“Live updates: U.S. reports more than 4,000 covid-19 deaths in deadliest day of pandemic”, The Washington Post

By Antonia Noori Farzan, Erin Cunningham, Kim Bellware and

Siobhán O’Grady, Jan. 8, 2021

The United States on Thursday shattered records for the number of coronavirus-related deaths on a single day, topping 4,000 fatalities for the first time. Experts worry that the new, more contagious variant of the virus that has been detected in eight states could make matters worse.

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“We are in a race against time,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Washington Post. “We need to increase our speed in which we act so that we don’t allow this virus to spread further and allow this variant to become the dominant one in circulation. The clock is ticking.”

Here are some significant developments:

• Nearly 21.6 million coronavirus infections and more than 363,000 fatalitieshave been reported in the United States since February.
• The coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech appears toprotect against a key mutation in the highly contagious new variantsdiscovered in the United Kingdom and South Africa, according to new data that is awaiting peer review.
• Modeling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than half of all coronavirus cases were spread by people without symptoms, confirming what many scientists had estimated.
• Moderna’s CEO said Thursday that the company’s vaccine is likely to provide protection “for a couple of years.”
• The human body typically retains a robust immune response to the coronavirus for at least eight months after an infection, and potentially much longer, according to a new study in the journal Science.
• Iran’s supreme leader said Friday that he was banning the import of U.S. and British coronavirus vaccines.

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