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      US passes 10m Covid cases as virus rages across nation

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      The number of US coronavirus cases passed 10m on Monday as the virus raged across many parts of the nation.
      The US recorded more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases for a fifth day in a row on Sunday, and the death toll passed 237,000.
      The numbers were released as Joe Biden named the members of his own Covid taskforce – and it was reported that Ben Carson, the housing and urban development secretary, had become the latest senior Trump aide to test positive for the virus.
      Trump adviser David Bossie also tested positive as a new cluster of infections appeared to spring up in White House circles.
      There was also promising news about the quest for a vaccine.
      Some counts had previously put the US caseload over 10m but according to data from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, 105,927 new cases on Sunday brought the total to 9,964,540 earlier on Monday and the total did not pass the 10m mark until the afternoon.
      The daily number was down from record highs on Friday and Saturday. The death toll stood at 237,409. But with cases holding at more than 100,000 a day, Dr Anthony Fauci’s infamous warning earlier this month still rang true.
      “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
      Deaths are expected to rise. “The next two months are going to be rough, difficult ones,” Dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, told the Associated Press. “We could see another 100,000 deaths by January.”
      During the presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly insisted the US was “rounding the corner” and refused to enforce mitigation measures at the White House and campaign events. On Monday, Carson followed the president, members of his family, senior White House and campaign aides and top Republicans in Congress in contracting the virus.
      Carson reportedly experienced symptoms and was tested at Walter Reed hospital, outside Washington DC, though he did not remain there for care. According to Bloomberg News, other attendees at a White House election night watch party last Tuesday included the attorney general, Bill Barr, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the health secretary, Alex Azar.
      On Monday morning, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that interim results in large-scale trials showed their Covid-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective. The companies touted “a great day for science and humanity”.
      Biden heralded the scientists’ work. From Delaware, where transition planning continued, the president-elect said: “It is also important to understand that the end of the battle against Covid-19 is still months away.”
      Even if the vaccine were to be approved by late November, as industry leaders predicted, Biden said “it will be many more months before there is widespread vaccination in this country.”

      He also said that for now, “a mask remains a more potent weapon against the virus than the vaccine” and emphasized precautions such as face coverings, social distancing and contact tracing.
      Mike Pence tried to take credit for the vaccine breakthrough, claiming Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative had spurred it – an assertion Pfizer rejected outright.
      “We were never part of the Warp Speed,” said Kathrin Jansen, the head of vaccine research and development. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”
      States across the US are struggling. On Sunday the Republican governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, declared a new state of emergency.
      “Due to the alarming rate of Covid infections within our state, tonight I issued a new state of emergency with several critical changes to our response,” Herbert said. “These changes are not shutting down our economy, but are absolutely necessary to save lives and hospital capacity.”
      The governor said the state was being placed under a mask mandate until further notice and casual social gatherings were being limited to household-only for the next two weeks. All extracurricular activities were being put on hold, he said.
      Utah has had 132,621 total confirmed cases and 659 deaths.
      In California, governor Gavin Newsom warned on Monday that the state’s positivity rate was on the rise, after a period of relative success in containing the virus. He also said some counties could move “backward” into more restrictive rules for reopening.
      Fauci and other experts have described how the work of the White House coronavirus taskforce has stuttered and dwindled. On Sunday, the day after his victory over Trump was called, Biden made his first two appointments to his own panel of Covid advisers.
      The former surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy and the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr David Kessler will be co-chairs. Members include Rick Bright, a scientist and Trump critic who quit the government in October; the surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande; bioethicist and former Obama aide Zeke Emanuel; Luciana Borio, the FDA acting chief scientist and national security council member under Trump; and Michelle Osterholm, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Minnesota.
      Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said he believed “the political pressure of denying Covid is gone” now Trump had been defeated. Cuomo clashed with Trump in the early days of the pandemic, when New York was hit hard.
      “I think you’ll see scientists speak with an unmuzzled voice now,” the Democrat told ABC’s This Week, on Sunday. “And I think the numbers are going to go up, and Americans are going to get how serious this is.”
      One leading Democrat expected to be named to Biden’s cabinet said there was “a sense of urgency throughout” the president-elect’s team.
      “We know that every day is bringing more loss, more pain and more danger to the American people,” Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and candidate for the Democratic nomination, told Fox News Sunday. “And it’s why he’s not waiting until he’s taking office to begin immediately assembling people who have the right kind of expertise and planning to actually listen to them.” More

