WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are giving themselves more time to sort through their end-of-session business on government spending and COVID-19 relief, preparing a one-week stopgap spending bill that would prevent a shutdown this weekend.

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House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, shown in June, said Monday that the temporary government funding bill is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, when it is sure to pass. Alex Brandon/Associated Press

House floor leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on Twitter that the temporary government funding bill is slated for a vote on Wednesday, when it is sure to easily pass. The development comes as Capitol Hill is struggling to figure out how to deliver long-delayed pandemic relief, including additional help for businesses hard hit by the pandemic, further unemployment benefits, funding to distribute COVID-19 vaccines and funding demanded by Democrats for state and local governments.

Disagreements flared Monday over one key provision — a proposed liability shield from COVID-19-related lawsuits for businesses, schools and organizations that reopen.

Hoyer had previously told lawmakers that this week would probably be the last of the session, but talks are going more slowly than hoped on a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill under assembly by senior members of the powerful Appropriations committees. The stopgap measure would prevent a government shutdown through Dec. 18.

“I am disappointed that we have not yet reached agreement on government funding,” Hoyer said.

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Massachusetts hospitals to halt some procedures to free up COVID beds

BOSTON — Massachusetts hospitals will soon put a temporary halt to in-patient elective surgeries that can safely be postponed, and the state will expand free testing throughout the state to help fight a rising tide of new coronavirus cases, Gov. Charlie Baker announced Monday.

“Massachusetts is now experiencing a rapid increase in new positive cases in the wake of Thanksgiving and, in turn, the number of people becoming ill and needing hospitalization is also increasing,” the Republican governor said at a news conference.

“We can’t afford to continue to strain the hospital system at this rate,” he added.

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Tim Smith, of Boston, receives a free COVID-19 test given by Health Innovations, Tuesday, Dec. 1, in Chelsea, Mass. AP Photo/Elise Amendola

The temporary halt to elective surgeries will start Friday and the goal is to free up medical staff and beds, he said.

Ambulatory out-patient surgeries and procedures will be allowed to continue, state Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said.

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Baker also announced a multi-faceted effort to expand the state’s testing capacity to 110,000 tests per week.

The plan includes expanded testing in western Massachusetts and on Cape Cod, where leaders have expressed frustration over a lack of testing capacity. More testing is coming to Amherst, Great Barrington, Greenfield, North Adams, and Pittsfield, the governor said.

The state has allocated more than $150 million for free COVID-19 testing, including surveillance testing programs in congregate settings and investments in laboratory capacity to process samples, according to the governor’s office.

Kansas hospital runs out of staff, as virus creates acute rural crisis

The radiology technician slept in an RV in the parking lot of his rural Kansas hospital for more than a week because his co-workers were out sick with COVID-19 and no one else was available to take X-rays.

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Eric Lewallen takes a photo of himself on Friday in La Crosse, Kansas. Lewallen, a radiology technician, has been sleeping in an RV in the parking lot of his rural Kansas hospital because his co-workers are out sick with COVID-19 and no one else is available to take X-rays. Eric Lewallen via Associated Press

A doctor and physician assistant tested positive on the same day in November, briefly leaving the hospital without anyone who could write prescriptions or oversee patient care. The hospital is full, but diverting patients isn’t an option because surrounding medical centers are overwhelmed.

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The situation at Rush County Memorial Hospital in La Crosse illustrates the depths of the COVID-19 crisis in rural America at a time when the virus is killing more than 2,000 people a day and inundating hospitals.

The virus is sidelining nurses, doctors and medical staff nationwide, but the problem is particularly dire in rural communities like La Crosse because they don’t have much of a bullpen – or many places to send patients with regional hospitals full.

The staff shortages have forced people like Eric Lewallen, a Gulf War veteran and alfalfa farmer who moonlights as a radiology technician, to mount a last line of defense. To keep the hospital open, he had no choice but to start living in his RV in the parking lot because he needed to be on site as the only remaining healthy staffer to perform X-rays.

“I’m it,” Lewallen said shortly after begging the hospital laundry staff to start washing his scrubs because he had run out of clean ones.

