent months by many states has allowed researchers for the first time to estimate the national scope of its astonishing ripple effect.

“It’s a cautionary tale,’’ said Bronwyn MacInnis, a genomic epidemiologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. “When we hear these stories of clusters where 20 or 50 or 100 were affected, that does not account for what happens after.’’

To track the spread, the researchers took advantage of a kind of genetic fingerprint that they identified in samples of the virus taken from 28 people who attended the meeting. An earlier version of the paper published online in June suggested that the conference had seeded tens of thousands of cases in the Boston area alone.

By March, the researchers had found, viruses bearing the same signature began to appear in the viral genomes taken from coronavirus patients in several other states. But by November, viruses containing the marker could be found in 29 states, linked to some 70,000 in Florida alone. And because the viral genome data linked to U.S. cases has grown by tenfold since June, the researchers were able to make a reliable national estimate. The conference, the study estimates, is responsible for 1.9 percent of all cases in the United States since the start of the pandemic.

The vast majority of introductions of the virus into a workplace or home or community fizzle, the researchers noted. But the study highlights how a local event with a mobile population can seed a national outbreak. Because the genetic fingerprint identified in the Biogen attendees existed previously in Europe, it was not possible to reliably estimate how many of the transmissions globally came from the Boston event, the researchers said.

While the Biogen conference occurred at a time when the coronavirus was barely on the radar for most Americans, it may have important implications for the current pandemic moment. The first, eagerly awaited vaccines have been demonstrated to protect from severe Covid-19 symptoms, but it is not known whether they protect people from transmitting the virus.

“We risk having folks going around thinking ‘all is good,’” Dr. MacInnis said. “Our data reminds us what can happen when transmission is unchecked.’’

From left: Karen S. Evans, the chief information officer at D.H.S.; Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of D.H.S.; Troy Edgar, the chief financial officer of D.H.S., in a photo tweeted by Mr. Edgar.
Troy Edgar

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security attended an indoor holiday party this week even as the Trump administration urged Americans to double down on pandemic precautions to combat increasing deaths from Covid-19.

The political appointees celebrated at the agency’s St. Elizabeth campus in Washington on Thursday, the same day that Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned Americans the country would count “more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor” for the next two to three months.

Troy Edgar, the chief financial officer for D.H.S., which has played a large role in implementing pandemic-related travel restrictions, posted a photograph at 9:31 p.m. on Thursday of himself alongside Chad F. Wolf, the agency’s acting secretary, and Karen S. Evans, its chief information officer. None of them were wearing masks.

“On the stage tonight at the DHS Holiday Party with @DHS_Wolf and Chief Information officer (CIO) Karen Evans,” Mr. Edgar tweeted. “I’m so grateful to serve with the 250,000 dedicated employees of Homeland Security. Merry Christmas.”

There were dozens of guests in attendance, according to department officials who asked to speak anonymously because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The latest guidance put forth by Washington mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a Democrat, limits indoor gatherings to no more than 10 people.

The White House sent out invitations to at least 20 year-end parties earlier this month.

D.H.S. includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been tasked with supporting state governments with personal protective equipment across the country, and Customs and Border Protection, which has screened travelers for the coronavirus at the nation’s borders.

In a statement to The New York Times, Chase Jennings, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, described the holiday party as “a meeting yesterday with political staff.”

“It is standard procedure for every agency to meet with political staff several times a year across every administration — D.H.S. is no different,” Mr. Jennings said. “The meeting itself was held at one of the largest spaces at D.H.S. headquarters in order to allow for social distancing. C.D.C. guidelines were followed.”

But he declined to answer questions inquiring why Mr. Wolf and other top officials were not wearing masks, exactly how many people attended the gathering or why the agency chose to have the party in person rather than virtually.

Mr. Wolf is expected to travel internationally this weekend. He and other D.H.S. staff members plan to fly to Panama and El Salvador, in part to discuss accords that have redirected asylum seekers at the southwest border back to Central America, the agency said in a statement on Friday.

Scientists developing the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and Russia’s Sputnik V will try a combination of their respective vaccines by the end of the year, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund announced on Friday, in hopes of strengthening the efficacy of both.

Vaccination often requires one injection and then a boost, and the process can take two forms: giving the same vaccine multiple times, a technique known as “homologous boosting,” or combining different, yet similar vaccines, called “heterologous boosting.”

By combining different but similar vaccines, AstraZeneca and the Russian Investment Fund said they were hoping to boost the immune protection of people who may receive the injections.

The Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, which develops the Sputnik V vaccine, uses two different human adenoviruses to develop its product. AstraZenca uses an adenovirus that infects chimpanzees.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, which is developed at the University of Oxford, showed encouraging but head-scratching results: two doses of the vaccine provided stronger results (90 percent efficacy) when the first dose was only at half strength, than when two full-dose shots were injected (a 62 percent efficacy).