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      PM channels his inner John Wayne in vaccine metaphor meltdown | John Crace

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      Shortly before 5pm in the UK, president-elect Joe Biden gave a press conference. The results of the trials were very promising, he said, but there was still a long way to go before a vaccination programme could be rolled out nationwide. So it was now more important than ever not to let your guard down and to carry on wearing masks. It was coherent, informative and in less than five minutes Biden had told Americans just about everything they needed to know.
      Boris Johnson likes to do things rather differently. Almost to the second after Biden had finished speaking, the prime minister stepped out into the Downing Street briefing room, flanked by the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, and Brigadier Joe Fossey, dressed in full camo gear that had the reverse effect of drawing attention to himself. A new form of anti-camo perhaps.
      After a few introductions, Boris went on one of his long rambles. He didn’t really have anything to say that couldn’t have been wrapped up in minutes but he considers a press conference not to have taken place unless he’s wasted the best part of an hour of everyone’s time.
      Perhaps it was the excitement of having a real life soldier standing next to him, but Johnson’s explanation of the new vaccination was relayed in a series of metaphors straight out of the movie Stagecoach. The arrows were in the quiver! The cavalry was on its way, the toot of the bugle – Michael Gove’s presumably – was getting louder but still some way off. Having a prime minister who manages to trivialise something really important is getting extremely draining and it’s hard not to zone out within moments of him starting a sentence. So much for the great communicator.
      Next up was the brigadier who is in charge of the mass testing in Liverpool and looked uncomfortable throughout. “Two thousand troops have answered the call,” he said, making it sound as if the soldiers had had some say in their deployment rather than been told they were off to Liverpool for the next four weeks.
      He then pulled out a piece of plastic from his pocket. “You know what a swab is,” he continued. “Well this is the lateral flow that gives you a result within an hour.” And that was all he had to say. He didn’t seem at all sure what the lateral flow actually was or how it worked but then he was only following orders. If he’d had his way, he’d have saved the taxpayer a return train ticket from Liverpool to London.
      There was no slideshow this time – obviously No 10 has started to wonder if they are more trouble than they are worth after recent events – so Van-Tam was left to ad lib on the vaccine trial. Even though he had no more information than Boris, so all he could do was repeat the fact that it was exciting but we shouldn’t get carried away just yet. Try to think of it as a penalty shootout, he said – Boris’s crap analogies are as contagious as the coronavirus. We’ve scored the first goal, so we know the keeper can be beaten, but there was a long way to go before the match was won. No one seemed to have told Van-Tam that the expectation in a shootout was that the penalty-taker would score.
      Things carried on in much the same vein when questions came in from the media. The brigadier tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible – merging into the background was part of his SAS training – and so the only other thing he had to offer was that he was just on day four of his deployment so it was hard to tell whether things were going well or badly. Van-Tam desperately hunted around for new ways of saying the vaccination trials were still at an early stage, but things were looking more hopeful for next year.
      Try to think of yourself as being on a railway station on a wet and windy night, he said, doing his best to channel his inner Fat Controller. You could see the lights of the train two miles away. Then the train pulled into the station and you didn’t know if the door was going to open. Next you couldn’t even be sure of whether there would be enough seats for everyone. The UK had only ordered enough vaccine for about a third of the population, so unless more doses came online most people were going to miss out. It didn’t sound quite as hopeful as he had suggested. But maybe that’s just the way he tells them.
      Boris, meanwhile, just looked relieved to only get one question on the US presidential election. And that wasn’t even on if he had spoken to the president-elect – he hadn’t as Biden has been too busy taking calls from Micronesia – or if he had any reaction to being called a “shape-shifting creep” by a former adviser to Barack Obama. The Democrats still haven’t forgiven Boris for his remarks about Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry giving him a dislike of the British empire.
      “I congratulate the president-elect,” said Johnson, sidestepping a suggestion he give Donald Trump a call to persuade him to throw in the towel. The US and the UK had had a close relationship in the past and no doubt would do so in the future. He had nothing to say on Brexit. Rather he chose to accentuate the shared climate change objectives of Cop27. Or Cop26 as the rest of the world knows it. More

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      Joe Biden vows to 'spare no effort' in tackling Covid as US sees record cases