“To keep a critical access hospital open, you have to have X-ray and lab functioning,” he said. “If one of those go down, you go on diversion and you lose your ER at that point. We don’t want that to happen, especially for the community.”

La Crosse, a town of 1,300 people that dubs itself as the “Barbed Wire Capital of the World” and is home to barbed wire museum, is like many small towns struggling with the virus. Case numbers have soared, there’s an outbreak at the nursing home, and its county has opted out of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s latest mask mandate.

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And there are few larger medical centers to send its sickest patients with the rest of the region also overrun by the virus.

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Rhode Island leads nation in virus cases per capita

PROVIDENCE, R.I.  — Rhode Island has reported more coronavirus cases per capita in the past week than any other state, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The first patients walk onto the floor of the Dunkin’ Donuts Center as a new COVID-19 rapid testing site operated by the Rhode Island Army National Guard opens in Providence, R.I, Tuesday, Dec. 1. AP Photo/David Goldman

Rhode Island averaged about 110 daily cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days, the CDC’s COVID-19 Data Tracker showed Sunday.

Minnesota and South Dakota are the only other states in the country with 100 or more.

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Rhode Island is halfway through Gov. Gina Raimondo’s “two-week pause,” the latest round of restrictions on business and personal activity meant to reduce community transmission of the coronavirus.

The state Department of Health on Friday reported 1,326 new coronavirus infections and a daily positivity rate of 9.2%.

Connecticut’s rate is 60.5 cases per 100,000 and that Massachusetts has a rate of 58.3 cases per 100,000, according to the CDC.

Millions of hungry Americans turn to food banks for 1st time

The deadly pandemic that tore through the nation’s heartland struck just as Aaron Crawford was in a moment of crisis. He was looking for work, his wife needed surgery, then the virus began eating away at her work hours and her paycheck.

The Crawfords had no savings, mounting bills and a growing dread: What if they ran out of food? The couple had two boys, 5 and 10, and boxes of macaroni and cheese from the dollar store could go only so far.

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A 37-year-old Navy vet, Crawford saw himself as self-reliant. Asking for food made him uncomfortable. “I felt like I was a failure,” he says. “It’s this whole stigma… this mindset that you’re this guy who can’t provide for his family, that you’re a deadbeat.”

Hunger is a harsh reality in the richest country in the world. Even during times of prosperity, schools hand out millions of hot meals a day to children, and desperate elderly Americans are sometimes forced to choose between medicine and food.

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Volunteers load non perishable foods green grocery bag that are then boxed up and put on a pallet for distribution to a school student food program in the area at the Houston Food Bank Wednesday, Oct. 14, in Houston. AP Photo/Michael Wyke

Now, in the pandemic of 2020, with illness, job loss and business closures, millions more Americans are worried about empty refrigerators and barren cupboards. Food banks are doling out meals at a rapid pace and an Associated Press data analysis found a sharp rise in the amount of food distributed compared with last year. Meanwhile, some folks are skipping meals so their children can eat and others are depending on cheap food that lacks nutrition.

Those fighting hunger say they’ve never seen anything like this in America, even during the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

The first place many Americans are finding relief is a neighborhood food pantry, most connected to vast networks of nonprofits. Tons of food move each day from grocery store discards and government handouts to warehouse distribution centers, and then to the neighborhood charity.

The Crawfords turned to the Family Resource Centers and Food Shelf, part of 360 Communities, a nonprofit 15 minutes from their apartment in Apple Valley, Minnesota. When needed, they receive monthly boxes of fresh produce, dairy, deli, meat and other basics — enough food to fill two grocery carts. If that runs out, they can get an emergency package to tide them over for the rest of the month.

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Crawford’s wife, Sheyla, had insisted they seek help; her hours had been cut at the day care center where she worked. At first, Crawford was embarrassed to go the food shelf; he worried he’d bump into someone he knew. He now sees it differently.

“It didn’t make me a bad man or a terrible husband or father,” he says. “On the contrary, I was actually doing something to make sure that my wife and kids had something thing to eat.”

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Nursing-home staffers attended a 300-person superspreader wedding. Now six residents have died.

