After the photographers snapped some “embarrassing” snapshots of her, the pop star took to Instagram on Wednesday to air her grievances.
“I had a s****y day yesterday !!! Paps took pics of me coming out of a public bathroom ….. I mean how embarrassing is that ????” she wrote alongside a video of herself posing in front of a Christmas tree in different outfits, set to Madonna‘s “Vogue.”
The photos in question could be ones that TMZ posted of Britney, at a gas station in Los Angeles. However, that didn’t keep the “Toxic” singer down for long. She added that to cheer herself up after seeing the pictures she had a “party for confidence.”
“I swear if you have confidence struggles or low self esteem and need to practice walking with your head held high and kinda hunched over … you must try it,” she urged.
Britney also hit back at the paps in a later post, where she showed off her physique and posed with fiancé Sam Asghari while wearing a white long-sleeve shirt, distressed denim shorts, and red knee-high boots.
“Oh the precious joy today !!! Me and my fiancé are so excited to be going away …. as you can see I’m not 800 pounds like the paps have me in pics … I’ve been working out and it’s real,” she shared. “God thank you for being able to go out of the country !!!! I am blessed !!!!”
Carlos Santana has canceled all the December shows of his Las Vegas show at the House of Blues, because he’s recovering from what’s described as an “unscheduled heart procedure.”
The 74-year-old guitar legend tweeted a video in which he explains that last Saturday, he asked his wife to take him to the hospital because “I had this thing happening in my chest.”
“We found out that I need to take care of it, so I am,” Carlos goes on. “So I’m gonna be taking time out for a little bit to make sure that I replenish and I rest….so that when I play for you, I will play the way I’m used to and give you 150%. I wouldn’t show up unless I could do that.”
Santana will resume his shows in January of 2022. A statement from his manager further explains that Santana’s “procedure” “impacted his performance,” but adds that Carlos is “doing fantastic and is anxious to be back on stage soon.”
Santana has canceled all December 2021 at the House of Blues Las Vegas as he recovers from an unscheduled heart procedure. We look forward to returning to perform at the House Of Blues in January 2022. pic.twitter.com/8cHcVDjFhv
There’s nothing bad about this — Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul and wife Lauren are expecting baby number two, and they couldn’t be more excited.
Lauren shared the joyful news to Instagram on Wednesday. Alongside an adorable photo of the couple’s three-year-old daughter Story Annabelle rubbing her baby bump, she wrote, “We can’t wait to meet you baby! We love you so much already.”
The due date or sex of the child was not mentioned.
Aaron, 42, and his actress wife Lauren, 34, married in 2013 and previously opened up about their desires to expand their family.
“I can’t wait to have another baby, and I’m so excited to see what 40 has to offer,” the Westworld actor told Haute Living last year. “I’m just excited to be around, to be alive. I’m just happy to be here. Life is good.”
Aaron also enthused about being a parent and admitted that “fatherhood has definitely changed me.”
“Having a child is the closest thing to magic that anyone can have,” he said. “I see why people rush home to be there when they get home from school. You don’t want to miss any of it.”
(OKEMOS, Mich.) — Michigan is in the midst of its fourth COVID-19 wave — and there is no end in sight, hospital officials said.
Cases and hospitalizations are rivaling levels seen in earlier parts of the pandemic, when vaccines weren’t widely available. The surge also comes at a time when non-COVID-19-related patients are being admitted, flu cases are emerging and health systems are understaffed, Brian Peters, CEO of the Michigan Health & Hospital Association, told ABC News.
Unvaccinated people continue to make up the majority of those infected with COVID-19, including severe cases of the infection. Roughly around three-quarters of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths were in unvaccinated people from Oct. 21 to Nov. 19, according to state data.
Around 45% of the state remains unvaccinated, according to federal data.
“The situation right here in Michigan is as dire as it has ever been since the start of this pandemic,” Peters said.
Michigan reported a nearly 20% positivity rate in the past week, and every county is currently at the state’s highest risk level for transmission.
Michigan is not alone in seeing COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations increase due to the delta variant, especially as colder weather has approached, people have gathered indoors more and pandemic fatigue has long set in. Though the duration of this surge, and the speed with which cases have “skyrocketed” in the past three weeks, is alarming, Dr. Darryl Elmouchi, president of Spectrum Health West Michigan, which operates 14 hospitals, told ABC News.
