June 8 coronavirus news

As more people get vaccinated the spread of Covid-19 becomes more controlled, public health officials are issuing new travel advice for more than 120 countries.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its international travel guidance on Monday to give specific advice for both vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers.

The update includes moving 33 countries, including Iceland, Israel and Singapore, into the lowest risk category. 

The CDC's Covid-19 revised Travel Health Notice guidelines also seek to "better differentiate countries with severe outbreak situations" from countries in which Covid-19 is "sustained, but controlled."

The CDC’s threat levels are determined by the number of Covid-19 cases in a given country. At each level, the CDC recommends getting vaccinated, but its guidance for unvaccinated people varies by how severe the pandemic is in each country. 

• The CDC recommends avoiding travel to countries at level 4, the highest threat level, which have more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents in the last 28 days. They include nations such as Brazil, India and Iraq.
• For countries at level 3, such as Mexico, Russia, and Iran, the CDC recommends against nonessential travel for that those who are unvaccinated. These are currently reporting 100 to 500 cases per 100,000 residents.
• At level 2, the agency recommends that unvaccinated travelers who are at severe risk for severe illness from Covid-19 should avoid visiting. These nations, such as Finland, Cambodia and Kenya, are currently reporting 50-99 cases per 100,000. 
• Finally, countries at level 1, such as Australia and New Zealand, are considered the lowest risk destinations, and have reported less than 50 Covid-19 cases in the last 28 days. The CDC still recommends getting vaccinated before traveling to a low-risk location.

See the CDC's Travel Health Notice here, and the CDC's interactive travel map here.

Four days after online registration opened for West Virginia’s “Do it for Babydog: Save a life, Change a life” vaccination lottery, more than 70,000 West Virginians have already registered to win, Gov. Jim Justice announced during a briefing Tuesday.

“What we’re trying to do is to bring a smile to many people’s faces through this lottery,” Justice said. “We’re tickled to death to be able to give away a lot of incredible stuff, but we need all West Virginians to step up and get vaccinated.” 

All West Virginians ages 12 and older who have had at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine are eligible to register for the lottery named after the governor’s bulldog Babydog.

The state’s lottery giveaways include a $1.588 million grand prize, a $588,000 second prize, weekly drawings for $1 million, full scholarships to any West Virginia state college or university, custom-outfitted trucks, weekend vacations at state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting rifles and shotguns.

Less than a month after the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was authorized for use in people as young as 12 years in the US, half of those 12 and older have now been fully vaccinated, according to data published Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

The CDC reported that 303,923,667 doses have now been administered, 81.7% of the 372,100,285 doses delivered. That’s 1,071,750 more doses reported administered since Monday, for a seven-day average of more than 1 million doses per day. 

The data shows that 140,411,378 people ­– about 50.1% of the eligible population of those 12 and older in the US – are now fully vaccinated. 

More than 171 million people ­– about 51.7% of the total US population – have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose and more than 141 million people – 42.3% of the population – are fully vaccinated.

Note: Data published by the CDC may be delayed, and doses may not have been administered on the day reported. 

Carnival Cruise Line will resume operations for two of its ships in July, but only for fully vaccinated guests, the company announced in a press release Monday. 

That means only customers who have waited 14 days after their final Covid-19 vaccine dose will qualify, according to the company.  

“We appreciate the progress and support for our U.S. restart from the CDC and other key federal agencies; however, the current CDC requirements for cruising with a guest base that is unvaccinated will make it very difficult to deliver the experience our guests expect, especially given the large number of families with younger children who sail with us. As a result, our alternative is to operate our ships from the U.S. during the month of July with vaccinated guests,” president of Carnival Cruise Line Christine Duffy said in the statement.

The Carnival Vista will be ready for guest operations on July 3 and the Carnival Breeze on July 15, both from the Port of Galveston, the company said, adding that it hopes for a July restart for the Carnival Horizon from PortMiami.  

Duffy went onto thank local government officials including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

For more than a year now, many of us have followed the standard drill: wash our hands, stay 6 feet apart, choose outdoor activities over indoors, and – most of all – wear a mask.

But as more people get vaccinated, the rules are stating to loosen. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks outdoors or even indoors, except in a few circumstances.

While the news was certainly a cause for celebration, it also was a cause for confusion.

Here's are some things you should assess when going mask-free.