Last month, more than 300 people packed into a wedding near rural Ritzville, Wash., defying state restrictions. Authorities later traced more than a dozen coronavirus cases and two outbreaks to the ceremony – and warned that the fallout would likely get worse.

Now, health officials say the wedding also included some guests whose job is caring for among the most vulnerable to coronavirus: nursing-home residents. And at least six residents have now died of covid-19 at two nursing homes where staffers tested positive for the virus after attending the wedding, the local department announced in a Thursday news release.

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A sign explains the closure of a shop in the Pike Place Market in Seattle in April. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson,File

The Grant County Health District said that it hasn’t yet definitively linked those deaths to the wedding, but the department now intends to do full contact tracing on the staffers tested positive after attending the event, spokeswoman Theresa Adkinson told The Washington Post in an email statement late Sunday.

“Because staff in these facilities care for entire units, direct contact with associated patients is not known,” according to the department’s news release.

Health experts have long warned of the risk that “superspreader” events pose to the elderly and those with underlying conditions even if they don’t participate in the mass gatherings themselves. In August, a wedding in a small Maine town with about 65 guests sparked an outbreak resulting in nearly 200 infections. Six residents of an assisted-living facility who did not attend the party died of covid-19 complications after being infected in the outbreak, the state’s CDC director later announced.

The continued fallout from the Washington state wedding comes as cases continue to surge across the state, which saw reported covid hospitalizations increase by about 20 percent in the last week, according to data collected by The Post. During that same seven-day period, Washington’s new daily reported deaths rose by about 167 percent.

The wedding, which according to local authorities took place at a private location near Ritzville on Nov. 7, attracted guests from multiple communities, making it difficult for the Grant County Health District to track all attendees. A little over a week later, local authorities announced the scale of the event and the outbreaks, asking attendees to get tested for the coronavirus and quarantine for two weeks.

Read the full story here.

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Smartphone app to track side effects of the coronavirus vaccine may be vulnerable to manipulation

A new smartphone technology designed to provide real-time warnings of side effects in the first Americans vaccinated against the coronavirus may be vulnerable to manipulation, raising concerns that malicious actors could gain access to the system to undermine confidence in the shots, federal and state health officials say.

The text-messaging system, called v-safe, is intended to provide early indications about possible adverse reactions from the vaccines. Using the messaging program, people who have received the shots can report symptoms and other health effects, such as missed work. Their responses could prompt phone calls from a team of safety professionals.

But the technology is raising red flags for some health and technology experts, who say hackers or anti-vaccine activists may be able to access the software to create false or misleading reports. Officials’ unease is acute because vaccine hesitancy, stoked by a well-funded anti-vaccine movement that makes prolific use of social and other media, is expected to be a central obstacle to the widespread immunization required to end the pandemic.

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North Carolina’ s cell phone app contact tracing SlowCOVIDNC is shown on Friday, Dec. 4, 2020, in Charlotte, N.C. An analysis shows that few Americans are utilizing contact tracing technology launched in a host of U.S. states and territories. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Not rolling out v-safe early to health-care providers and public health workers, who will be asked to promote it, has also raised concerns, because these foot soldiers of the mass vaccination campaign have had little opportunity to see how the system works.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is overseeing v-safe, say they’re beginning to increase messaging about the software and how to ensure its proper use.

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The vulnerability in the new tool “is a potential risk,” said one federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Safeguards are in place to block false information from being spread, but using them “eats up time” that could be used to investigate actual adverse events, said another official who spoke on similar terms.

The CDC said in a statement that the smartphone-based tool was developed to allow “people to report how they are feeling after covid-19 vaccination to CDC in almost real time.” The voluntary system is in addition to existing safety monitoring programs, the agency said. “Reports to v-safe indicating a medically significant health impact” are followed up by trained personnel. CDC vaccine experts may reach out to the person’s health-care provider to request more information, the agency said.

The v-safe platform “is in the final stage of development, which includes security testing,” the statement said.

The messaging tool promises to give officials a quicker signal of any safety issues associated with coronavirus vaccines. It prioritizes ease of use to encourage people to participate, but experts say that can make it less secure.