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      Joe Biden vowed on Monday to spare no effort in tackling the coronavirus pandemic as soon as he enters the White House and warned the US is “facing a very dark winter”.
      Speaking in a televised address to the nation – little more than 48 hours after he was announced the winner of the presidential election – the Democrat said he was ready to get to work, laying out plans as the pandemic on Monday was approaching 10m cases.
      The US has experienced record new infections in recent days, a figure expected to significantly worsen before the former vice-president’s inauguration on 20 January. According to Johns Hopkins university, as of Sunday the coronavirus had killed 237,570 people in the US and had infected more than 9.9 million.
      While he welcomed Pfizer’s announcement earlier in the day that it has found a vaccine that it believes is 90% effective, he warned America could lose 200,000 more lives in the next few months before a vaccine becomes available.
      “I will spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we’re sworn in on 20 January,” he said, speaking to the camera from his home town of Wilmington, Delaware.
      “Get our kids back to school safely, our businesses growing and our economy running at full speed again. And get an approved vaccine manufactured and distributed as quickly as possible to as many Americans as possible free of charge. We’ll follow the science.”
      But he warned that the challenge ahead was “immense and growing”. “Although we are not in office yet, I’m just laying out what we expect to do and hope can be done, some of it, between now and the time we’re sworn in.”
      He added: “There’s a need for bold action to fight this pandemic. We’re still facing a very dark winter.”
      Citing statistics that show the US topped 120,000 new cases on several consecutive days last week and rising infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths, he said: “This crisis claims nearly 1,000 American lives a day. Nearly 240,000 deaths so far. The projections still indicate we could lose 200,000 more lives in the coming months before a vaccine can be made widely available.”
      Masks
      On mask-wearing, Biden said: “Please, I implore you, wear a mask. Do it for yourself, do it for your neighbour. A mask is not a political statement, but it is a good way to start pulling the country together.”
      Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, was also present but did not speak.
      The announcement came after Biden’s transition team unveiled a coronavirus advisory board of 13 public health experts. The taskforce will be led by three co-chairs: the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, the ex-food and drug administration commissioner David Kessler and Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale.
      Other experts on the taskforce include Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama health adviser and one of the creators of the Affordable Care Act, and Rick Bright, a former top vaccine official from the Trump administration and a whistleblower.
      The advisory board, he said, would create a “blueprint” to be put in place as soon as the Biden administration is sworn into office. “This group will advise on detailed plans, build on a bedrock of science and … keep compassion, empathy and care for every American at its core.” More

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      Joe Biden: US still facing 'very dark winter' despite promising coronavirus vaccine news – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden said the months ahead would still be very difficult for the United States, despite the encouraging news about Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine.
      Biden said it would be ‘many months’ before the vaccine was widely available, warning that another 200,000 Americans could die of coronavirus in the coming months.
      Biden also spoke about his coronavirus taskforce and urged Americans to wear face masks to limit the spread of the virus
      Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede
      US coronavirus cases near 10m as Ben Carson tests positive More

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      Joe Biden's coronavirus taskforce to meet as Trump urged to cooperate

