July 15 coronavirus news

People wear face masks at an outdoor mall in Los Angeles on June 11.

Los Angeles County will reinstate its mask mandate regardless of vaccination status starting 11:59 p.m. Saturday night amid a rise in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. 

The new health officer order will require masking indoors regardless of vaccination status, Los Angeles County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a news conference Thursday. 

The daily test positivity rate in Los Angeles County has risen to 3.75%, an increase from 1.2% on June 15. 

The county has seen more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases each day for the past seven days, an alarming new rise as the Delta variant spreads, Davis said.

He explained that the county was at a low level of transmission when it reopened last month. 

“We’re in a different situation,” Davis emphasized. “This is not the same situation as it was June 15.”

Los Angeles County reported 1,537 new cases on Thursday, an 83% increase over the last week.  

“Anything is on the table if things continue to get worse,” Davis said in response to a question about whether the county would consider more restrictions. 

The new health officer order, which requires the use of masks indoors regardless of vaccination status, will add that extra layer of protection where the risk is higher, he said.

The county is urging all residents to get vaccinated and has launched mobile clinics for easier access. 

Los Angeles County has administered more than 10.7 million doses of the vaccine and over five million residents are fully vaccinated, according to Davis.

President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel hold a joint press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 15.

President Biden says he’ll soon be able to answer persistent questions about travel to the US from Europe after German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the matter in the Oval office.

Biden said he brought in members of his Covid team when Merkel raised the question during their bilateral talks.

“It’s in process now,” Biden said, adding he’d be “able to answer that question…in the next several days.” 

While Europe eased restrictions for American travelers last month, the US has maintained strict travel restrictions put in place under former President Trump. Officials have said the spread of the Delta variant has put a hold on reopening to country to Europe.

Merkel said she’d received similar assurances from Biden in their meeting that he was looking into the matter.

She said she had “every confidence in the American Covid team.”

Boston Red Sox players take batting practice at Yankee Stadium on July 15 in New York.

Tonight’s New York Yankees home game versus the Boston Red Sox has been postponed due to positive Covid-19 tests within the Yankees organization, according to Major League Baseball (MLB).

The Red Sox-Yankees game was the lone MLB game on tonight’s schedule following the annual All-Star Game break.

Read the MLB’s full statement:

Rhode Island has become the first state where all public and private colleges and universities require their students to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 before returning to campus this fall, Gov. Dan McKee announced this week.

“Thank you to our institutions for taking proactive steps to keep our communities safe,” McKee tweeted Tuesday.

Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, Rhode Island’s health director, said in the state’s news release that vaccinations are “key” to having a successful academic year.

The schools include:

A healthcare professional draws up a dose of Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at Thornton Little Theatre in Thornton-Cleveleys, England, on January 29.

Almost 100% of people tested positive for antibodies 14 or more days after their second Covid-19 vaccine dose, an English study has found.

More than 207,337 participants in England took part in the home surveillance study for Covid-19 antibodies between May 12 and May 25.

Participants tested themselves at home using a finger prick test 14 days after their second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of a study being conducted by Imperial College London and Ipsos MORI.

The researchers tested the blood for antibodies specifically generated by the vaccines – antibodies that researchers believe protect people against the worst effects of the virus. It’s a different test from the commercial tests used to detect evidence of past coronavirus infection. 

Some context: England is scheduled to lift all restrictions on social contact on Monday despite a rise in cases. On Thursday, 48,553 new cases and 63 Covid-related deaths were reported across the UK, according to government figures.

Following one dose of either vaccine, the proportion of people testing positive for antibodies peaked at four to five weeks after first dose and then started to decline before rising substantially in those who had a second dose, according to the news release.

On Wednesday, the government announced more than two in three adults in the UK have now received both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Anti-vaccine rally protesters hold signs outside of Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, on June 26.

Misinformation and mistrust continue to play a key role in Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, according to a CNN analysis of data from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. 

Nearly half (48%) of people who said they will “definitely” or “probably” not get a Covid-19 vaccine cited mistrust in the vaccines as a reason for not getting vaccinated, according to the latest data, published Wednesday and based on survey responses from June 23 to July 5. That’s an increase from about a month ago, when 46% of people who said they did not plan to be vaccinated gave the same reason. 

And in the latest survey, more than a half (51%) of people who said that they “definitely” or “probably” would not get a Covid-19 vaccine because they were concerned about side effects, up from 49% about a month ago. 

