Covid-19 Live Updates: Spread of Virus Slows in U.S. Nursing Homes

Amid a sometimes chaotic rollout of vaccines across the United States, health experts say a glimmer of good news has emerged: Recent reports of coronavirus cases in nursing homes have declined for the past four weeks, according to federal data.

The country recorded 17,584 cases in nursing homes during the week ending on Jan. 17, according to the federal data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A month earlier, during the week ending on Dec. 20, more than 32,500 cases were reported.

In part, the development reflects a downward trend in new cases across the country, health experts said. Coronavirus cases in nursing homes are driven by infections in the rest of the community, said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, so one can expect to see cases at long-term care facilities drop when the numbers are declining elsewhere.

But the decline in cases in nursing homes is more pronounced than it is nationally, and it also began earlier, Dr. Jha said. Residents in nursing homes have been prioritized as among the first groups to get the vaccine. “That combination really does make me think this is not just broad national patterns, but that vaccines probably are playing a role,” Dr. Jha said. “I’m optimistic, this is good.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that as of Saturday, more than 3.5 million shots have now been administered in long-term care facilities, including to workers and residents.

Still, a slower-than-expected vaccine rollout in nursing homes has been deeply frustrating, Dr. Jha said. Efforts to efficiently give shots to all nursing home residents should be a top priority, he said, adding, “Once that’s in, then we should feel really confident that these declines will continue and we will not see a spike back up, even if we see one in the national picture.”

Nursing homes have been devastated by the virus. Although 5 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these settings have accounted for about 36 percent of deaths from the virus in the country, according to a New York Times database.

In New York, new reports of cases among residents in nursing homes run by the state health facilities association — which includes 425 skilled nursing homes and assisted living facilities — have been steadily declining since the first and second week of January, said Stephen Hanse, the president and chief executive of the association.

“Throughout the state, providers really saw the cases reducing, residents stabilizing,” he said, adding that it’s too early to tell if the drop is directly linked to the number of vaccine doses being administered. A large majority of residents in the association’s facilities — at least 80 percent — have now received their second dose of the vaccine, Mr. Hanse said. Nursing home administrators and directors “really see the vaccine as the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Tom Moore, 100, a decorated British Army veteran who captured the attention of the British public in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic by raising $40 million for the National Health Service, was hospitalized with the virus on Sunday, his daughter said.

Mr. Moore had been treated for pneumonia in recent weeks and tested positive for the coronavirus last week, Hannah Ingram-Moore said in a statement on Twitter. He was taken to a hospital because he needed help with his breathing, she said, but he was not in the intensive care unit.

Mr. Moore became a national hero after he completed 100 laps of an 82-foot walk on the brick patio next to his garden in Marston Moretaine, a quiet village north of London, to raise money for the N.H.S.

The laps, which Mr. Moore completed 50 meters at a time while gripping his walker and wearing a blazer adorned with military medals, quickly caught the attention of Britain’s public and its news media, which nicknamed him Captain Tom. He raised 32.8 million pounds, or $40 million, through an online charity. Prince William, who contributed an undisclosed sum, called him a “one-man fund-raising machine.”

News of Mr. Moore’s illness came days after Britain surpassed 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus. The country’s response to the pandemic has been filled with delays, reversals and mixed messages, most recently in the struggle to contain a fast-spreading variant of the virus.

Ms. Ingram-Moore did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Moore’s family told the BBC that he had not yet been vaccinated because of the medication he was taking for his pneumonia.

In September, Mr. Moore published a best-selling autobiography, “Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day,” and at one point, he had the No. 1 song in Britain with a version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein standard “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which he recorded with the English singer Michael Ball and the N.H.S. Voices of Care Choir. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Mr. Moore in July.

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Moore drew comparisons between the beleaguered health workers fighting the coronavirus and the soldiers who won World War II.

“At that time, the people my age, we were fighting on the front line and the general public was standing behind us,” Mr. Moore said. “In this instance, the doctors and nurses and all the medical people, they’re the front line. It’s up to my generation to back them up, just as we were backed up.”

FACT CHECK

On Jan. 5, Hank Aaron, the legendary home run hitter, posted on Twitter that he had been vaccinated for the coronavirus at the Morehouse School of Medicine, along with other prominent civil rights figures in Atlanta who were 75 or older and thus part of the group at the highest priority to be inoculated.

“I hope you do the same!” he wrote.

Seventeen days later, Mr. Aaron died at the age of 86.