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      Joe Biden will convene a coronavirus taskforce on Monday to confront one of the biggest problems vexing the US, as the president-elect and his running mate, Kamala Harris, move ahead with their transition process.On Sunday night, Biden and Harris released their first public schedule as “president-elect” and “vice-president-elect”.Biden is due to meet with a 12-member advisory board led by former the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, and the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, David Kessler, to examine how best to tame a pandemic that has killed more than 237,000 Americans.He will speak in Wilmington, Delaware, about his plans for tackling the coronavirus pandemic and rebuilding the economy later in the day.Biden has spent much of the campaign criticising Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis and has vowed to listen to scientists to guide his own approach.There are questions over whether Trump, who has not publicly recognised Biden’s victory and has falsely claimed the election was stolen, will impede Democrats as they try to establish a government.The transition cannot shift into high gear until the US General Services Administration, which oversees federal property, certifies the winner.Emily Murphy, the Trump appointee who runs the agency, has not given the go-ahead for the transition to begin, and on Sunday night a GSA spokeswoman gave no timetable for the decision.Until then, the GSA can continue providing Biden’s team with offices, computers and background checks for security clearances, but they cannot yet enter federal agencies or access federal funds set aside for the transition.The Biden campaign on Sunday pressed the agency to move ahead.“America’s national security and economic interests depend on the federal government signalling clearly and swiftly that the United States government will respect the will of the American people and engage in a smooth and peaceful transfer of power,” the campaign said in a statement.There is little precedent in the modern era of a president erecting hurdles for his successor. The stakes are especially high this year because Biden will take office amid a raging pandemic, which will require a comprehensive government response.The advisory board of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition also urged the Trump administration to “immediately begin the post-election transition process and the Biden team to take full advantage of the resources available under the Presidential Transition Act”.Biden’s taskforce will be responsible for executing the promises he made on the campaign trail for tackling Covid-19, which include doubling the number of drive-through testing sites, establishing a US public health job corps to mobilise 100,000 Americans on contact tracing; and ramping up production of masks, face shields and other PPE equipment.Trump has no public events scheduled for Monday, and he has not spoken in public since Thursday. Vice-president Mike Pence is due to meet with the White House coronavirus taskforce on Monday for the first time since 20 October.As part of a public campaign to question the election results, he is planning to hold rallies to build support for his fight over the outcome, Trump’s campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said.The US recorded more than 127,399 cases on Saturday, bringing the total recorded to nearly 9.9m, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 1,000 deaths were recorded, bring the national toll close to 237,000. America has reported over 100,000 infections five times in the past week, according to a Reuters analysis, which found that the latest seven-day average in the US is more than the combined average for India and France, two of the hardest hit countries overseas.Biden’s transition effort now has a website, BuildBackBetter.com, and a Twitter account, @Transition46. Biden’s team is also expected to move forward with efforts to choose the officials who will serve with him in his administration. He has not offered a timeline for cabinet picks, but he and Harris have pledged that his administration leaders will reflect the country, with representation of women and people of colour.He is also reportedly planning a series of urgent orders that would roll back some of Trump’s agenda, in some cases fulfilling his campaign promises. That includes repealing the travel ban against Muslim-majority countries (one of Trump’s first actions); rejoining the international climate accord; rejoining the World Health Organization; taking action to protect “Dreamers” from deportation; revoking “the global gag rule”, which blocks the US government from funding groups that conduct abortions or advocate abortion rights; and reestablishing Obama-era environmental regulations.But Trump has not yet acknowledged defeat and has launched an array of lawsuits to press claims of election fraud for which he has produced no evidence. State officials say they are not aware of any significant irregularities. Since the race was called, the president has been golfing and tweeting a steady stream of election misinformation that has forced Twitter to acknowledge his allegations are disputed and that mail-in voting is safe and secure.Murtaugh said Trump will hold a series of rallies to build support for the legal fights challenging the outcome, though he did not say when and where they would take place.Trump will seek to back up his as-yet-unsubstantiated accusations of voting fraud by highlighting obituaries of dead people the campaign said voted in the election, Murtaugh said.Trump also announced teams to pursue recounts in several states. Experts said that effort, like his lawsuits, are unlikely to meet with success.“The chances of a recount flipping tens of thousands of votes across multiple states in his favour are outside anything we have seen in American history,” William Antholis, the director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center thinktank, wrote in an essay on Sunday.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      The Guardian view on Joe Biden: cometh the hour, cometh the man | Editorial