“If you look at most other states, and all the surges we’ve had, usually you start at a low point and you go up really quickly, and then you come down pretty quickly,” he said. “What happened for us is we went up gradually enough, but we went up high enough, with [positivity rates] in the teens, that when we shot up, we shot up from that baseline.”
“This has far surpassed anything we’ve seen before — both in how long it’s been going on, and now its seemingly never-ending peak,” he added. “We just don’t know when the end will be, and we’re very worried it will have a very long tail.”
Michigan reported its second-highest number of COVID-19 cases and case rates in the past week, according to the state’s latest weekly coronavirus report, released Tuesday. That follows records set in both cases and case rates the previous week. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients also increased 13% during the past week, the report found.
“I felt like probably the surge we had last fall was going to be the worst we’ve ever seen. I never would have guessed that we would be in yet another surge and that it would be the worst surge yet,” Sandra Gilman, a nurse and hospital supervisor for Spectrum Health, told ABC News.
At Spectrum Health West Michigan, unvaccinated COVID-19 patients are generally about nine years younger and only have two comorbidities, as opposed to four, when compared to vaccinated patients, “meaning that they’re younger and healthier when they’re coming in,” Elmouchi said.
“That tells us the importance of being vaccinated,” he said. “And that’s what’s so heartbreaking for our teams, is that they see all these people that are so sick, being on the ventilator and even dying, and they know it’s preventable. It’s heart-wrenching.”
Due to a mix of early nursing retirements, pandemic burnout and a “rising tide of violence” against health care staff, Michigan hospitals are treating the latest surge in COVID-19 patients amid a staffing shortage, according to Peters. There are approximately 875 fewer staffed hospital beds in Michigan than in November 2020, he said.
“That is incredibly concerning, because there’s not a rapid or easy solution to that problem,” Peters said.
Amid the staffing strain, this week, the Department of Defense temporarily deployed nearly four dozen medical personnel, including registered nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, to two hospital systems in the state.
The help is welcome, though more is needed, Peters said, especially as the pandemic only worsened an existing health care workforce shortage. Among other measures, his organization is advocating for a $650 million special appropriation in the state legislature that would provide payments to health care staff to encourage them to stay in their jobs, as well as offer incentives for training programs to increase the number of workers in the pipeline, he said.
For now, hospital capacity remains a concern throughout the state, where every region, from urban to rural, is a “hotspot,” Peters said.
At Spectrum Health West Michigan, the intensive care units are operating at 147% of their traditional capacity, Elmouchi said.
Statewide, hospitals are operating at almost 85% occupancy, according to state data.
In recent weeks, some hospitals have had to divert patients to other hospitals and delay elective procedures, Peters said.
“That doesn’t necessarily create a quality-of-care problem as much as it can be a convenience problem,” he said. “But what we’re very fearful of, is that if these COVID numbers don’t level off and decline, you’re going to start seeing real access challenges, where literally there’s no more capacity to care for patients, COVID or otherwise, in certain communities.”
“We’re doing everything we possibly can to avoid that outcome, but without the public’s help, that’s our future,” he added.
Health officials are urging residents to get vaccinated and receive booster shots and to mask up indoors in public settings to help alleviate the surge — especially amid concerns and questions around the transmissibility and mutations of the new omicron variant, which was first detected in the U.S. Wednesday in California.
“Ensuring that as many Michiganders as possible are vaccinated remains the best protection we have against COVID-19 — including variants of concern,” Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive, said in a statement this week.
Peters said he has been encouraged by the continued increase in vaccinations in the state, including among newly eligible pediatric populations, but “those numbers aren’t growing rapidly enough.”
“[Omicron] is yet another reason for the public to get vaccinated now without waiting any longer,” he said. “I fear that there are so many Michiganders, and I’m sure it’s true outside of Michigan as well, but who believe that the pandemic is largely over. And nothing could be further from the truth.”
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5.2 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 780,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Just 59.4% of the population in the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Dec 02, 9:33 am
Unvaccinated people will be barred from most businesses in Germany
Unvaccinated people in Germany will be barred from most businesses, except for grocery stores and pharmacies, officials announced Thursday.