Now, anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, are seizing on his death to suggest — without evidence — that there might be a link.

“That was a pure coincidence,” countered Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the founding dean of the Morehouse medical school and secretary of health and human services in the George H.W. Bush administration, who was vaccinated along with Mr. Aaron. He told the Atlanta station WSB-TV, “It is though, if you might say, Hank was in a car before the day he died, and we try and attribute his death to being in a car.”

The Fulton County medical examiner has also said there was nothing to suggest that Mr. Aaron had an allergic or anaphylactic reaction related to the vaccine.

Still, Mr. Aaron’s death has gotten caught up in a swirl of misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding the coronavirus and society’s efforts to fight it. Skepticism about the vaccines has emerged as one of the latest forms of resistance that health officials have confronted throughout the pandemic, as critics have flouted social distancing rules and bristled at covering their faces with masks.

Demonstrators forced the authorities in Los Angeles to close the entrance to Dodger Stadium, one of the largest vaccination sites in the country, for an hour on Saturday. About 50 protesters had gathered there, with some holding posters that said “99.96% Survival Rate” and “End the Lockdown.”

Health officials say that so far, with more than 23 million doses administered in the United States, the two vaccines already authorized for use, appear to be quite safe. There have been a few severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, but they are treatable and considered rare, and no deaths have been reported from them. The rates at which anaphylaxis has occurred so far — five cases in every million doses of the vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech, and 2.8 cases per million for the vaccine by Moderna — are in line with what happens with other widely used vaccines.

At a meeting on Wednesday of expert advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Shimabukuro of the C.D.C. said, “Overall, the safety profiles of the Covid-19 vaccines are reassuring and consistent with that observed in the pre-authorization clinical trials.”

He said the federal government had “implemented the most intense and comprehensive vaccine safety monitoring program in history.”

Even so, anti-vaccine activists have sought to undermine the public’s confidence in the vaccines, using social media to spread unfounded accounts of people dying or suffering drastic side effects.

Polls have shown that public confidence in the vaccines has solidified generally in recent months, but confidence among African Americans is running lower than among other demographic groups, even though the virus has swept through that community with a punishing fury.

That is why the Morehouse School of Medicine assembled pioneering civil rights leaders like Mr. Aaron and Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador, to get vaccinated and lead by example.

“They marched to the polls to secure our rights,” Valerie Montgomery Rice, the dean and president of the medical school, said in a statement. “And now, they are rolling up their sleeves to save lives.”

Paris is gone for now, its lifeblood cut off by the closure of all restaurants, its nights silenced by a 6 p.m. curfew aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, its cafe bonhomie lost to domestic morosity. Blight has taken the City of Light.

Taboos fall. People eat sandwiches in the drizzle on city benches. They yield — oh, the horror! — to takeout in the form of “le click-and-collect.” They dine earlier, an abominable Americanization. They contemplate with resignation the chalk-on-blackboard offerings of long-shuttered restaurants still promising a veal blanquette or a boeuf bourguignon. These menus are fossils from the pre-pandemic world.

Gone the museums, gone the tourist-filled riverboats plying the Seine, gone the sidewalk terraces offering their pleasures at dusk, gone the movie theaters, gone the casual delights of wandering and the raucous banter of the most northern of southern cities. In their place, a gray sadness has settled over the city like fog.

Paris is far from alone in its deprivations. The pandemic has, in some ways, imposed conditions of war in time of peace. It, too, will end.

But until then, “We’ll always have Paris,” and in these photographs by Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times, the City of Light proves it is worth soldiering through for in the fog.

As frustration mounts in Canada over lockdowns and the glacial pace of vaccinations, a consortium of some of the country’s largest companies has begun a rapid testing program with the aim of protecting their 350,000 employees.

The program is believed to be the first of its kind among the Group of 7 industrialized nations, and has already attracted the attention of the Biden administration.

The 12 companies, including Canada’s biggest airline and grocery chain, have worked together for four months, creating a 400-page operating manual on how to run rapid antigen tests in various work settings. They began piloting the tests in their workplaces this month, and expect to expand the program to 1,200 small and medium-size businesses.

They also plan to share their test results with the government health authorities, greatly raising test counts in the country and providing an informal study of the virus’s spread among asymptomatic people.

The companies in the consortium were brought together in the spring by Ajay Agrawal, the founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which helps science and technology start-ups. They were inspired by the most Canadian of muses: Margaret Atwood, the author.