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      “This is the time to heal in America”. President-elect Joe Biden’s words were directed at a nation suffering after four years of Donald Trump’s dishonesty and fear-mongering. Mr Biden understands Trumpism is arsenic in the water supply of American political culture. It has sloshed around the country, flowing most freely wherever Republicans were in power. Even after the president had clearly lost the popular vote, his Republican enablers embraced his claims about a stolen election rather than denouncing them.Yet Mr Biden wants America to come together not come apart. There is nothing to gain from trading incivilities with Republican opponents. He seeks to bridge divides. Under Mr Trump, the US has become more polarised between educated and less-educated voters; whites and people of colour; haves and have-nots; and urban and rural areas. Mr Biden is right: politics can’t be conducted in a furnace, it’s time to “lower the temperature”.In his words Americans must “see each other again [and] listen to each other again”. There’s too much at stake to do otherwise. The US faces a triple crisis: a pandemic that is costing hundreds of lives daily; an economic depression with skyrocketing long-term unemployment; and a politics where consensus is sorely lacking but badly needed. These are interrelated emergencies. Covid cannot be solved without a faith in facts, which is why Mr Biden will set up an expert pandemic taskforce ahead of naming his cabinet. His emphasis on science is in contrast to widespread Republican disdain for evidence.The country’s economy can only be revived by federal spending to keep companies and households afloat while upscaling the test-and-trace regime. Thanks to the US’s skewed electoral system Republicans may find themselves in a position to frustrate a president Biden. Some want to bite the hand of friendship that he has extended. This would be a bad idea. Republicans who shrank the government to the size “it can be drowned in the bathtub” can see when you do so people die. Those who pushed profit-driven opinion ahead of scientific fact ought to realise that conservative ideology won’t cure coronavirus.Without a vaccine, what is needed is money from Congress and politicians willing to persuade people to change their behaviour. Super-spreading lies about the economy and the virus has deadly consequences. A public reared in an age of government distrust led to a revolt against mask-wearing and social distancing. Mr Biden is asking Republicans to stop peddling fact-free assertions about liberties being lost for the sake of public health. They should listen to him.The trained cynicism about government needs to be unwound. Mr Biden’s argument is that if Americans cannot share a common narrative about how to handle Covid then the government cannot produce a successful solution. He is right. Republicans must break Mr Trump’s spell over their party. Left unchecked the Grand Old Party risks reducing itself to a cult beholden to an ageing leader’s bizarre conspiracy theories.The American dream does not exist for many people. How to manage this pain is central to Mr Biden’s healing touch. The president-elect seems ready to offer compassion and help to those whose suffering Mr Trump dismissed as fraudulent. Mr Biden wants Americans to feel empowered by believing in something larger than themselves. He would like elected leaders to take, rather than abdicate, responsibility for public duties. If the 2020 election was a referendum on the Trump years, the pandemic provides a test of conservative principles. Mr Biden aims to restore trust in government, and in the US itself. Republicans should do their bit to help. More

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      Biden will put the US back on the world stage, and Britain must stand with him | Keir Starmer

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      Britain’s special relationship with the US was forged on the battlefields of Europe. At this year’s Remembrance Sunday, we remembered how we came together, not just as two nations with shared interests, but as friends, brothers and sisters to liberate Europe, defend freedom and defeat fascism.Like any close relationship, we’ve had our disagreements, tensions and arguments. But the values we fought for 75 years ago – liberty, cooperation, democracy and the rule of law – remain as important today as they did then. The victory of President-elect Biden presents a chance to reset that partnership and to tackle the new challenges the world faces today.The eyes of the world have been on the US in recent days – to see which direction its people would choose. In electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the American people have voted for a better, more optimistic future: for unity over division, hope over fear and integrity over dishonesty.The new president has promised to restore the US’s alliances and fill the void in global leadership. Britain should welcome this. The two biggest issues facing us all – defeating coronavirus and tackling the climate crisis – require a joined-up, global effort that has been sorely lacking in recent years.This election also had stark lessons for those of us who want to see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair. The Democrats’ path to victory was paved by a broad coalition, including many of the states and communities that four years ago turned away from them.To win back the trust of voters takes time. It takes political leaders who listen, learn and renew. Biden spoke to the soul of the nation, with a focus on who people are and what they value: family, community and security. One election victory does not mean that work is now finished for the Democrats; for us in the Labour party, it is only just beginning.It is crucial that the British government seizes this moment. Britain is forging a new path for its future outside the European Union. I believe we can succeed and thrive, but to do so we must be a part of the change that is coming. That requires hard work and leadership.It means working with other countries to ensure the global success and distribution of a coronavirus vaccine. It means building a more resilient, focused and effective response to the security threats posed by our adversaries. It means leading the global response to tackling climate breakdown, starting with next year’s Cop26 climate summit.I want us to be striking the best possible trade deals for Britain, which help to create jobs, grow our industries and protect our standards. That must start with us getting a trade agreement with the European Union by the end of the year, as was promised. It also means being a country that abides by the rule of the law.We will soon have a president in the Oval Office who has been a passionate advocate for the preservation of the Good Friday agreement. He, like governments across the world, will take a dim view if our prime minister ploughs ahead with proposals to undermine that agreement. If the government is serious about a reset in its relationship with the US, then it should take an early first step and drop these proposals.Equally, when our allies are wrong, Britain should be prepared to speak out and say so. We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose. That we are standing up for our beliefs and our shared values. In recent years, this has been absent. For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.• Keir Starmer is leader of the Labour party and MP for Holborn and St Pancras More