Month: January 2021

One of the UK’s most notorious serial killers has been offered a COVID-19 jab before millions of Britain’s elderly and most vulnerable — a move condemned as a “national scandal,” according to a report. Levi Bellfield — who murdered three people, including 13-year-old Milly Dowler — received a letter offering him a vaccine in the coming weeks even as the program has only just been rolled out to those over 70, The Sun said. David Spencer, of the Centre for Crime Prevention, called it “a national scandal.” “The notion of criminals being prioritized over law-abiding citizens says everything about the way our criminal justice system is run at the moment,” he told The Sun. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett said it defied belief “that prisoners, let alone...

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COVID-19 has killed more than 417,000 Americans in less than a year, and infections have continued to mount despite the introduction of a pair of vaccines late in 2020. USA TODAY is tracking the news. Keep refreshing this page for the latest updates. Sign up for our Coronavirus Watch newsletter for updates to your inbox, join our Facebook group or scroll through our in-depth answers to reader questions. The United States on Sunday surpassed 25 million cases of COVID-19, but an influential coronavirus model says the true number is likely much higher. About 17% of people in the U.S., or upward of 50 million people, have been infected with the coronavirus, researchers at the University of Washington estimate. They warn the U.S. is likely only identifying about half of COVID-19 cases. The mod...

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The unrelenting increase in COVID-19 infections in Spain following the holiday season is again straining hospitals, threatening the mental health of doctors and nurses who have been at the forefront of the pandemic for nearly a year. In Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar, the critical care capacity has more than doubled and is nearly full, with 80% of ICU beds occupied by coronavirus patients. “There are young people of 20-something-years-old and older people of 80-years-old, all the age groups,” said Dr. Joan Ramon Masclans, who heads the ICU. “This is very difficult, and it is one patient after another.” Even though authorities allowed gatherings of up to 10 people for Christmas and New Year celebrations, Masclans chose not to join his family and spent the holidays a...

President Joe Biden seeks to reset the nation’s inconsistent coronavirus testing efforts with a $50 billion plan and more federal oversight. Biden’s plan calls for a newly-created Pandemic Testing Board to coordinate a “clear, unified approach,” to testing for COVID-19, a marked difference from the Trump administration’s policy of states establishing their own plans with federal support. Laboratories have ramped up production to more than 2 million tests each day, but stubborn problems persist. Some labs still struggle to complete timely tests – particularly when demand surges – due to shortages of critical supplies. Public health labs largely are not equipped to detect new coronavirus variants such as ones first identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa. And there's still debat...

URK, Netherlands (AP) — Rioting youths protesting on the first night of a Dutch curfew torched a coronavirus testing facility and threw fireworks at police in a Dutch fishing village. Police said Sunday they fined more than 3,600 people nationwide for breaching the curfew that ran from 9 p.m. Saturday until 4:30 a.m. Sunday and arrested 25 people for breaching the curfew or for violence. Video from the village of Urk, 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Amsterdam, showed youths breaking into the coronavirus testing facility near the village’s harbor before it was set ablaze Saturday night. The police and municipality issued a statement Sunday expressing their anger at rioting, “from throwing fireworks and stones to destroying police cars and with the torching of the test location as a ...