Rethink you mental shortcuts: When we try to solve problems or make decisions, we rely on "heuristics," a fancy name for the rules of thumb, intuition and mental shortcuts that help with our judgment, according to Eve Wittenberg, a health decision scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

But with Covid there is ambiguity – the not knowing what the probability of certain outcomes are. And she said that it makes taking a risk, like whether to dine indoors, board a plane or attend that concert, even harder.

The most crucial tip for decision-making in poker and life is to update your decisions based on the incoming information.

Assess how protected you are: First, for the most part, unvaccinated people are primarily a risk to other unvaccinated people. They aren't much of a risk to the vaccinated and the vaccinated aren't much of a risk to them.

There are two key points to remember. One is that vaccinated people are very unlikely to get really sick, even if they do have the rare breakthrough infection. Second, for people who live with a child under 12 or someone who for health-related reasons can't mount an immune response from a vaccine – even if you do get infected, the science is beginning to show that you're very unlikely to then be contagious enough to spread the virus to somebody else in your family or community.

Experts say for most people, in most situations where we are not close to people for a long period of time, it's really about assessing the situation that you're in and taking steps to mitigate the risk.

Think about if you are risk-tolerant or risk-averse: This is the idea that some people's nature makes them more cautious – or in other words, people differ in what they worry about.

Experts say people should take in information and evaluate how trustworthy they consider it and how relevant it is to their own situation.

The United States added 16,281 new Covid-19 cases in children between May 27 and June 3, the lowest number of new child cases in a week since the week ending in June 6, 2020, according to data published Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

These numbers represent a nearly 52% decline from the previous week, which logged 34,463 new cases in children. This is the largest percentage decline of the pandemic, according to AAP data. 

Cumulatively, nearly 4 million children have tested positive for Covid-19 in the United States, according to AAP data. Even with the week-by-week decline, children accounted for nearly 1 in 5 new cases reported overall between May 27 and June 3. 

Total cases in children remain the highest in California, but Vermont has the highest percentage of cases in children. Per AAP reporting, nine states have 18% or more of their Covid-19 cases in children. 

AAP pulls data from individual states, which means reporting can be inconsistent. In this most recent report, Texas only contributed age distribution for 3% of cases, Massachusetts only reported age distribution for cases within the last two weeks, and New York only contributed age distribution for cases reported from New York City. States also define “child cases” differently, ranging from 0-14 in some states to 0-20 in others. 

New York state continues to break its own record-low Covid-19 positivity metrics, the governor said Tuesday, noting that the statewide vaccination rate is at 68.9%.

When 70% of adult New Yorkers have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said he plans to lift "virtually all" pandemic-related restrictions.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the US is "working closely with the Canadians" to ensure that necessary travel across the border is not impeded by Covid-19 restrictions.

"I'm particularly concerned with communities especially that have to transit through Canada," he said. "What I can tell you is we're working closely with the Canadians to see if we want to make sure that the ability of our citizens to go to and fro is sustained."

Nonessential travel across land border crossings between the US and Canada has been limited for more than a year.

The potential for Covid-19 vaccine doses to go unused and expire in individual states should not impact plans to distribute vaccines globally, White House Covid-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said in a briefing on Tuesday.

“Our first goal and our first opportunity is that every dose that’s been ordered by a governor in a state gets used,” he said. “There is a very, very small fraction of doses that have been sent out to states that will ultimately not be used."

“These will be fractional amounts and really will not have any significant bearing on our ability to commit to distribute vaccines globally,” he added.

On Tuesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine urged residents of his state to get vaccinated, saying in a news release that 200,000 doses of the state’s Johnson & Johnson vaccine stock were set to expire before the end of the month. In the release, the governor’s office said Ohio does not have the ability to share these doses with other states or countries.

“Look, it's not realistic to expect that not a single dose will go to waste,” Slavitt said, responding to a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “I will tell you that a very, very small fraction of the doses that have been sent to states, that are in the hundreds of millions, will end up not being used. Remember those doses were ordered by states, delivered by states and should end up in people's arms.”

Slavitt said they’re “working aggressively” to get doses administered, and encouraged states to work with the US Food and Drug Administration on storage solutions. 

They “would encourage every governor to who has doses that they worry may be expiring to work with the FDA directly on the proper storage procedures … as they continue to examine processes that will allow the doses to potentially last longer, as they go through those trials,” he said. 

The numbers: Only about 11 million people have received the Johnson & Johnson shot – a small fraction of the 171 million people who have been vaccinated in the United States. But nearly twice as many J&J doses – about 21.4 million – have been delivered to states and other jurisdictions, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, however, about 83% of the doses delivered have been administered.