Covid-19 Live Updates: India Is in Crisis as Virus Races Out of Control

New research has identified unusual antibodies that appear to have caused, in rare cases, serious and sometimes fatal blood clots in people who received the Covid vaccine made by AstraZeneca.

Exactly why the rare reactions to the vaccine occurred is still a mystery.

Scientific teams from Germany and Norway found that people who developed the clots after vaccination had produced antibodies that activated their platelets, a blood component involved in clotting. The new reports add extensive details to what the researchers have already stated publicly about the blood disorder.

Younger people appear more susceptible than older ones, but researchers say no pre-existing health conditions are known to predispose people to the rare reaction. That is worrisome, they say, because there is no way to tell if an individual is at high risk.

Reports of the clots have already led a number of countries to limit AstraZeneca’s vaccine to older people, or to stop using it entirely. These cases have dealt a crushing blow to global efforts to halt the pandemic, because the AstraZeneca shot — easy to store and relatively cheap — has been a mainstay of vaccination programs in more than 100 countries.

The European Medicines Agency, the regulator for the European Union, has emphasized repeatedly that the clotting disorder is rare, and that the vaccine’s benefits far outweigh its risks. But when a side effect has the potential to be devastating or fatal — like the blood clots in the brain linked to this vaccine — some regulators and segments of the public are finding that the risk is unacceptable, even if it is extremely rare.

As of Sunday, European regulators had received reports of 222 cases of the rare blood-clotting problem in Britain and the 30-nation European Economic Area (the European Union plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein). They said that about 34 million people had received the AstraZeneca vaccine in those countries, and that the clotting problems were appearing at a rate of about one in 100,000 recipients.

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At least 300,000 more people died last year during the coronavirus pandemic than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics.

Not all of those deaths were necessarily caused by the virus. But they belie President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that the country has managed the virus better than most. In reality, a New York Times analysis of mortality data shows, deaths in Russia last year were 28 percent higher than normal — an increase in mortality greater than in the U.S. and most countries in Europe.

“People didn’t know the objective situation,” said Olga Kagarlitskaya. “And if you don’t know the objective situation, you are not afraid.” Her father had been hospitalized weeks earlier in a coronavirus ward. Now he was gone, cause of death: “viral pneumonia, unspecified.”

For much of the last year, Russia has appeared more focused on the public-relations and economic aspects of the pandemic than on fighting the virus itself. After a harsh, two-month lockdown last spring, the government largely lifted restrictions last summer, a boon for public opinion and the economy, even as the disease spread more rapidly.

In other virus developments around the world:

• Iran, facing a fourth virus wave, began a 10-day lockdown across much of the country, state TV reported. The surge in cases comes after an uptick in travel over Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The president said the presence of the variant first detected in Britain was a major factor in the increase, according to The Associated Press.

• Thailand plans to install 10,000 field hospital beds in Bangkok as it deals with a third wave, Reuters reports.

• Cambodia’s prime minister threatened prison time for those who break quarantine and said that civil servants who did not get vaccinated could lose their jobs, according to AFP. The authorities have recently imposed stricter Covid-19 measures, including a nightly curfew in the capital and the closure of a popular tourist destination.

• Libya began its vaccination campaign on Saturday with the prime minister, who received a shot on live TV, Reuters reports. The country, mired in political turmoil, has been slow on the vaccine front but recently received doses.

Farah Mohamed contributed reporting.

WHAT WE LEARNED

A highly infectious and more lethal variant first identified in Britain is now the most common source of new infections in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week.

That variant, B.1.1.7, has been found to be most prevalent in Michigan, Florida, Colorado, California, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to the C.D.C. Until recently, the variant’s rise was somewhat camouflaged by the drastic drop in reported cases over all, lulling Americans into a false sense of security and leading to a relaxing of restrictions that researchers have warned was premature.

The variant is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus, according to the most recent estimates. Infected people seem to carry more of the B.1.1.7 virus and for longer, said Katrina Lythgoe, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford.

At the moment, most Covid-19 vaccines appear to be effective against the variants. But public health officials are deeply worried that future iterations of the virus may be more resistant, requiring Americans to line up for regular rounds of booster shots or even for new vaccines.

“We don’t have evolution on our side,” said Devi Sridhar, a professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “This pathogen seems to always be changing in a way that makes it harder for us to suppress.”

Health officials see an urgent need to expand vaccinations, which reduce transmission and therefore the virus’s opportunities to mutate. The United States is administering an average of about three million doses a day, up from roughly two million a month ago.

President Biden said on Tuesday that he was moving up the deadline to April 19 for states to make all adults eligible for a vaccine. Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. said this week that residents 16 or older would become eligible for vaccinations on Monday, meaning all 50 states, the capital and the largest U.S. territory have now said they would beat or meet Mr. Biden’s call to accelerate their eligibility timelines.

Here’s what else we learned this week:

• On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, released a survey reporting that over 80 percent of association members had been vaccinated or had made a vaccine appointment. About 85 percent of members said their school was “operating on at least a part-time basis,” according to the survey.

• As the United States struggles to emerge from the worst public health crisis in a century, the arrival of digital vaccine verification apps — a modern version of the World Health Organization’s “yellow card” that provides international proof of yellow fever vaccination — has generated intense debate over whether proof of vaccination can be required at all.

• In Mississippi on Thursday, there were more than 73,000 vaccine appointments available as the state struggles to find enough people to inoculate. Though access remains a problem in rural Mississippi, experts say that the state — one of the first to open eligibility to all adults three weeks ago — may be a harbinger of what much of the United States will confront in the coming weeks, as increasing supplies enable most Americans who want the vaccine to easily make appointments.

The pandemic has hit African-Americans and Latinos hardest on all fronts, with higher infection and death rates, more job losses and more business closures. And not since Lyndon B. Johnson’s momentous civil rights and anti-poverty legislation has an American president so pointedly put racial and economic equity at the center of his agenda.

President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar initiatives to rebuild infrastructure in neglected and segregated neighborhoods, increase wages for health care workers, expand the social safety net, and make early education and college more accessible are all shot through with attention to the particular economic disadvantages that people of color face. So were his sweeping pandemic relief bill and Inauguration Day executive orders.

Yet as ambitious as such efforts are, academic experts and some policymakers say that still more will be needed to repair one of the most stubborn and invidious inequalities: the gap in wealth between Black and white Americans.

Wealth — a person’s total assets — is the most meaningful measure of financial strength. Yet for every dollar a typical white household has, a Black one has 12 cents, a divide that has grown over the last half-century. Latinos have 21 cents for every dollar in white wealth.

Proposals that confront the wealth gap head on, however, are expensive and politically charged.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey have tended to push for asset-building policies that have more popular support. They have offered programs to increase Black homeownership, reduce student debt, supplement retirement accounts and establish “baby bonds” with government contributions tied to family income.

With these accounts, recipients could build up money over time that could be used to cover college tuition, start a business or help in retirement.

“We have very clear evidence that if we create an account of birth for everyone and provide a little more resources to people at the bottom, then all these babies accumulate assets,” said Michael Sherraden, founding director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. “Kids of color accumulate assets as fast as white kids.”

Without dedicated funds — the kind of programs that enabled white families to build assets — it won’t be possible for African-Americans to bridge the wealth gap, said Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”

She paraphrased a 1968 presidential campaign slogan of Hubert Humphrey: “You can’t have Black capitalism without capital.”