In Russia, the Sputnik V vaccine showed an efficacy rate of 95 percent in preliminary results from a clinical trial, but such results were based on an unspecified small group of volunteers, raising skepticism from experts.

The Russian Investment Fund said AstraZeneca and the Gamaleya Research Institute would begin clinical trials by the end of the month. Kirill Dmitriev, the fund’s C.E.O., hailed the partnership as “an important step toward uniting efforts in the fight against the pandemic,” and AstraZeneca said it “could provide an additional approach to help overcome this deadly virus.”

The announcement comes days after both Britain and Russia began rolling out of a vaccine, the first two countries in the world to do so. Britain has used the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and Russia has administered the Sputnik V vaccine.

A British government official said earlier this week that scientists were reviewing whether it was safe to combine and match vaccines.

“What it means is that you give one vaccine to get the immune system triggered up and another one to then boost it further with a different vaccine,” England’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said in an interview with Sky News. “That’s an established way of getting the immune system geed up.”

Russia drew widespread criticism when it registered its Sputnik V vaccine for emergency use in August before completing a Phase 3 clinical trial to measure its efficacy, yet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has boasted that it was the first vaccine in the world to receive government approval.

Rep. Devin G. Nunes, Republican of California, spoke to a Fresno, Calif., radio station about having coronavirus antibodies.
Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Representative Devin G. Nunes of California said he had tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in a live interview with a Fresno radio station on Friday afternoon.

“I felt a little under the weather in October,” Mr. Nunes, a Republican, told Ray Appleton of KMJNOW. “I isolated myself for a few days, and anyway I’m guessing that’s when I had it, but I don’t really know.”

Researchers believe that antibodies could last months, and possibly years, after a person recovers from the virus. Mr. Nunes said he discovered he had the antibodies when he returned to Washington post-election and requested the test from Navy doctors who regularly examine lawmakers.

Mr. Nunes encouraged Californians to donate plasma if they can, and said hospitals were running out. Blood from people who have recovered can be a rich source of antibodies that fight the virus. The state’s hospital systems are under immense strain after a recent surge in virus cases: More than 33,000 new cases were reported and nearly 13,000 people were listed as hospitalized with the virus on Thursday. On Friday, the governor’s office issued an emergency alert urging residents to stay home and warning that I.C.U. capacity was less than 10 percent statewide.

Several members of Congress have contracted the virus in recent months. Nearly a dozen prominent Republicans tested positive for the virus after attending the Rose Garden ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court in late September, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Thom Tillis of Florida and, most notably, President Trump. Last month, two of the oldest members of Congress, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Representative Don Young of Alaska, also announced they had contracted the virus.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, Mr. Nunes, who is the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called the closing of California schools “way overkill” and encouraged people to dine out even as health experts were urging Americans to stay home.

Funeral homes are struggling to carry out basic services and keep up with the expanding crisis. 
Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The next few months are “going to be really tough” in the United States, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned on Thursday.

“We are in the time frame now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we’re going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor,” Dr. Redfield said during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, 2,977 people were killed. The attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, killed 2,403 Americans.

On Wednesday, at least 3,055 new coronavirus deaths in the U.S. were reported, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. On Thursday, at least 2,923 people died.

Although a vaccine should be available soon, Dr. Redfield said that it is unlikely to reduce the numbers of deaths over the next few months. He urged Americans to “double down” on precautions and protect themselves by wearing masks, maintaining social distancing, avoiding indoor social gatherings and keeping their guard up, even among friends and family members. He also implored Americans not to travel and to reconsider travel plans if they have already made them.

“We are turning a corner, but I want to come back to the reality that this is going to be a brutal time for us,” Dr. Redfield said.

Health officials across the country share that same grim assessment.

“The worst is yet to come in the next week or two or three,” said Catherine Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston. “What happens after that is going to depend on our behavior today.”

Dr. Troisi said she expected the death toll to accelerate in part because current numbers most likely do not reflect infections from Thanksgiving gatherings.

The virus has taken the lives of the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, the prominent and the ordinary people known best by those who loved them.

Linda Azani, the assistant manager of Perches Funeral Homes in El Paso, said the toll the virus has taken there is so steep that “there’s not enough of us to go around.”

“Not enough directors to see families,” she added. “Not enough facilities to have funerals. Not enough chapels.”

Body camera footage shows Rebekah Jones outside her home as Florida state agents execute a search warrant earlier this week.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, via Reuters

MIAMI — The complicated story of how a Florida data scientist responsible for managing the state’s coronavirus numbers wound up with state police agents brandishing guns in her house this week began seven long months ago, when the scientist, Rebekah D. Jones, was removed from her post at the Florida Department of Health.

