Covid News: Moscow Orders Shutdown as Russia Battles New Wave of Cases

MOSCOW — Russian officials scrambled on Saturday to slow the spread of a new wave of the coronavirus, ordering workers in Moscow to take next week off and pleading with the populace to make use of widely available vaccines.

The biggest spike appeared to be in Moscow, the Russian capital, which reported 6,701 new cases on Saturday — more than double the rise five days ago, and the highest single-day total since December. Mayor Sergey S. Sobyanin said the situation had “sharply worsened” in the past week, and that thousands of hospital beds were being repurposed to provide care for Covid-19 patients.

“According to epidemiologists, it is now necessary to at least slow down the speed of, if not stop, the spread of the virus,” Mr. Sobyanin said on his blog.

Bars and restaurants will be required to stop serving customers at 11 p.m., food courts in shopping malls will be closed, and public playgrounds and athletic grounds will be closed, Mr. Sobyanin said. Most employers will be required to keep workers home — with pay — next week. However, Mr. Sobyanin did not impose new restrictions on indoor dining beyond the 11 p.m. cutoff, reflecting the Kremlin’s prioritization of the economy in its policies during the pandemic.

Overall, Russia reported 13,510 new cases on Saturday, the highest number since February and a 50 percent rise from a week earlier. Just as worrying to epidemiologists is that Russia’s vaccination campaign appears to be stalling. President Vladimir V. Putin said on Saturday that 18 million people had been vaccinated in the country, which is less than 13 percent of the population, even though Russia’s Sputnik V shots have been widely available for months.

“Right now, we can vaccinate everyone in Russia given the volume of vaccine being produced,” Mr. Putin said at an annual state awards ceremony at the Kremlin on Saturday, according to Interfax. “The question is that, as always — it’s a typical phenomenon here — people are cautious about all such procedures.”

The two-dose Sputnik V vaccine is 91.6 percent effective against the coronavirus, according to peer-reviewed research published in The Lancet in January. But polls show that nearly two-thirds of Russians say they do not plan to get the vaccine. Analysts attribute Russians’ hesitancy to a seemingly contradictory mix of factors: widespread distrust of the authorities on the one hand, and frequent state television reports describing the coronavirus as mostly defeated or not very dangerous on the other.

Russian officials frequently claim that the country has handled the coronavirus better than the West. There have been no large-scale lockdowns in the country since last summer. The official death toll stands at 126,073, but the unusually high number of deaths in the past year suggests that the real toll is several times higher.

Now, with Western countries emerging from lockdowns, Russia runs the risk of entering a vicious new wave of the virus. And officials are starting to acknowledge that the pandemic will not end in the country anytime soon unless the vaccination rate accelerates drastically.

“Until we have truly mass vaccination, the city will constantly be getting sick,” Mr. Sobyanin said on Saturday.

More than two million travelers passed through U.S. airport security checkpoints on Friday, the first time since March 2020 that such a milestone had been reached, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

“The growing number of travelers demonstrates this country’s resilience and the high level of confidence in Covid-19 countermeasures,” Darby LaJoye, a T.S.A. official, said in a statement issued on Saturday. “T.S.A. stands ready to provide a safe and secure screening process as part of the overall travel experience.”

The agency screened 2,028,961 travelers on Friday, almost four times more than the 519,304 people that passed through security checkpoints a year earlier. Friday’s number is still only about 74 percent of the total on the same date in 2019, according to the T.S.A.

Air travel came close to hitting the two-million mark on the Friday before Memorial Day in May, when more than 1.95 million people went through security checkpoints, according to the T.S.A. Still, significantly more Americans preferred to travel by road for Memorial Day weekend. Before the holiday, AAA said it expected about nine out of 10 travelers would drive to their destinations.

Before the start of the pandemic, an average of about 2 million to 2.5 million travelers were screened daily by the T.S.A., according to the agency. Since the pandemic, the lowest screening volume was recorded last year on April 13, when fewer than 88,000 air travelers went through security checkpoints, the agency said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in April that fully vaccinated Americans could travel at low risk.

As the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads in southeastern China, doctors say they are finding that the symptoms are different and more dangerous than those they saw when the initial version of the virus started spreading in late 2019 in the central city of Wuhan.