According to the latest Household Pulse Survey data, the top reasons people who said they “definitely” or “probably” will not get a Covid-19 vaccine are: 

Additionally, 14% said that they don’t think Covid-19 is a serious illness and 18% said they don’t know if a vaccine will work. 

The White House is ramping up efforts to push back more aggressively on vaccine disinformation, and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned in a new advisory published Thursday that health misinformation is “a serious threat to public health.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said access to raw data was a challenge at the start of the investigation into the origins of Covid-19 and called on countries to be cooperative with future phases. 

“We have done the phase one, and the phase one has shown some progress, but there are also some challenges that have to be addressed,” he said during a news briefing in Geneva Thursday. “One of the challenges is what you mentioned, you know, access to raw data, especially the data at the start of the pandemic, the raw data was not shared.” 

Tedros later said that he didn’t think momentum had been lost on the origins investigation. 

“We need to continue the study in order to know what exactly happened,” he said. “If we know what happened, then we can prevent future similar crises or problems.” 

The investigation is one of the basics for outbreaks, regardless of their size, he said, and what is done when any outbreak happens, so that the origins can be understood.

“There is the other part of it, especially considering the unprecedented nature of this pandemic, the number of people that died and the number of people that suffered,” Tedros said. “Take the number of deaths alone, more than four million, I think we owe it to them to know what happened. And everybody should cooperate to know what happened, and to prevent the same crisis from happening again. And that’s why we need cooperation.” 

Misinformation about health and health care frequently comes from people trying to share helpful information, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Thursday.

Murthy released an advisory warning of the threat posed by the spread of health misinformation earlier Thursday.

Not all of it is spread deliberately, he told the Stanford panel.

“Yes, there are some nefarious actors who are actively and willfully trying to harm others or generate an advantage to themselves politically or financially by spreading misinformation. But much of what we are seeing is people who think they’re helping sharing misinformation,” he said.

Murthy said this means fighting misinformation can be a personal objective. The surgeon general recommended first making sure that you yourself are not spreading misinformation, and then having conversations with the people around you.

“So, when my parents shared something, show something to me, and I realize it’s false, I often will tell them, ‘Talk to your friend. Not judgmentally, not with blame, but let them know, because they may be unaware, that what they shared actually isn’t true,’” Murthy said. “Doing that with our family and friends respectfully, kindly, is actually an important step that we can take also to slow the spread of misinformation.”

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy speaks during the daily news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on July 15 in Washington, DC.

Peer-to-peer sharing of information is a powerful and essential way to fight vaccine misinformation, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Thursday.

“It’s about peers talking to peers,” he said during a Stanford University panel event on Thursday. “That is actually extraordinarily important.”

Murthy released an advisory earlier Thursday in which he called misinformation a serious threat to public health. “I am urging all Americans to help slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond,” Murthy wrote in a 22-page advisory released Thursday.

College students can help, he told the Stanford panel later. “The trust that you have with your peers is absolutely essential. It’s very powerful,” he said.

And it’s important for people to not themselves be vectors of misinformation, Murthy said.

“Know that you yourself may be doing that, inadvertently. So pausing before you share to check sources, to make sure it’s coming from a scientifically credible source, is really important,” he said.

Respiratory Therapist Robert Blas, left, administers a dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine at a mobile clinic on July 9 in Los Angeles.

The pace of full Covid-19 vaccinations in the US is down 11% from last week and less than a quarter of the pace set in late spring, new government data shows.

The latest data on vaccination efforts in the United States, published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows:

The United States delivered 500,000 Moderna Covid-19 vaccine doses to Haiti on Wednesday, the US Embassy in Port au Prince said in a statement Thursday. 

“In these difficult times, we remain a committed partner to the Haitian people in building a more stable and secure Haiti, including in its fight against COVID,” the statement said.

The doses were delivered with support from the US Coast Guard, the embassy said, adding that the US government “through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Southern Command, is also providing more than $3 million in financial and equipment support to the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP).”

“This support allows Haiti to improve its logistics capability for storage and distribution of the vaccine and craft communications to address vaccine hesitancy in the population,” the embassy statement said. 

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is urging technology companies — as well as everyday Americans — to do more to fight the spread of Covid-19 misinformation online.

“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment, with little accountability to their users. They’ve allowed people to intentionally spread misinformation, what we call disinformation, to have extraordinary reach,” Murthy said during a White House press briefing on Thursday.

“They’ve designed product features, such as like buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content, and their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a wealth of misinformation,” Murthy added, in an apparent allusion to Facebook.

Murthy also made recommendations for people who use social media or online platforms, asking Americans: “if you’re not sure, don’t share.”

“We ask people to raise the bar for sharing health information by checking sources before they share to ensure that information is backed by credible scientific sources. As we say in the advisory. If you’re not sure, don’t share. Second, we’re asking health organizations to proactively address misinformation with their patients,” Murthy said. “We’re asking educational institutions to help improve health information literacy. 

Murthy added that he has lost 10 family members to Covid-19 and it’s “painful” for him to know that every Covid-19 death happening now could have been prevented.

“Health misinformation has cost us lives,” Murthy said.

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy speaks during the daily news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on July 15 in Washington, DC.

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who issued an unprecedented advisory on Covid-19 misinformation Thursday, said that misinformation is among the key reasons that the pace of American vaccinations has slowed.

He continued, “So we know that it’s not the only driver that’s leading people not to be vaccinated, but it is a very important one.”

Asked whether he believed public figures and companies that are helping spread misinformation should be held accountable, Murthy suggested that everyone, but especially those with large platforms, share accountability.

“All of us have to ask how we can be more accountable and responsible for the information that we share,” he said, adding that those with larger platforms “bear a greater responsibility to think about that.”

Technology companies, Murthy said, also “have a critically important role,” issuing an urgent call for them to take “aggressive action.”

“We know that the dramatic increase in the speed and scale of spread of misinformation has in part been enabled by these platforms, so that’s why in this advisory today, we are asking them to step up. We know they have taken some steps to address misinformation, but much, much more has to be done and we can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action because it’s costing people their lives,” he said.

A hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, has reached capacity due to the increased number of Covid-19 patients being admitted. 

The University of Arkansas Medical Center is currently treating 45 Covid-19 patients, 15 of which are in the intensive care unit, 12 are on ventilators and four are on life support, Leslie Taylor, University of Arkansas Medical Sciences spokesperson, tells CNN.  

Taylor says the patients they are currently treating are younger and sicker than those they saw in the first surge. 

Cam Patterson, chancellor with UAMS, tweeted on Tuesday that over 20% of Covid-19 inpatients at UAM Health are unvaccinated pregnant women. 

Taylor said there are emergency room patients and people with conditions other than Covid-19 who need to be transferred from other hospitals and are being turned away because there are no available beds for them at this time. 

University of Arkansas Medical Center is the only Level One Trauma Center in the state. 

As the more transmissible Delta variant continues to spread and Covid-19 cases rise in the US, experts say the most effective way to stop the spread of the coronavirus is to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.

In 47 states, the rate of new cases in the past week are at least 10% higher than the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Of those, 35 have seen increases of over 50%.

However, only 48.2% of the country is fully vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Not to mention, the rate of new vaccinations is on the decline.

The reason for this, experts say, all boils down to disinformation.

As misleading information spreads, unvaccinated Americans are now seeing the largest impact of the pandemic.

Data now shows that over 99% of people currently hospitalized with Covid-19 are unvaccinated, Collins said. Therefore, those who are vaccinated have enough protection to prevent getting severely ill.

According to Collins, the data speaks for itself, proving that vaccines are effective.

“Why are we waiting folks? Let’s roll up our sleeves if we haven’t already done so,” he said.

People walk by the Olympic rings installed by the Nippon Bashi bridge in Tokyo on Thursday, July 15.

The 2020 Olympic Games, which were delayed a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, are kicking off next Friday in Tokyo. As the Games approach, vaccine rates have remained relatively low in Japan and daily cases have begun to spike in Tokyo.

Here’s everything you need to know ahead of next week’s Games:

Olympic medal ceremony: The Olympic medal ceremony is undergoing several changes in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19. According to the International Olympic Committee, some changes include mandatory masks for all participants and a modified podium with additional modules between medalists to allow for social distancing. There will also be no contact between participants and no group photo on the podium.

Spectators: Tokyo venues for the Olympics will no longer allow spectators, according to the Japanese Olympic Committee. This decision was made after Tokyo declared a coronavirus state of emergency from July 12 to August 22, a period which covers the 16-day Games. Tokyo 2020 chief Seiko Hashimoto said due to the pandemic, organizers have “no choice but to hold the Games in a limited way.”

Covid-19 cases: Tokyo reported 1,308 new Covid-19 cases today, the second straight day with cases over 1,000. Daily cases have been increasing weekly for the past 26 days, according to public broadcaster NHK, and recent numbers are some of the highest reported in half a year. According to Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of the country’s pandemic response, the more infectious Delta variant now accounts for up to 30% of cases.

Vaccines: Japan has lagged behind Western countries in rolling out vaccines. Just less than 20% of Japan’s population is fully vaccinated in comparison to nearly 48% of US citizens and almost 52% of people in the United Kingdom, according to CNN’s global vaccine tracker.

CNN’s Alyssa Kraus, Aleks Klosok, Junko Ogura, Chie Kobayashi and Nectar Gan contributed to this report.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said that the Covid-19 pandemic is still a public health emergency of international concern, in a WHO statement released Thursday.

This determination came after the eighth meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee regarding the pandemic, which happened on Wednesday.

“The Director-General determined that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to constitute a PHEIC. He accepted the advice of the Committee to WHO and issued the Committee’s advice to States Parties as Temporary Recommendations under the IHR. 

Speaking about the Committee meeting during a news briefing in Geneva on Thursday, Tedros said “the committee has expressed concern that the pandemic is being mischaracterized as coming to an end when it’s nowhere near finished. It has also warned about the strong likelihood for the emergence and global spread of new and possibly more dangerous variants of concern that may be even more challenging to control.”

The Committee also “expressed deep concern” about the level of funding for WHO’s Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan for Covid-19, Tedros said, which constrains the ability of WHO to coordinate the global pandemic response, “particularly in terms of having the flexibility we need to move at the speed this virus moves.”

The advice of the committee to WHO included recommendations such as continuing to work with States Parties to implement public health social measures to control transmission; continuing to advocate for equitable vaccine access and distribution; expediting the work to establish means for documenting Covid-19 status of travelers; continuing to strengthen the global monitoring and assessment framework for variants; strengthening communication strategies at all levels and collecting information from State Parties on the uptake and progress in implementing temporary recommendations.

The committee’s temporary recommendations to States Parties include continuing evidence-informed use of public health social measures; implementing a risk-management approach for mass gathering events; achieving at least 10% of all countries populations vaccinated by September; enhancing surveillance of the virus and report to WHO; improving access to and administration of WHO recommended therapeutics; continuing a risk based approach to facilitate international travel and share information with WHO; no requiring proof of vaccination for international travel; recognizing all vaccines that have receive WHO emergency use listing and addressing community engagement and communication gaps at national and local levels.

Dr. Catherine O'Neal, chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rogue, speaks during an interview on July 15.

A Louisiana hospital medical officer said it is “disheartening” to see “a surge happening again when we really have made [Covid-19] a preventible disease.”

Dr. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rogue, said that the current rise in cases that her hospital is seeing is different from other spikes in a few ways.

“The cases are younger. They’re largely unvaccinated, almost predominantly unvaccinated. And also people who made this choice. … They have the knowledge in their hand, but they choose not to take the life raft that we’ve been throwing at them,” she told CNN’s Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto.

One of the five largest under-vaccinated clusters is in Louisiana.

O’Neal said she has conversations with patients about getting vaccinated.

“We have a lot of conversations about risk, about what it means for you, about what it means for the community. And in the end … do you want to see a lot more death or do you want an end to the pandemic? Because the choice for vaccination right now … really boils down to those two things: Either a lot more people will die because everybody is going to get this or we’ll end the pandemic through vaccination,” she said. “And which side of that do you want to be on? And how do you want to contribute to this process? And I hope we make the right choice.”

Cuba reported a record 67 Covid-19 related deaths on Thursday, according to the country’s health ministry.

The death toll in Cuba since the start of the pandemic is 1,726.

Additionally, the island nation added 6,749 new cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number of cases to 263,356.

Cuba has seen the number of cases and deaths spike in recent weeks after controlling the infection rate for much of the pandemic.

Many Cubans have been critical of the governments Covid-19 response and the deep economic toll the pandemic has had on the country. 

Late Wednesday, the Cuban government announced it will lift restrictions on travelers bringing in food, medicines and hygiene products and custom duties on these products will not need to be paid. 

The announcement comes days after island-wide protests have occurred driven in part by chronic shortages in stores and the impact Covid-19 is having on the country.

The measure will stay in place for the rest of the year.

South Africa’s Olympic Rugby Sevens team is isolating in Tokyo after a passenger on their incoming flight to Japan tested positive for coronavirus, according to a statement on the SA Rugby website.

The team’s players and management tested negative upon arrival but their onward travel to a training camp has been delayed.

Springbok Sevens coach Neil Powell told Springboks.Rugby that adaptability will be key to the Olympics. 

A decision on further travel is expected after results are in from the team’s test on Thursday.