In Germany, shops and restaurants check vaccination status at entrances.
Nearly 69% of Germans are fully vaccinated. The country has reported several cases of the omicron variant.
-ABC News’ Joe Simonetti
Dec 02, 8:33 am
Mask mandate on public transportation extended through March 18
Required masks on public transportation, including airplanes, rails and buses, will be extended through March 18, according to a new plan from the Biden administration.
Tighter requirements for travel into the U.S. will go into place early next week, the administration said. The rule calls for proof of a negative test within one day of travel to the U.S. for all passengers, regardless of their vaccination status or nationality.
President Joe Biden also announced a plan Thursday allowing for free rapid tests.
Senior administration officials say the more than 150 million Americans with private insurance will be able to submit for reimbursement to their insurance companies through the same rule that allows tests on site to be covered by insurance. To reach uninsured Americans and those on Medicare or Medicaid, the Biden administration will send 50 million at-home tests to 20,000 federal sites around the country to be handed out for free.
The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor and Treasury Department will put out guidance by Jan. 15 to determine exactly how many tests will be covered and at what frequency, the plan said, and it will not retroactively cover tests already purchased.
-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett, Justin Gomez
Dec 01, 5:32 pm
CDC orders airlines to share contact info for travelers from southern Africa
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is directing airlines to provide the agency with the names and contact information of passengers who have entered the United States since Nov. 29 and had been in southern Africa the prior two weeks. Airlines must turn the information over within 24 hours of the flight’s arrival into the U.S.
The directive, in effect indefinitely, applies to travelers from the Republic of Botswana, the Kingdom of Eswatini, the Kingdom of Lesotho, the Republic of Malawi, the Republic of Mozambique, the Republic of Namibia, the Republic of South Africa and the Republic of Zimbabwe.
The order, which does not mention the omicron variant specifically, is to “prevent the importation and spread of a communicable disease of public health importance.”
Delta and United are currently the only two carriers that offer flights between the U.S. and countries covered by the CDC order.
ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett, Sam Sweeney and Mina Kaji
Dec 01, 3:23 pm
California governor on omicron case: ‘This is not surprising’
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the first detected case of the omicron variant in the U.S. being found in California “is not surprising” due to the state’s “aggressive testing protocols” and genomic sequencing.
During a previously scheduled press briefing Wednesday afternoon, he shared a timeline on the San Francisco resident who tested positive for the case. The person left South Africa on Nov. 21 and landed in the U.S. on Nov. 22, developed symptoms a few days later around Nov. 25 and got tested on Nov. 28, he said. The test came back positive on Nov. 29, he said.
On Nov. 30, initial lab testing determined the sample could be omicron, and a full sequencing confirmed it was early Wednesday morning, San Francisco health officials said.
Newsom encouraged Californians to get vaccinated and receive a booster shot as the winter approaches.
Dec 01, 3:02 pm
California omicron case ‘not a cause for us to panic,’ health director says
The individual who tested positive for the first case of the omicron variant detected in the U.S. had received a full dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine but was not yet eligible for a booster dose, according to San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax.
The person developed symptoms upon returning from South Africa, got tested in San Francisco and has since recovered, Colfax told reporters during a briefing Wednesday.
“They did the right thing and got tested and reported their travel history,” he said.
Colfax said the case is “not a cause for us to panic,” and that San Francisco “is prepared” for this.
The health department has no plans at this time to change its current COVID-19 health orders, Colfax said.
It could turn out to be a very merry Christmas for movie theaters across the country, that is if advance ticket sales for Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home are any indication.
The online ticketing service Fandango is reporting Spider-Man: No Way Home has shattered the pre-sale records for 2021, beating out Marvel’s Black Widow. It’s even keeping pace with films that premiered prior to COVID-19, including 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
In fact, when tickets for the Tom Holland-led film went on sale on Monday, some online sites crashed due to the demand. Additionally, theater owners had to hastily add screenings, according to Variety.
A co-production of Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios, Spider-Man: No Way Home, co-starring Zendaya as MJ and Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, hits theaters on Dec. 17.