Patients are becoming sicker and their conditions are worsening much more quickly, doctors told state-run television on Thursday and Friday. Four-fifths of symptomatic cases developed fevers, they said, although it was not clear how that compared with earlier cases. The virus concentrations that are detected in their bodies climb to levels higher than previously seen, and then decline only slowly, the doctors said.

Up to 12 percent of patients become severely or critically ill within three to four days of the onset of symptoms, said Guan Xiangdong, director of critical care medicine at Sun Yat-sen University in the city of Guangzhou, where the outbreak has been centered. In the past, the proportion had been 2 percent or 3 percent, although occasionally up to 10 percent, he said.

Doctors in Britain and Brazil have reported similar trends with the variants that circulated in those countries, but the severity of those variants has not yet been confirmed.

The testimonies from China are the latest indication of the dangers posed by Delta, which the World Health Organization last month labeled a “variant of concern.” First identified this spring in India, where it was blamed for widespread suffering and death, Delta has since become the dominant variant in Britain, where doctors suggest that it is more contagious and may infect some people who have received only one of two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

China has uniquely detailed data, however, because it has essentially universal testing in the vicinity of outbreaks, allowing officials to gather detailed information on the extent of cases.

Delta’s spread in southeastern China focuses more attention on the effectiveness of China’s self-made vaccines. The Chinese authorities have not indicated how many of the new infections have occurred in people who had been vaccinated. In some other countries where Chinese-made vaccines are in wide use, including the Seychelles and Mongolia, infections among vaccinated people are rising, although few patients have reportedly developed serious illness.

Nearby Shenzhen had a handful of cases last week of the Alpha variant, which first emerged in Britain.

As some other parts of the world still struggle to acquire and administer large numbers of coronavirus tests, southeastern China has used its local production of scarce chemicals to conduct testing on a remarkable scale. The authorities said that they had conducted 32 million tests in Guangzhou, which has 18 million people, and 10 million in the adjacent city of Foshan, which has seven million.

Guangzhou has also isolated and quarantined tens of thousands of residents who had been anywhere near those infected. The testing and quarantine appear to have slowed but not stopped the outbreak. China’s National Health Commission announced on Friday that nine new cases had been found in Guangzhou the previous day.

“The epidemic is not over yet, and the risk of virus transmission still exists,” said Chen Bin, deputy director of the Guangzhou Municipal Health Commission.

Albee Zhang contributed research.

Fully vaccinated lawmakers and staff members in the House of Representatives will no longer be required to wear a mask or maintain six feet of social distance, following updated guidance issued on Friday by Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician of Congress.

Those who are not fully vaccinated remain required to mask and take other precautions or be subject to fines, according to the guidance, which Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, forwarded to the House membership.

The change comes thanks to a “considerable rate of vaccination participation” and “diminishing daily evidence of disease transmission” in the Washington area, according to the updated guidelines for congressional offices and work centers.

The document noted that “congressional community vaccination rates are generally much higher” than in the country as a whole. But CNN reported in May that, while all Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress had been vaccinated, the rate was lower among Republicans: 92 percent among senators and “at least 44.8 percent” among representatives.

The issue of House coronavirus measures has been contentious.

After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last month that fully vaccinated people — those who are two weeks past their final dose — could remove their masks indoors, Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to lift the mask mandate, noting that some conservative Republican lawmakers had refused to get vaccinated.

“No,” Ms. Pelosi told CNN in May when asked if she planned to change the rule. “Are they vaccinated?”

The House guidelines recommend the use of masks around others whose vaccination status is indeterminate. And all lawmakers and staff members, regardless of their vaccination status, will still be required to report a daily self-monitoring of health symptoms, the guidelines say.

As facilities in the House return to “prepandemic operational postures,” the updated guidelines also suggest maintaining six feet of distance at workstations around unvaccinated individuals, and that dining facilities allow for “a separate seating area” for those who are not fully vaccinated, where they can maintain social distance.

At least a dozen Venezuela players and staff members have tested positive for the coronavirus a day before they were to play Brazil in the opening match of the South American soccer championship, according to the health authorities in Brazil.

The outbreak is the latest bad news for the troubled tournament, the Copa América, which was moved to Brazil less than two weeks ago after the scheduled host, Argentina, said it could not hold it safely during the pandemic. Colombia, the other co-host, had dropped out earlier.

