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Life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020, the federal government reported on Thursday, the largest drop since World War II and a grim measure of the deadly consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
Life expectancy — the average number of years that a newborn is expected to live — is the most basic measure of the health of a population, and the stark decline over such a short period is highly unusual and a signal of deep distress. The drop comes after a series of troubling smaller declines driven largely by a surge in drug overdose deaths. A fragile recovery over the past two years has now been wiped out.
Thursday’s figures give the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans, which dropped to 77.8 years from 78.8 years in 2019. It also showed a deepening of racial and ethnic disparities: Life expectancy of the Black population declined by 2.7 years in the first half of 2020, after 20 years of gains. The gap between Black and white Americans, which had been narrowing, is now at six years, the widest since 1998.
“I knew it was going to be large, but when I saw those numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Elizabeth Arias, the federal researcher who produced the report, said of the racial disparity. Of the drop for the full population, she said, “We haven’t seen a decline of that magnitude in decades.”
Still, unlike the drop caused by the extended, complex problem of drug overdoses, this one, driven largely by Covid-19, is not likely to last as long because virus deaths are easing and people are being vaccinated. In 1918, when hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the flu pandemic, life expectancy declined 11.8 years from the previous year, Dr. Arias said, down to 39. Numbers fully rebounded the following year.
Even if such a rebound occurs this time, the social and economic effects of Covid-19 will linger, researchers noted, as will disproportionate effects on people of color. Some researchers said that drug deaths, which began surging again in 2019 and 2020, may continue to lower life expectancy.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former New York City health commissioner who is now a professor of health and human rights at Harvard, said that unless the country better addressed inequality, “We may see U.S. life expectancy stagnate or decline for some time to come.”
She noted that life expectancy here began to lag behind other developed countries in the 1980s. One theory is that growing economic disparities affected health. Life conditions that have exacerbated Covid-19 rates, like overcrowded housing and inadequate protections for low-wage workers, will only add to that trend, she said.
In Thursday’s figures, Black and Hispanic Americans were hit harder and the fatalities in these groups skewed younger. Over all, the death rate for Black Americans with Covid-19 was almost twice that for white Americans as of late January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the death rate for Hispanics was 2.3 times higher than for white non-Hispanic Americans.
The 2.7-year drop in life expectancy for African-Americans from January through June of last year was the largest decline, followed by a 1.9-year drop for Hispanic Americans and a 0.8-year drop for white Americans.
Dr. Bassett said she expected life expectancy for Hispanic people to decline further over the second half of 2020, when Covid-19 death rates for that demographic continued to rise even as they dropped for white and Black Americans.
Rates of vaccination in Black and Latino communities in New York are lower than rates in largely white communities, new data shows, the latest evidence that suggests they aren’t getting equal access to vaccines, even though they have been disproportionately been affected by the coronavirus.
The picture is hazy because accurate national data on race and ethnicity is lagging. But experts and leaders in these communities say the data shows that Black and Latino Americans are being vaccinated at lower rates because they face obstacles like language and technology barriers, disparities in access to medical facilities and getting to a site.
Some Black and Latino Americans face other problems, too, including social media misinformation and hesitancy to get the vaccine because of mistrust in government officials and doctors.
Data released on Tuesday on the 1.3 million vaccines administered in New York City showed lower rates of vaccination in predominantly Black areas. New York State also reports Latino and Black residents to be behind in vaccination totals.
President Biden has repeatedly said that racial equity is at the center of his response to the coronavirus pandemic and he appointed an adviser, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, to tackle that. The Biden administration announced a program last week that began to ship vaccines to federally funded clinics in underserved communities.
The federal government also sent one million doses to about 6,500 retail pharmacies beginning last week. But researchers who did a county-level analysis, which included community pharmacies, federally qualified health centers, hospital outpatient departments and rural health clinics, found that more than a one-third of U.S. counties have two or fewer of those facilities.