Ms. Jones had helped build the statistics dashboard that showed how the virus was rapidly spreading in a state that had been hesitant to mandate broad restrictions.

Two months in, Ms. Jones was sidelined and then fired for insubordination, a conflict that she said came to a head when she refused to manipulate data to show that rural counties were ready to reopen from coronavirus lockdowns. The specter of possible censorship by the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican allied with President Trump, exploded into the frenetic pandemic news cycle, and Ms. Jones’s defiance came to symbolize the growing questions over Florida’s handling of the pandemic.

The arrival of state agents at her home in Tallahassee on Monday to execute a search warrant in a criminal investigation marked a new, dramatic chapter in Ms. Jones’s saga, which at its core has always returned to the same basic question: Can Floridians, who are in the midst of another alarming rise in coronavirus infections and deaths, trust the state’s data?

“This isn’t really unexpected,” she said of this week’s raid. “You take down a governor, he’s going to come for you. Six months ago, I was just a scientist trying to do my job.”

Global roundup

A medical worker in a protective suit at a coronavirus testing center in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
Kin Cheung/Associated Press

Hong Kong and Japan announced on Friday that they had secured vaccines for their citizens, while Saudi Arabia said on Thursday it had approved one for use, as governments worldwide line up for vaccines rapidly becoming available.

The chief executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, said on Friday that the Chinese territory had struck an agreement to buy 15 million doses of coronavirus vaccines. Half will come from Sinovac — whose unproven vaccine has already been given to tens of thousands on the Chinese mainland — and the other half from Pfizer-BioNTech.

Each of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents will be vaccinated free, Mrs. Lam said, and the first million doses from Sinovac will arrive in January.

Japan’s Health Ministry said on Friday that it had formalized a deal to buy 120 million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, enough for 60 million people, and that it expected to receive the first quarter of those doses by March.

Japan has also agreed to buy 120 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 50 million doses of the Moderna vaccine.

While Saudi Arabia has not announced the number of vaccines it plans to purchase, government officials said on Thursday that it had approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as the first to be used in the country. Officials did not say when the vaccine would arrive or when it would be distributed.

In other developments across the world:

  • Switzerland ordered shops, bars, restaurants and sports facilities across much of the country to close at 7 p.m. each night. The country had imposed limited measures last month to halt a spike in cases and deaths, but achieved only partial success. Health authorities there reported a sharp rise in the weekly average of new cases on Friday, and warned that hospitals were close to capacity. Establishments in French-speaking areas of the country, which had protested against new restrictions, will be allowed to stay open later if they report case numbers below the national average.

  • As Germany sees record levels of coronavirus infections and deaths, several states are planning tight lockdowns even before nationwide measures can be announced. On Friday, the Eastern state of Thuringia announced it would close shops and move classes to online lessons by the end of next week. A meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel and state governors to agree on a countrywide lockdown is expected to take place on Sunday, and the mayor of Berlin told reporters he expected a three-week lockdown starting at the end of next week. German health authorities registered 29,875 new infections on Thursday, beating the previous record, set on Wednesday, by 6,196. Hospitals also recorded a record 598 deaths in one day on Thursday.

  • Bahrain said on Thursday that it would provide a free vaccine to all citizens and residents. The plan is to vaccinate as many as 10,000 people per day through 27 medical centers, officials said without naming which vaccine it would offer.

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Congress is still divided over a stimulus deal, but on Friday senators voted to stave off a shutdown with a one-week stopgap bill.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

President Trump on Friday signed a one-week stopgap bill to fund the government, buying additional time for negotiators to reach agreement on both a catchall government spending package and a coronavirus aid plan to address the economic toll of the pandemic.

The Senate earlier in the day had approved the measure by voice vote, after top congressional leaders corralled the chamber into supporting the one-week extension.

While lawmakers and staff on Capitol Hill continue to haggle over an aid plan, the two policy divides that have long impaired a coronavirus relief deal — a Republican insistence on sweeping coronavirus liability protections and Democratic demands for state and local funding — remain sticking points. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has suggested jettisoning both provisions in order to get a swift agreement on a narrower package, but many lawmakers are reluctant to resort to that.

Democratic leaders have said the starting point for talks should be a $908 billion bipartisan compromise being drafted by a group of moderates. It would include limited liability protections, $160 billion in state and local funding, $288 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program that extends loans to small businesses, and $300-a-week supplemental federal jobless payments until the spring. The proposal, for now, does not include direct payments from stimulus checks.

“These problems don’t go away,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is part of the group that is working on the bipartisan plan. “If anything, they just get bigger. So if we can just stick to it, get a proposal that we can advance that resolves not only goals like unemployment, P.P.P., food security, but also the state and local and tribal and the liability issue — this is what we’ve been working on. This is what we need to keep doing.”

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