Marvel is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
(NEW YORK) — The American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychologists (AACN), the professional organization that sets standards and practices for the field of neuropsychology, has called for “the elimination of race as a variable in demographically-based normative test interpretation,” the controversial practice widely known as race-norming.
The move comes amid a firestorm of criticism following an ABC News investigation of alleged racial bias in the National Football League’s landmark concussion settlement program. ABC News uncovered emails and data suggesting race-based adjustments to former players’ cognitive test scores made it more difficult for Black former players to qualify for compensation from the league for head injuries sustained on the field of play.
In a position statement provided to ABC News, the AACN acknowledged fundamental flaws with race-norming and signaled its support for the development of new testing protocols in neuropsychology that do not rely on race as a proxy for environmental influences that lead to inequity.
“Indeed, sampling of racial minority populations in the U.S. has been limited and inconsistent when creating neuropsychology test norms,” the statement’s authors wrote. “Use of unrepresentative norms can result in diagnostic error, as well as stigmatization of minority populations based on supposed disparities in neuropsychological ability.”
Last March, the federal judge overseeing the NFL concussion settlement ordered the league and attorneys for former players into mediation to “address the concerns” about the use of race-norming. After several months of confidential negotiations, the NFL in October agreed to abandon the practice and reevaluate past claims for compensation that may have been impacted by race-based adjustments.
Sources familiar with the matter told ABC News that the deal could result in hundreds of millions of dollars of additional compensation for former players and their families.
In the coming weeks and months, parallel efforts to engage neuropsychological experts in the development of new testing practices that seek to eliminate racial bias will be underway.
The AACN has pledged to “advance and support the necessary work to make this complex transition possible,” which could include raising public and private funds and partnering with test development companies and other scientific organizations. The group cautioned, however, that progress will be slow and require patience from the public, as “simple solutions will not suffice to solve problems that were centuries in the making.”
The NFL, meanwhile, has committed to funding the continued work of a panel of experts developing what it calls “a set of diagnostically accurate, race neutral, long-term norms” that will ultimately replace the current method of measuring cognitive impairment in former NFL players seeking compensation.
They hope to deliver a solution within a year of the implementation of the new settlement agreement, which is still awaiting final approval by a federal judge.
There is at least one point of overlap between those two efforts: Dr. Anthony Stringer, the director of neuropsychology and behavioral health at Emory University School of Medicine, is serving as the chairman of the AACN subcommittee on the use of race in neuropsychological test norming and performance prediction — and is also serving, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, on the NFL-funded panel of experts developing the replacement norms for the future evaluation of former players.
Stringer did not respond to multiple requests for comment from ABC News.
The neuropsychology community is just the latest branch of medicine to reckon with its use of race in diagnostic testing and clinical care. In response to public pressure and congressional oversight, a number of leading medical societies and institutions have also pledged to review or amend their policies to reflect an evolving consensus that race-norming can be harmful to Black patients.
Cy Smith, an attorney who represents Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, the former NFL players who filed the original lawsuit alleging that the league’s protocols skewed concussion payouts along racial lines, hailed the development as “long overdue,” but noted that actual change has yet to be made.
“We are pleased to see that our lawsuit and the vital oversight of the Court in the NFL Concussion Settlement has pushed the psychology profession to revisit the use of ‘race norms,’ alongside other health care providers,” Smith told ABC News. “But the next step is just as important — any replacement norms must be fair, and not be used to limit the claims of Black football players, or other people of color.”
Dorothy Roberts, the founding director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society, said that while criticism of race-norming is hardly a new development, the current level of public attention is unprecedented.
“The idea of adjusting medical tests for race is deeply rooted in the history of racism in America and has been contested for a long time,” Roberts told ABC News. “But the recent controversy surrounding the NFL, coupled with new research being done, is galvanizing a groundswell of opposition that I hope will lead to abolishing race correction throughout medicine.”
(ALBANY, N.Y.) — With mounting concerns over the potential threat of the newly discovered omicron variant, U.S. scientists are racing to try to determine whether there are any confirmed cases of the new variant circulating around the country.
Among those is the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center Labs in Albany, New York, where for months, scientists have been on the lookout for dangerous variants, while monitoring the genetic changes in the COVID-19 virus.