And it might not be the only crisis organizers are facing: A report in Bolivia on Saturday said at least four people connected to that country’s national team also had the virus. Bolivia is scheduled to face Paraguay on Monday.

The Brazilian newspaper Globo reported on Saturday that the number of infected members of Venezuela’s traveling party had grown to 12 from five, citing the health authorities in Brasília, where its team is scheduled to play host Brazil on Sunday night. A circular sent to the teams by Conmebol, the governing body for soccer in South America and the organizer of the Copa América, reported the figure as 13.

The Associated Press reported that Conmebol had told Brazilian health officials about the positive results on Friday night.

“The health department was notified by Conmebol that 12 members of the Venezuelan national team’s delegation, including players and coaching staff, tested positive for Covid-19,” the health authorities said in a statement. Venezuela’s team arrived in Brazil on Friday.

“They are all asymptomatic, isolated in single rooms and are being monitored,” the statement added.

Conmebol later publicly confirmed that there were positive cases in the Venezuelan camp; the total number of positives was shared only with the teams.

Reports in Venezuela said the federation was preparing to charter a flight to send 14 replacement players to Brasília so that Sunday’s game could go ahead as planned. Another Venezuelan playing domestic soccer in Brazil also would be added to the roster, the reports said. Teams at the tournament were asked to submit a short list of as many as 60 players as organizers tried to put in place mitigation measures in case of a spate of positive tests.

Two players on Venezuela’s roster were forced to drop out after testing positive ahead of the team’s departure for Brazil on Thursday. The positives after the team’s arrival in Brazil will raise questions about the efficacy of those tests.

Local news media reports had also raised concerns about how strictly the team was following protocols to isolate itself from outsiders after politicians and celebrities posted images from inside Venezuela’s pretournament training camp.

The positive tests most likely will renew opposition toward a tournament that many have said should have been canceled. The players on Brazil’s team have gone public with their concerns about the tournament, even as they have committed to play in it. Almost 500,000 people have died from the virus in Brazil, more than any country except the United States.

The Copa América is the oldest international competition in soccer. This year’s edition, though, can already lay a claim to being the most unpopular edition in its 105-year history.

An 11th-hour decision to switch the 10-nation event to Brazil amid its continuing struggle to contain the coronavirus has led to protests and widespread condemnation inside and outside the country. The tournament was supposed to be held jointly by Colombia and Argentina, but Colombia was dropped amid political protests and then Argentina announced — two weeks before the games were to begin — that it could no longer safely stage the tournament.

Brazil’s populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro, whose handling of the pandemic has drawn much criticism, jumped at the opportunity to step in. The decision to bring the event to a nation still battling the pandemic was met with immediate outrage, with the competition, which will be played without spectators, being darkly described by some opponents as the “championship of death.”

The opposition to the tournament extended to the stars of the Brazil squad, which has collectively expressed its opposition to the circumstances that led to the event’s being moved to their home country. The teams held multiple meetings, and at one point considered boycotting the tournament, before resolving to defend the trophy they won for the ninth time on the last occasion the tournament was played in 2019.

“We are against the organization of the Copa América, but we will never say no to the Brazilian team,” the players said in an unsigned statement.

Still, the outrage continued, and even led to an emergency appeal to Brazil’s Supreme Court by opponents who wanted it canceled. The court ruled on Thursday that the games could go ahead.

The event will, though, be played without two of its major sponsors. Mastercard, a tournament partner since 1992, and the brewing giant Ambev said they could no longer associate their brands with this year’s Copa América.

Canada’s health products regulator has rejected the country’s first and only shipment of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine because of contamination issues at the U.S. plant that produced it.

The 300,000 doses had been held in storage since April to allow Health Canada to conduct a safety review. The regulator, in a statement issued on Friday evening, said that Emergent BioSolutions had made those doses at the same time as other batches of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that were found to be contaminated with the harmless virus used to manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Health Canada said its review was unable to determine that the vaccines sent to Canada met “the department’s rigorous quality standards.” The regulator also said that it would not approve the use of any vaccines or vaccine ingredients made at the factory until it sends inspectors there, most likely in the summer.

The announcement came after the Food and Drug Administration told Johnson & Johnson that 60 million doses of vaccine produced at the Baltimore factory cannot be used because of contamination. The F.D.A., however, will allow about 10 million other doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be distributed in the United States or other countries, with the warning that it cannot guarantee that Emergent followed good manufacturing practices.