This makes access to vaccines more difficult, according to the study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and West Health Policy Center.
While vaccine hesitancy may play a role in Black and Latino communities, Sean Dickson, the director of health policy at the West Health Policy Center, said that the study shows evidence of effects from systemic health infrastructure issues.
“It’s important that we don’t rest on vaccine hesitancy as a crutch,” Mr. Dickson said, adding that it could sometimes be used to blame Black and Latino communities. “If we don’t do anything to better affirmatively distribute the vaccines in these communities, then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, Renee Muir, the director of development and community relations at the BMS Family Health Center, said she is developing a survey to gather evidence of the challenges affecting the community. Many residents have been deeply affected by the virus because of adverse health conditions and unemployment.
“Now you’re talking about people making decisions to spend $6 round trip, or eating, or paying a phone bill,” Ms. Muir said about residents traveling to get a vaccine.
On messaging platforms like WhatsApp and on social media, Latinos have been exposed to vaccine misinformation, said Dr. Valeria Daniela Lucio Cantos, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University. She has been working to help Latinos understand the vaccine and make appointments.
“There’s this emphasis on the risk and not enough on the benefits of the vaccines,” she said.
But while many older Americans struggle with the online system to register for a vaccine, sites only available in English presented an additional barrier, Dr. Cantos said.
“It feels like the system built for vaccine distribution did not have the Latinx community in mind,” she said, using the gender-neutral term for Latinos. She added that vaccine sites asking for Social Security numbers or insurance numbers made it difficult for undocumented immigrants to feel safe.
As vaccine supplies ramp up, Dr. Paulina Rebolledo, an assistant professor at Emory, hopes that officials begin to rethink their approach by mobilizing with organizations within Black and Latino communities that are trusted by residents and speak various languages.
“We, on the provider side or the health care side, can try to do more to reach patients and have them hear our voices,” she said. “It’s their overall health we’re trying to work on, and this is just an integral part of the movement.”
One million counterfeit N95 masks were seized by federal agents on Wednesday as part of a sweeping fraud investigation stemming from the pandemic, the head of the Department of Homeland Security announced.
The seizure brought the total number of knockoff masks confiscated in recent weeks to more than 11 million, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said during a news conference.
Mr. Mayorkas appeared next to several boxes of masks that had been seized and were stamped with the name 3M, the largest American producer of N95s.
Officials said that the company had been working with investigators to identify sources of counterfeit masks, which originated in China, and that the department expected to make arrests.
Officials also said federal agents had executed search warrants in five states in the past two weeks but would not identify which ones.
The snug-fitting N95 masks, which provide 95 percent efficiency in filtering airborne particles, have become the gold standard for frontline workers in the pandemic. But the intense demand for the masks, which are considered superior to the ubiquitous pleated ones, has given rise to the production of counterfeits.
Steve K. Francis, an assistant director for the Global Trade Investigations Division of Homeland Security Investigations, said during the news conference that there could be deadly repercussions from the sale of counterfeit N95 masks.
“They’re extremely dangerous,” Mr. Francis said. “They’re providing a false sense of security to our first line responders, to American consumers.”
As millions get vaccinated, Apple is making a design change to its syringe emoji, swapping an image with drops of blood at the end of the emoji’s needle for one that looks more like a vaccine.
The redesigned emoji is available only to members of the company’s beta program but will be publicly available with iOS 14.5. While new emojis are more difficult to approve, changing an emoji’s design can enact a similar result on a faster timeline, according to Keith Broni, the deputy emoji officer at Emojipedia, a service that archives the design and usage trends of emojis.
The syringe emoji dates to 1999 and had been used mainly to illustrate blood donations in Japan. The emoji was often used in discussions around blood donations and even tattooing, Mr. Broni said.
“When you provide someone with a communication tool, they will use it as they see fit,” Mr. Broni said. “We’ve seen many different emojis take on many different connotations.”