In order to track new variants, the team sequences the virus’s genetic material to identify its lineage, strain and mutations, as well as to see how the virus is evolving, and which viruses are entering the state of New York.
The lab has been on high alert since the discovery of the omicron variant, analyzing positive COVID-19 samples from across the state to see if the variant is already present within the community.
On Wednesday, scientists in California confirmed the first known case of omicron in the U.S.
It is “absolutely, entirely possible,” that the omicron variant is already circulating in many other communities across the country, Dr. Kirsten St. George, director of virology and chief of the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the Wadsworth Center, told ABC News on Tuesday.
“We only sequence a subset of samples in New York and elsewhere in the country. We’re not sequencing 100% of positive specimens. It is entirely possible that it is already here, and we have yet to sequence the specimen that it’s in,” St. George said on Tuesday, prior to the news of the U.S.’ first confirmed case.
St. George said she was taken aback when she first saw a 3D image, shared by South Africa, of omicron’s mutations.
“You could see the individual mutations marked on that protein, and it was really pretty jaw dropping, because it had so many more mutations than anything we’ve ever seen. It was a fairly startling thing to look at,” St. George said, adding that “the evolutionary change on that protein was more extensive than anything we had seen.”
Omicron is concerning because it has mutations not seen before, and scientists still do not know how it will clinically affect those it infects, St. George said, adding that “there are mutations that we unfortunately know can be associated with reduced efficacy of immunity.”
The lab has been sequencing over 800 COVID-19 samples per week, researchers explained, a number that has been greatly enhanced with the establishment of a sequencing consortium, which comprises four other sequencing laboratories around the state, and also by collaboration with other labs across the state.
“These are known positive COVID samples that have been collected from throughout New York state and they’re sent to us and we’re preparing them for whole genome sequencing,” Alexis Russell, a research scientist for the lab, told ABC News.
With multiple labs, throughout the country, sequencing different percentages of the positive specimens, and sharing data as soon as it is available, “we will know immediately when we see it, when it comes through the pipeline,” St. George said
Following the discovery of the omicron variant, South Africa, one of the first countries where the newest variant was first discovered, has begun to experience an uptick in coronavirus infections. According to St. George, it is possible that omicron is behind South Africa’s latest surge.
“The correlation of the emergence of that variant in South Africa, combined with the rapid increase in positivity and increase in case count, is quite suspicious,” St. George said. “I think it’s quite possible that it correlates with that variant and that it is probably a rapidly transmissible variant.”
However, it is “very unlikely” that the increase in COVID-19 cases seen in the U.S., in recent weeks, is the result of the omicron. St. George said, “I think if that were the case, we would have seen it already in our sequencing pipeline.”
It is still too early to know whether omicron will turn out to be more transmissible than delta, St. George said, though some of the existing PCR tests just happen to pick up an omicron marker, making it easier to detect than delta.
Positive samples for omicron have shown a phenomenon called “S-gene-dropout,” which means that a target gene, linked to COVID-19 variants, appears to be missing from the new variant, allowing it to be distinguished easily from the dominant delta variant.
“It is a very suspicious indicator when you see it, a convenient indicator,” St. George explained, making it potentially easier to detect omicron as compared to delta.
The discovery of new variants is not unexpected, St. George said, but it becomes particularly worrisome when it replicates at high numbers, increasing the chances of a mutation emerging.
“The more virus that it’s producing, the more chance it has of producing a virus with a mutant. And then the more people who are infected, the higher the risk again, the higher the chance of producing it,” St. George added.
It is possible that omicron could prove to be stronger than the delta variant, which has been shown to be far more transmissible than prior variants.
“The competition against delta is quite dramatic. It certainly looks as if it’s got a very good fitness advantage against it, at this point,” St. George said.
However, researchers cautioned that there are also times when viruses do develop mutations that seem to give them fitness advantages over dominant variants, but they ultimately “sort of burn out,” and subside.
The protective measures that should be taken against omicron remain the same as with the other variants, wear masks, especially inside, and in crowds, wash your hands and get vaccinated.
“Even though we know that this virus has mutations that can be associated with evading immunity, be it prior infection, immunity or vaccine associated immunity. You have a better chance of not getting sick and having a decreased amount of viral replication in your system if your immune system is already primed with a vaccine,” St. George said.
Darren Riley, 29, is the CEO and Co-founder of JustAir, which uses small sensors to map air quality on a neighborhood level. – JP Keenen/ABC News
(NEW YORK) — This is the fourth and final episode of ABC News Digital’s four-part series “Green New Future,” which highlights innovators and environmental solutions.
While climate change and poor air quality are global issues concerning all people, 29-year-old Darren Riley has found that the ZIP code people are born into can disproportionately put them in harm’s way.
Riley’s father ended up in a coma in the ICU due to asthma-related illnesses in 2014, Riley told ABC News. It was his father’s words from seven years before that made him realize the connection between a person and where they live.
“I was a product of my environment,” Riley’s father had told him.
Riley, who also developed asthma himself, said he set out to find a way to alleviate systemic issues and allow people from all areas an equal opportunity in quality of life. He is now the CEO and co-founder of JustAir Solutions, a company that creates air quality monitoring networks to provide cities and individuals data on their breathing environment.
“I think air quality is a sliver of all of many injustices that we see in the world that we can really focus on,” Riley told ABC News.
The disproportionate impact of pollution is one example of a host of systemic issues that people of color, lower wealth communities and indigenous populations are facing, advocates say.
These issues are “fueled by environmental racism,” Mustafa Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation, told ABC News.
Through discriminatory practices such as redlining, cities in the U.S. have been divided and designed with toxic industries disproportionately running through areas inhabited by communities of color, according to Ali.
This affects the quality of the air people breathe, which research has found can determine the long-term health of their lungs and subsequently, their life expectancy.
“We have 100,000 people who die prematurely from air pollution in our country,” Ali said.
This issue came to the forefront over 50 years ago when Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which set out to control and reduce air pollution across the nation by keeping track of the quality of air that citizens were inhaling.
The U.S Environmental Protection Agency mandates that cities track their air quality levels using a monitor that tracks dust, metals and other matter that could affect the lungs.
The EPA regulations state there must be a minimum of one monitor per city, but community advocates argue there must be more. Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Riley piloted his project, has just one monitor that reports on the city’s air quality level.
Data from that monitor is used to approximate the air quality level for the entire city and its suburbs, Jim Meeks, the chairman of JustAir, told ABC News.
But Riley was curious about the difference in air quality levels across neighborhoods, which the lone monitor set up by the EPA could not capture. He deployed 11 sensors across Grands Rapids — five in the downtown area, five in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood and one adjacent to the EPA monitor.
When comparing data from his sensors in the metro downtown area of Grand Rapids versus Roosevelt Park, the neighborhood with the highest non-white population, Riley found stark differences in the air quality levels.
The Roosevelt Park sensors recorded far more unhealthy days than the one near the EPA monitor, Riley said.
“There are disparities between sensors within a city,” Riley told ABC News. “And one sensor doesn’t detect that.”
JustAir’s sensors are currently only used in Grand Rapids, but Riley hopes to expand his company to other cities such as Detroit and Chicago, believing that the data could inform governments and individuals to take action.
He said he hopes his company will bring change to the nation’s struggle with poor air quality and its health impacts.
The key to fighting air pollution-related health disparities lies in the re-prioritization of resources and budgets and breaking through the existing political polarization, according to Ronda Chapman, equity director at The Trust for Public Land.
“This is a non-partisan concern when we’re talking about the health and well-being of individuals,” Chapman told ABC News. “And so when we have the data to back it up, that’s how we’re able to better make the case for investing in green infrastructure, investing in neighborhoods and investing in communities.”
Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)(WASHINGTON) — As cases rise in the colder months and amid concerns of a new COVID-19 variant, President Joe Biden announced a plan Thursday for a winter coronavirus strategy that includes making at-home rapid tests free, extending the mask requirement on public transit and requiring more stringent testing protocols for all international travelers.
The latest plan does not include more aggressive measures like requiring testing for domestic flights or mandating testing for passengers after their arrival in the U.S.
To allow for free rapid tests, senior administration officials say the more than 150 million Americans with private insurance will be able to submit for reimbursement to their insurance companies through the same rule that allows tests on site to be covered by insurance.
To reach uninsured Americans and those on Medicare or Medicaid, the Biden administration will send 50 million at-home tests to 20,000 federal sites around the country to be handed out for free.
The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor and Treasury Department will put out guidance by Jan. 15 to determine exactly how many tests will be covered and at what frequency, the plan said, and it will not retroactively cover tests already purchased.
Senior administration officials said they are confident in the supply of rapid tests to meet the possible demand of Americans who will now be able to get them at no cost.
“Supply will quadruple this month from where it was at the end of summer, so we’re doing a ton to ramp up all tests, but specifically a big focus on ramping up these at-home tests,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters Wednesday night.
The extension of mask mandates on public transportation, including airplanes, rails and buses, will now go through March 18, per the plan, and tighter requirements for travel into the United States will go into place early next week.
The new travel rules call for proof of a negative COVID test within one day of travel to the U.S. for all passengers, regardless of their vaccination status or nationality.
The plan also puts a heavy emphasis on booster shots, which have had a sluggish uptake in the U.S. but experts urge for added protection in the face of the new omicron variant and its many unknowns.
Pharmacies will expand locations and hours to administer booster shots through December, according to the plan, and the Biden administration will up its outreach efforts through a public education campaign aimed at seniors and new family vaccination clinics that can be a one-stop shop for kids vaccines, adult vaccines and booster shots.
Biden also raises the possibility that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer suggest that schoolchildren quarantine for 14 days after exposure, instead relying on the popular “test-to-stay” policy that allows kids to keep attending school so long as they test negative each day.
“The CDC has been studying approaches to quarantine and testing, including looking at the science and data of how they may keep school communities safe. CDC will release their findings on these approaches in the coming weeks,” according to the plan.
In all, the new strategy comes as cases continue to rise, a combination of colder weather pushing people indoors together and vaccine immunity waning among people who got the shot more than six months ago and haven’t yet gotten a booster.
There are also new concerns about omicron, which has more mutations than previous variants but is still mostly a mystery — from how transmissible it is to its capability to cause more severe disease or evade vaccines.
On Monday, Biden reassured Americans that his administration is taking every precaution to protect the public from the omicron variant and that he doesn’t expect this to be the “new normal.”
“It’s a new variant that’s cause for concern, but not a cause for panic,” the president said. “And we’re gonna fight this with science and speed. We’re not going to fight it with chaos and confusion, and we believe we can deal with it.”
The administration’s ban on incoming travel from eight countries in southern Africa went into effect this week after the variant was first detected in Botswana. It has since been found in nearly 30 countries, including in the U.S. on Wednesday.
Over the past year, Biden has focused his efforts to defeat COVID on increasing vaccinations and testing.
When the country didn’t meet his goal of 70% of all adults vaccinated with at least one shot by July, and as cases spiked again from the delta variant’s arrival over the summer, Biden moved forward on vaccine mandates.
Though the mandates were supposed to apply to all federal government employees, health care workers and employees of large private companies, the rollout has been met with lawsuits and lax deadlines.
The mandate for government employees initially was supposed to be implemented in late November, but the government has delayed firing employees who refused to comply until after the holidays.
Still, 92% of federal employees had their first dose as of last week.
The mandates on health care workers and employees of large companies have faced legal challenges that halted them until a decision in higher courts later this winter.
But many hospitals and companies have gone ahead with mandates on their own, often successfully.
The nation’s public health experts have continued to push vaccines and boosters as the best defense against the variant, even as they wait for more data.
“We don’t know everything we need to know about the omicron variants, but we know that vaccination is a safe and effective way to protect yourself from severe illness and complications from all known SARS-CoV-2 variants to date,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters on Tuesday.
As of Wednesday, 71% of adults over 18 and almost 60% of the entire American population are currently fully vaccinated. Nearly 100 million adults who are eligible for boosters have yet to get them.
Reflecting on the past year, Biden on Monday said, “we’re in a very different place” as we enter December, noting that vaccinations were just being rolled out and the majority of schools were still closed in 2020.
“Last Christmas, our children were at risk without a vaccine. This Christmas, we have safe and effective vaccines for children ages 5 and older, with more than 19 million children and counting now vaccinated,” Biden said.