U.S. regulators have put the Baltimore facility under a microscope since March, when they discovered that a major production mishap had resulted in the contamination of a batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Emergent later discarded the equivalent of 15 million doses. The New York Times has documented months of problems at the plant, including failures to properly disinfect equipment and to protect against viral and bacterial contamination.

The Emergent factory remains closed.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

The annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca next month will be restricted to 60,000 and limited to people living in Saudi Arabia because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Saudi Press Agency said on Saturday, as the authorities maintain tight restrictions on an event that usually draws millions of people from around the world every year.

The event was nearly abandoned in its entirety last year, when only about 1,000 people were able to take part in the ritual with social distancing and masks required.

The hajj, which all Muslims who are physically and financially able are supposed to complete at least once, is scheduled to begin in mid-July, and attendance will be limited to pilgrims who have been vaccinated and are between 18 and 65 years old, the press agency said.

The Saudi authorities indicated last month that the ritual would not return to normal this year. Fahad Nazer, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said on Twitter that there would be “preventative & precautionary measures that ensure the health & safety of pilgrims.”

The decision, which was attributed to the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, will come as a disappointment to many Muslims, who often save up and wait for years to make the pilgrimage in the hopes of obtaining a hajj visa. Obtaining a spot can be difficult because demand is exceptionally high and Saudi Arabia limits the number of pilgrims who can attend from each country each year.

Saudi Arabia has reported 7,537 coronavirus deaths, according to a New York Times database. It recently reopened to international air travel, but also said that vaccination will be required for entry to most buildings and public transportation starting in August.

In other news from around the world:

• In France, officials granted an exemption to the country’s pandemic curfew on Friday night, allowing 5,000 fans to stay for the remainder of the French Open semifinal match between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

• In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, said on Saturday that hospitals in the country’s capital of Kinshasa were “overwhelmed,” Reuters reported. On Friday the country reported one of its highest daily case totals since the pandemic began.

On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India made a televised address, a rare event since the country’s devastating second coronavirus wave began in April. With infections and deaths falling, according to official figures, Mr. Modi declared that the central government would help all 900 million adults in India get free vaccines, a reversal of his earlier policy that had forced state governments into a chaotic competition over limited supplies.

It was an attempt to regain control over the narrative, something the media-savvy Mr. Modi has been adept at doing in seven years in office. But over the past two months, Mr. Modi largely vanished from public view as his government proved powerless to stop the deaths and the mounting criticism about his performance.

With his poll numbers dropping and his allies straining to make his case on India’s talk shows, Mr. Modi and his minders have pushed “be positive” messaging and feel-good tips that have often struggled to connect.

“Sit in a comfortable meditative posture,” read a tweet from one of Mr. Modi’s accounts, in which he often appears as a yoga guru. “Keep the spine erect. Place the hands on the thighs. Gently close the eyes and raise the face slightly. Breathe normally.”

One commenter responded: “This is like rubbing salt on wounds.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

More people have died of Covid-19 this year than in all of 2020, as some of the deadliest outbreaks of the pandemic tear through nations that are struggling to vaccinate their people.

On Wednesday, the number of deaths recorded this year surpassed the total last year, according to data collected by The New York Times. The global death toll before the midway point of 2021 is more than 1,882,000, eclipsing the 1,874,531 deaths recorded for all of 2020, according to official statistics.

While the United States and other wealthy countries with access to coronavirus vaccines are recording far fewer deaths, growing caseloads in Asia and Latin America are pushing the global toll higher. New cases and deaths are surging in some of the poorest parts of the world. Less than 1 percent of the two billion doses of Covid vaccines produced so far have gone to those countries.

In countries including Haiti and Tanzania, not a single person has been vaccinated. The United States has vaccinated about 172.4 million people — more than half its population — with at least one dose.

India, with 3 percent of its population fully vaccinated, is averaging 100,000 new daily infections and more than 3,000 deaths. Eleven percent of Brazilians are vaccinated, but the country is averaging more than 64,000 new infections and 1,800 deaths each day. Argentina and Colombia are averaging about 25,000 new infections and about 550 deaths, with 7 percent of their populations inoculated.

And while the United States is close to recording 600,000 deaths from the coronavirus since the start of 2020 — the highest reported toll in the world — fewer Americans are dying on a daily basis. Thanks to mass vaccination, deaths in the United States have dropped by 90 percent since their peak in mid-January, when more than 3,000 people died on an average day.

Because of limited awareness and testing during the initial months of the pandemic, an unknown number of early Covid-19 deaths will never be counted. Inconsistent accounting and limited data collection continues around the world, and the actual toll is most likely significantly higher, according to experts.

Here’s what else you might have missed this week:

A Baltimore factory that rendered useless 75 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson failed for weeks to seal off a preparation area for vaccine ingredients and allowed production waste to be hauled through the area, the Food and Drug Administration said in a memorandum analyzing the plant’s operations.

The memo, posted on the agency’s website late Friday, offered the most extensive explanation to date of why regulators believe that tens of millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine produced at that factory must be discarded.

The F.D.A. advised Johnson & Johnson on Friday that it should throw out the equivalent of 60 million doses. That brought to 75 million the total number of doses that cannot be used because of concerns about contamination at a southeastern Baltimore plant, operated by Emergent BioSolutions, Johnson & Johnson’s subcontractor and a longtime government contractor.

The vaccine-making factory has been shut for the past two months while regulators determine the cause of contamination that ruined many doses, whether it is safe to reopen the facility, and what to do with the equivalent of at least 170 million doses of vaccine that Emergent produced for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, another vaccine developer.

The F.D.A.’s memo stated that Emergent failed to properly segregate zones in which workers manufactured vaccines developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca in order to prevent cross-contamination that could render doses unsafe or ineffective. It was written by Dr. Peter Marks, the F.D.A.’s top vaccine regulator, and was addressed to Johnson & Johnson.

When Emergent first began producing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in November, the memo stated, the plant’s workers weighed and readied ingredients used to produce the two vaccines in separate areas. But once the factory began full production in December, workers began weighing and clearing materials for both vaccines in a common warehouse.

At the same time, the accelerated pace of production created more waste. Emergent allowed workers to tote it through the warehouse in wheeled containers, according to the F.D.A.’s report and interviews with former Emergent workers familiar with the plant’s procedures.

That mistake is most likely to blame for Emergent’s discovery in March that a batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been contaminated with a key ingredient used to manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine, the memo stated. Emergent said weeks ago that it had discarded that entire batch, the equivalent of 15 million doses.

On Friday, the F.D.A. decided that an additional 60 million Johnson & Johnson doses should not be used. The agency said it considered a separate 10 million doses to be safe, effective and suitable for distribution in the United States or for export. Emergent and Johnson & Johnson have both cast the clearance of those doses as a positive development that will help fight the pandemic.

The memo said that the contamination discovered in March most likely occurred when workers removing waste from AstraZeneca’s production zone tainted bioreactor materials that were being readied for use in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Besides the 15 million doses that had to be tossed out, the F.D.A. said, an additional 60 million should be discarded because the same lax procedures were used in producing them and evidence of trace contamination might not have shown up in tests.

There is no evidence that even a low level of contamination “would have no impact on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine,” the memo stated.

Even though the plant did not fully follow good manufacturing practices, regulators decided to clear 10 million doses, citing the continuing Covid-19 public health emergency. Those batches were produced under better conditions, before “the overloading of the facility’s capacities and the transit of waste in the area that led to the cross contamination,” the memo stated.

The agency also underscored the fact that regulators were concerned about Emergent’s practices before the contaminated batch was discovered. In September, it stated, inspectors cited manufacturing areas crowded with equipment and supplies, inadequate support for quality assurance and a need to improve the flow of materials and equipment.

During a follow-up visit in early February, inspectors were troubled by the number of personnel changes and new hires, as well as the need for more consistency in following manufacturing procedures, the memo said.

The government agreed in May 2020 to pay Emergent monthly fees that as of this April would have totaled about $200 million. A federal official said the Biden administration has not been paying the Emergent fees, which were tied to production of the AstraZeneca vaccine since about April.

After the contamination was discovered, federal officials stripped Emergent of the responsibility of producing AstraZeneca’s vaccine. If and when the factory is allowed to reopen, Emergent will only produce the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and only under Johnson and Johnson’s direct supervision. A decision on whether the Baltimore plant can resume operations is expected in a few weeks.