Mr. Broni said he had started to notice a spike in the usage of the emoji late last year, and saw that the conversations people were having on Twitter while using it had pivoted to talk about coronavirus vaccines.
Mr. Broni said he expected the change from Apple to be a permanent one, and that other technology companies would be likely to follow suit. He said the emoji that resembles a vaccine injection could be used more readily and that removing the blood would make the emoji more flexible and less intimidating.
global roundup
The Hong Kong government said on Thursday that it had approved Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine, a drug manufactured by a mainland Chinese company that has faced scrutiny around the world over shipping delays and spotty data disclosures.
Hong Kong’s health authorities said the first million doses of the vaccine, called CoronaVac, would arrive on Friday and that vaccinations would begin next week, starting with essential workers and people over 60.
The announcement is notable because Hong Kong is one of only a few governments in Asia to have approved CoronaVac for use. Several other countries have said they would only do so after receiving full trial data from the manufacturer.
Malaysia and Singapore, for instance, have both ordered doses from Sinovac. But officials in both countries have had to reassure their citizens that they would approve a vaccine only if it had been proved safe and effective.
In January, officials in Brazil said that the efficacy rate of CoronaVac was just over 50 percent, barely above the World Health Organization’s threshold for an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The company said the efficacy rate was weaker than expected because the trial had been conducted among health care workers, who had a higher risk of contracting Covid-19, and included people with “mild symptoms.”
Sinovac has given government-appointed experts in Hong Kong late-stage trial data for CoronaVac showing a 62.3 percent efficacy rate after two shots, Lau Chak Sing, the spokesman of a coronavirus vaccine advisory panel, told reporters on Tuesday. The advisers reviewed the data and determined that vaccine’s benefits outweighed the risks, he said.
Sinovac did not release the data publicly.
Pitching CoronaVac to the Hong Kong public could be tough: A recent poll conducted by the University of Hong Kong showed that fewer than three in 10 residents would take it, because of worries about its weak efficacy. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had the highest level of acceptability, at 55.9 per cent.
Hong Kong’s health authorities approved the Pfizer vaccine in late January, and the first doses are expected to arrive in late February.
Beijing officials once hoped that Sinovac and other Chinese-made vaccines would burnish the country’s global reputation. At least 24 countries, most of them low and middle income, signed deals with the Chinese vaccine companies because they offered access when richer nations had claimed most of the doses made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Now Beijing is on the defensive, and China’s state-run media has been waging a misinformation campaign against the American vaccines, questioning their safety and promoting the Chinese ones.
In other news from around the world:
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India will require travelers arriving from Brazil and South Africa to undergo a coronavirus test, to prevent variants from spreading. The Health Ministry said on Thursday that India had recorded one case of the variant circulating in Brazil, four variant cases from South Africa and 187 from Britain. India has recorded nearly 11 million cases during the pandemic. Its death toll of 156,014 is the world’s third-highest after the United States and Brazil, according to a New York Times database.
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Nepal on Thursday approved a vaccine manufactured by Sinopharm, a state-owned vaccine maker from China. The Sinopharm vaccine is the second to be approved for emergency use in Nepal after Covishield, the Indian-made version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Nepal, which borders both China and India, is one of the places where the two countries are competing to distribute vaccines. Nepal approved Sinopharm’s vaccine days after the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, had pledged to donate 500,000 doses. India has already sent a million Covishield doses. As of Thursday, more than 400,000 frontline health workers and other essential workers had been vaccinated.
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China has begun requiring that travelers isolate for 14 days before flying in from some countries in Africa and Asia, according to notices posted on Chinese embassies’ websites this week. Places affected include Egypt, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. China already required anyone entering from abroad to quarantine for multiple weeks upon arrival, as do numerous other countries. Mandatory quarantine before travel appears to be far rarer.
