Health experts are urging all Americans to step up social distancing and mask-wearing — with President Joe Biden introducing a federal mask order and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considering a double-mask recommendation.
There’s also a clamor for more testing. The new administration has issued tighter testing requirements for international travel and is debating whether to require testing for domestic travel, too.
“The emergence of variants underscores the need for public health action. First, get vaccinated when it’s your turn,” the new CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told a White House briefing last week.
“Second, wear a mask. Practice social distancing and wash your hands. And finally, now is not the time to travel. But, if you must, be safe and follow the CDC guidance.”
But public health experts are pessimistic that Americans are going to change their ways, one year into the pandemic.
YOU ASKED. WE ANSWERED.
Q: Should you wear two masks?
“If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective, and that’s the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, now chief medical adviser to Biden, told NBC.
Whatever mask you wear, be sure to do so properly — including while double masking. No uncovered noses are allowed. Both masks should go over the bridge of the nose, below the chin and be flush on the face, resting along the skin, experts say.
WHAT’S IMPORTANT TODAY
Biden faces dilemma over Republican offer on Covid-19 rescue plan
President Biden will on Monday meet with 10 Republican senators who have drawn up a smaller counter-proposal to his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 rescue plan, in the most critical test yet of his core promise to forge unity at a time of bitter division. But hopes for a rare bipartisan deal at the start of a new administration still look doubtful. Their plan is less than a third of the size of the economic shock treatment the White House says the nation needs.
WHO team investigating pandemic visits Wuhan wet market
On Sunday, the team visited the wet market thought to be central to the disease’s spread: The now disinfected and shuttered Huanan seafood market in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, where an initial cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses were noticed by doctors in mid-December 2019. The market has become the anecdotal ‘ground-zero’ for Covid-19, even though later studies have suggested it may have begun elsewhere.
The team visited the Centers for Disease Control in Hubei on Monday. They are also scheduled to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they are expected to meet She Zhengli, the virologist known as “Bat Lady” for her lengthy investigation of bat coronaviruses, which scientists say are a close cousin to SARS-COV-2. The Wuhan Institute has gained notoriety after a series of unsubstantiated, evidence-free claims by senior Trump officials that the laboratory was the source of the virus.
A fight between the EU and UK reveals the ugly truth about vaccine nationalism
The UN General Assembly in September last year was a pivotal moment in the pandemic, when leaders began to show some unity as global deaths approached a million. They had learned hard lessons from the damage that hoarding protective equipment had done, they said. When a vaccine was developed, the world’s most vulnerable would be first in line, they claimed.
The vaccines are now here and that solidarity has frayed. Between the United Kingdom and the European Union, it has disappeared entirely and given way to an all-out battle over who is more entitled to tens of millions of doses produced by British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. Meanwhile, many countries in the global south have yet to administer a single vaccine.
ON OUR RADAR
- Tom Moore, the World War II veteran who raised millions for a UK charity by walking laps of his garden before his 100th birthday, has been hospitalized with Covid-19 and pneumonia, his daughter Hannah said on Twitter Sunday.
- AstraZeneca will deliver additional Covid-19 vaccine doses to the EU and increase its manufacturing capacity on the continent, the European Commission President said on Sunday.
- Hundreds of people were dispersed or detained at protests against pandemic restrictions in Hungary, Austria and Belgium over the weekend.
- The Department of Homeland Security said Sunday that Transportation Security Administration workers now have the authority to enforce President Biden’s transportation mask mandate.
- A single coronavirus case in Western Australia has triggered a five-day lockdown for 2 million people.
- Pakistan is battling a tsunami of Covid-19 patients with few vaccines in sight.
- Antibodies that protect against the coronavirus can be passed through the placenta from mother to infant, a new study suggests.
TOP TIP
High case rates, new variants, teacher union negotiations, and elaborate and costly protocols for safe school reopenings all complicate a return to pre-pandemic life for kids.
Experts agree that a widely available pediatric vaccine would simplify the process, but we don’t know when we can expect it and whether it’s necessary for a safe return.
TODAY’S PODCAST
“The Biden administration is ramping up the Defense Production Act to make more N95s available to healthcare workers who still don’t have enough. And then, hopefully, for the rest of the population.” — CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta