Coronavirus

“I can imagine a production network in South America and for Africa,” Sahin said at a briefing with members of Germany’s foreign press association. “We are also talking about African production sites.”

Though BioNTech and its U.S. partner Pfizer Inc. have committed to make 2.5 billion doses of their two-shot vaccine this year, the vast majority are tied up in lucrative contracts with the world’s wealthiest countries. Africa trails the rest of the world in accessing the shots it needs to immunize its more than 1 billion residents. Globally, countries with the highest incomes are getting vaccinated about 25 times faster than those with the lowest, Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker shows.

ONS figures show death rate starting to rise at beginning of first lockdown and increasing sharply each quarter

CDC: People vaccinated against Covid-19 can go without masks
indoors and outdoors

The requirement to wear masks during travel -- on buses, trains, planes and public transportation --
still stands, Dr. Rochelle Walensky said. Guidance for travel will be updated as science emerges.

She also said that "the past year has shown us that this virus can be unpredictable, so if things get
worse, there is always a chance we may need to make a change to these recommendations."

People who develop Covid-19 symptoms, even those who are vaccinated, should put their mask
back on and get tested, Walensky said.

Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

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