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Spectators were allowed back into the Australian Open on Thursday, hours after the state of Victoria ended a five-day lockdown it had imposed to contain an outbreak in a Melbourne quarantine hotel. The tennis tournament’s director, Craig Tiley, said that 7,477 fans would be allowed in for each session, about half capacity. Fans are required to wear masks while indoors or when they are unable to socially distance.
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Zimbabwe began its first vaccinations using 200,000 Sinopharm doses donated by China. The country’s daily new cases have slowed down after a recent wave, and the government relaxed some lockdown rules on Monday. Zimbabwe has recorded 35,423 cases and 1,418 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
Roughly a third of America’s military personnel are declining to receive coronavirus vaccines when they are offered, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
The refusal rate is slightly above that of the civilian population, and is the same for active-duty troops and for those in the National Guard, who have been helping state governments administer coronavirus tests and vaccines.
About 960,000 members of the military and its contractors have been vaccinated, Robert G. Salesses, the acting assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security, told members of the House Armed Services Committee at a hearing on Wednesday. As in the civilian world, the priority for administering vaccinations has been people working in heath care and those over 65.
The Pentagon can require troops to receive standard immunizations, but it cannot make Covid-19 vaccination mandatory, at least for now. That is because the vaccines have been released through federal emergency use authorizations, rather than through the normal, much lengthier approval process. So all the military can do is urge troops to get the shots, not order them to.
“We think it’s important that the department continues to communicate to our service members the safety of the vaccine,” Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the hearing. He added that troops who decline the vaccine are still permitted to deploy overseas.
For the nation’s entire history, the military has recognized that disease can be far more lethal than an enemy, and it has repeatedly forced troops to be vaccinated. In 1777, George Washington was the first military leader commanding troops to take action to prevent an epidemic by ordering all of his troops to be inoculated against smallpox. That primitive vaccine posed a risk of death. Washington wrote at the time, “This expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects.”
In the generations since, the military has mandated troops be vaccinated against a growing list of diseases, including typhoid in 1911, tetanus in 1941, and anthrax in 1997. Today, troops are required to have several other vaccines to travel overseas.
In a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 31 percent of respondents from the general public said that they would wait until the vaccine “has been available for a while to see how it is working for other people” before getting the shot themselves. Various news reports and studies have found that refusal rates are highest among Republicans and among Hispanic adults, including many who work in health care.
Defense officials said they were studying the demographics of those in uniform who decline the vaccines, and had reached no conclusions yet.
Most states have relied on National Guard personnel to help respond to the pandemic, including assisting with vaccine distribution and even putting shots in arms.
The Biden administration recently announced that it would open 100 new vaccination sites around the country, operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and assisted by hundreds if not thousands of active-duty service members. About 1,100 troops have been deployed at the five centers that have been set up so far.
Dave Philipps contributed reporting.
The Democratic leaders of the New York State Senate are moving to strip Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of unilateral emergency powers granted during the pandemic, setting up an unusual rebuke by members of his own party.
The measures, which could come to a vote next week, underscore the deepening division between Mr. Cuomo and state lawmakers since he acknowledged having intentionally withheld critical data on virus-related deaths from them.
The F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York have opened an inquiry into the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic. The inquiry, which was confirmed by three people familiar with the matter, is in its earliest stages, and it is not clear whether it is focused on any individual.
The inquiry, first reported in The Times Union of Albany, was another indication of the shift in Mr. Cuomo’s position since March, when he emerged as a prominent national voice in a crisis through his daily briefings. Now, much of that good will has evaporated.
The Senate’s action also illustrates fatigue in the Democratic-controlled State Legislature over his use of powers that gave him broad control over the state’s response to the virus, from ordering shutdowns to managing vaccine distribution.
Lawmakers discussed limiting his powers earlier this year but did not take any steps. On Wednesday, State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat and chairman of the health committee, said it was now time for action. “We need to remind them that state government is not one big branch: There’s three of them,” he said.
