Biden announces coronavirus relief plan as priority to kick-start US economy – live

Our Health reporter Jessica Glenza has this latest update on the Covid pandemic in the US:

More Americans are dying of Covid-19 than at any time during the pandemic, the most complex mass vaccination campaign in history is off to a rocky start, and more transmissible strains of the coronavirus are emergent. January is going to be a bleak month.

The most pessimistic outlook published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts up to 438,000 people may be killed by Covid-19 by the end of the month in a staggering upward trend.

“My hope is this month will be the peak and things will start to look better in February,” said Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University whose work focuses on pandemic response. “I don’t think it will be vaccination that will bend the curve. It will be washing your hands and staying home.”

A mass vaccination campaign now underway holds the promise of altering the pandemic, though it has stumbled. The vaccination campaign is not likely reflected in existing forecasts, because only about 3% of the population has been vaccinated.

Experts attribute this failure to hit early vaccination targets to a disengaged White House which pushed vaccine planning to states, a lack of timely federal funds, and failure to conduct public education campaigns to combat vaccine hesitancy. These failures have led to wide discrepancies between states.

The differences are, “not a red versus blue state thing,” Dr Ashish K Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Twitter. “It’s a lack of federal leadership thing.”

Herd immunity, likely requiring near-universal vaccine uptake among US adults, is seen as the ultimate goal of the vaccination campaign. But a tipping point, when the vaccine has observable positive effect, is likely to come earlier. If the Biden-Harris administration can successfully speed up vaccinations, it is possible a reduction in deaths could be the first positive outcome of the vaccination campaign.

“We will likely see the positive effects of the vaccination campaign in deaths before new cases,” said Rivers. That is because, “we are specifically targeting people who are at highest risk of severe illness” for vaccination.

Read more of Jessica Glenza’s report here: US suffers bleak January as Covid rages and vaccination campaign falters