“How soon can we have a cheap, buy-it-at-the-drugstore, self-administered test?” Ms. Atwood asked during a virtual meeting last May of business leaders and others tasked with brainstorming ideas for economic recovery during the pandemic.

The problem, the group posited, was the “information gap” — since there was no way to tell who might be an asymptomatic carrier, everyone was treated as a potential threat.

Ms. Atwood envisioned something like a home pregnancy test.

“That would be a game changer,” she said.

As new variants like the one discovered in South Africa migrate to more countries — including the United States — it is becoming ever clearer that the tragedy for poorer countries could become a tragedy for every country. The more the virus spreads, and the longer it takes to vaccinate people, the greater chance it has to continue to mutate in ways that put the whole world at risk.

Recent studies suggest that at least four vaccines that are effective at preventing infection with the original virus did not perform as well against the variant found in South Africa. That variant is also more infectious — as is another one, discovered in Britain — and it is now estimated to make up 90 percent of all cases in South Africa, according to data compiled by researchers. It has turned up in dozens of other countries.

Inoculation prompts the immune system to make antibodies to the virus, but as mutations change its shape, the virus can become more resistant to those antibodies. In the worst case, failing to stop the spread of the virus globally would allow more mutations that could make existing vaccines less effective, leaving even inoculated populations vulnerable.

“This idea that no one is safe until everyone is safe is not just an adage, it is really true,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, Ms. Taylor said, at the current pace of production, there will not be enough vaccines for true global coverage until 2023. The current rollout plans across Africa are expected to vaccinate only 20 percent to 35 percent of the population this year if everything goes right.

And while some wealthy countries have secured enough vaccine to cover their populations multiple times, South Africa has secured just 22.5 million doses for its 60 million people, and many nations lag even farther behind.

BNEI BRAK, Israel — Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, 93, can’t use a phone. He rarely leaves his house. His family says he has never successfully made a cup of tea. His closest aides think he doesn’t know the name of Israel’s prime minister. He studies the Torah for, give or take, 17 hours a day.

Yet despite his seeming detachment from worldly life, Rabbi Kanievsky has become one of the most consequential and controversial people in Israel today.

The spiritual leader of hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Kanievsky has landed at the center of tensions over the coronavirus between the Israeli mainstream and its growing ultra-Orthodox minority.

Throughout the pandemic, the authorities have clashed with ultra-Orthodox Jews over their resistance to antivirus safety protocols, particularly their early refusal to close schools or to limit crowds at religious events. Similar conflicts have arisen in the New York area.

Rabbi Kanievsky, issuing pronouncements from a book-filled study in his cramped apartment in an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, has often been at the fore of that resistance. Twice, during the first and second waves of the pandemic in Israel, he initially rejected state-imposed safety restrictions and refused to order his followers to close their yeshivas, the independent religious schools where students gather in close quarters to study Jewish Scripture.

If anything, he said, the pandemic made prayer and study even more essential.

Both times he eventually relented, and it was not clear whether his stances did as much to accelerate the spread of the virus as his critics said. But the damage was done.

Many public health experts say that ultra-Orthodox Jews — who account for about 12 percent of the Israeli population but 28 percent of the country’s coronavirus cases, according to Israeli government statistics — have undermined the national effort against the pandemic. The reaction to the outsized role of the ultra-Orthodox has been fierce, and much of it has centered on Rabbi Kanievsky.

Those We’ve Lost

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

As a boy, Isidore Torres owned two pairs of pants: one for school, one for hoeing sugar beet fields outside Bay City, Mich., alongside his mother and siblings.

“If you could hold a hoe, you were out there working from sunrise until 5 o’clock in the afternoon,” an older brother, Abel Torres, said.

For years, the family had shuttled between Michigan and Texas looking for migrant work, eventually settling in Bay City so the children could receive a steady education.

Mr. Torres never forgot his humble roots, even as he became the first Hispanic judge in the Wayne County court system and served on state benches for more than a quarter-century. A prominent figure among Michigan Latinos, known for an endearing smile and a love of coffee, he had the ear of mayors, governors and congressmen as he lobbied for more minority representation in the legal system.

Mr. Torres died on Jan. 12 at Beaumont Hospital in Troy, Mich. He was 73. The cause was Covid-19, his family said. He also had central nervous system lymphoma.

“My father always had to fight for the life that he wanted,” said his son, Felipe Barboza Torres, a Wayne County prosecutor. “No one ever told him that he would be a great lawyer. They told him he wouldn’t be able to be a lawyer because he was brown.”