The tension was out in the open on Wednesday, with Mr. Cuomo attacking critics, singling out Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat, who said the governor had threatened him last week — an accusation the governor’s staff called a lie.
Earlier this week, a group of State Assembly Democrats circulated a letter seeking support for revoking Mr. Cuomo’s powers and suggesting the administration had broken federal law — an accusation the governor denied on Wednesday. That came less than a week after 14 Senate Democrats signed a statement saying that “it is clear that the expanded emergency powers granted to the governor are no longer appropriate.”
Senate leaders now intend to pass a bill that would limit the governor’s ability to supersede state laws and would establish a commission of state lawmakers to evaluate future pandemic-related directives and suspensions of laws.
The last month has been one of turmoil for Mr. Cuomo, who is known for his combative politics. After a scathing report from Letitia James, the state attorney general, that suggested the death toll at nursing homes had been undercounted, the official number of residents of nursing homes and similar institutions was increased from about 8,500 to more than 15,000.
As the virus claimed the lives of thousands of nursing home residents, the state count had left out those who had died in hospitals rather than at the homes.
The governor acknowledged on Monday that there had been “a delay” in releasing the full story.
Nicole Hong and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
When President Biden set a goal last year of 100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots in the first 100 days of his presidency, it now seems that he was aiming low. With the pace of vaccinations quickly rising in the United States, the nation appears likely to get there with more than a month to spare.
About 36.6 million doses have been given in the first four weeks of Mr. Biden’s presidency, bringing the total doses administered to about 56.3 million, as vaccinations have steadily increased since December. The country has averaged 1.64 million doses a day over the last week. (The vaccines that have so far been authorized in the United States involve two doses given several weeks apart, so the number of people who have been fully vaccinated by now is much smaller.)
Mr. Biden said on Tuesday night that the way things are going, vaccines should be available to anyone in the country who wants one “by the end of July,” a timeline made shorter by increasing production and by the prospect that a third vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson and administered in a single dose, nears authorization.
The White House also said that states will collectively begin receiving 13.5 million doses each week, a jump of more than two million, in part because of a shift in how the doses in each vial of the Pfizer vaccine are being counted. Administration officials have framed regular increases in dose allocations as Mr. Biden’s accomplishment, though supplies were expected to grow as Pfizer and Moderna, the makers of the two authorized vaccines, ramped up manufacturing.
Even if the pace of vaccination stays where it is now, Mr. Biden’s initial goal would be met in late March, around Day 67 of his presidency. If the pace keeps rising and reaches 2 million doses a day, the nation could hit the 100-million-shot mark by Day 60.
Before I took office, I set a big goal of administering 100 million shots in the first 100 days. With the progress we’re making I believe we’ll not only reach that, we’ll break it.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 16, 2021
“When he first announced it, it did seem like an ambitious goal,” said Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. But by Inauguration Day, it was a “low bar,” he said, and now, “something catastrophic would have to happen to keep us from achieving the 100 million doses.”
Mr. Biden first announced the benchmark on Dec. 8, several days before the first shot was given in the country outside of a clinical trial. By the time he was sworn in on Jan. 20, the nation was putting nearly 1 million shots into arms each day, adding to the roughly 19.7 million doses given before he took office.
In all, counting both before and after the change of administration in Washington, about 56.3 million doses have been administered, and about 15.5 million Americans have been fully vaccinated so far, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As the president’s initial goal has come within reach, attention has been shifting to the more meaningful challenge of getting vaccine doses to everyone who wants them.
With states expanding their inoculation programs and the federal government gradually expanding supply, Dr. Toner said, the country may be able to administer as many as 3 million doses a day within a few months, twice the pace that Mr. Biden identified in January as a target. That could rein in the spread of the virus to the point that state and local governments could ease restrictions, Dr. Toner said, provided they were careful not to relax too quickly.
“That could get us where we want to go,” he said. “Sometime over the summer, we want life to be looking fairly normal again.”
Noah Weiland contributed reporting.
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