Read the full story here.

Germany puts nursing homes, over 80s 1st in line

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BERLIN — A panel of medical experts in Germany is recommending that nursing home residents, people over 80 and key medical personnel in acute and elderly care should receive coronavirus vaccines first when they become available.

A draft recommendation released Monday defines some 8.6 million people who would receive a vaccine first. That’s over 10% of the German population.

According to the 62-page document, only once those groups have been immunized and if vaccines are still limited should other high risk groups received the shot.

The draft, which still needs to be approved, has a total of six categories grouped according to their risk of serious illness from COVID-19 and the likelihood they might expose others. Teachers belong to the fourth category, while people working in key positions of government, in critical infrastructure and in small stores are in the fifth.

All other healthy individuals under 60 — an estimated 45 million people in the country of 83 million — would be last in line for a vaccine.

The expert panel says people who have recovered from a confirmed infection do not need to get immunized.

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Germany plans to start vaccinations at beginning of the year

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff says he expects coronavirus vaccinations to start in Germany “in the very first days” of the new year. The trained doctor says he’s prepared to help vaccinate people himself.

European Union authorities are expected to make a decision by Dec. 29 on approving the first vaccine for use. Germany is getting special vaccination centers ready. The news comes as Britain gears up to start coronavirus vaccinations on Tuesday.

Merkel’s chief of staff, Helge Braun, told the Bild newspaper late Sunday that he will tell medical authorities he’s prepared to help. He said he and Merkel will get vaccinated “when it’s our turn.”

Infection figures in Germany have stabilized at a high level since a partial shutdown started on Nov. 2 but haven’t decreased. On Monday, the national disease control center reported 12,332 new cases over the past 24 hours, compared with 11,168 a week ago, and 147 new deaths.

Restrictions such as the closure of restaurants, bars, sports and leisure facilities are due to last until at least Jan. 10 and some regions are taking or contemplating tougher measures.

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Hong Kong to install testing kit vending machines

HONG KONG — Hong Kong plans to install vending machines for coronavirus testing kits in 10 subway stations across the city amid a new surge in cases.

A government news release Monday said about 10,000 specimen collection packs will be supplied to the machines daily.

The persistence of the virus in the city of 7.5 million has prompted an increasing array of control, testing and case tracing measures.

The news release said another 95 virus cases had been recorded on Sunday, bring the city’s total to 6,898, with 112 deaths. The last two week have seen the addition of 1,242 cases, most of them local, prompting authorities to tighten restrictions, including banning most social gatherings to just two people. The surge in cases has also led to the suspension of plans to open a “travel bubble” with Singapore.

Describing the epidemic situation as “severe,” the government’s Center for Health Protection called on the public to “avoid going out, having social contact and dining out,” and strongly urged people to avoid all nonessential travel outside the city.

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California prepares for new stay-at-home order

LOS ANGELES — Many Californians are preparing for a new stay-at-home order that bars restaurant dining, shutters salons and limits retail in an effort to curb spiraling coronavirus infections and hospitalizations.

The new rules that take effect before midnight in the vast region of Southern California, much of the San Francisco Bay Area and a large swath of the Central Valley also prohibit residents from gathering with people not in their households.

Public health officials contend the measures are critical as space dwindles in intensive care units in Southern California and much of the Central Valley amid a surge in coronavirus infections

Some law enforcement officials in these same areas, however, said they don’t plan to enforce the rules and are counting on residents to wear masks and practice physical distancing to protect themselves during the pandemic.

First shipments of vaccine delivered to UK

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LONDON — Shipments of the coronavirus vaccine developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech were delivered Sunday in the U.K. in super-cold containers, two days before it goes public in an immunization program that is being closely watched around the world.

Around 800,000 doses of the vaccine were expected to be in place for the start of the immunization program on Tuesday, a day that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has reportedly dubbed as “V-Day,” a nod to triumphs in World War II.

“To know that they are here, and we are amongst the first in the country to actually receive the vaccine and therefore the first in the world, is just amazing,” said Louise Coughlan, joint chief pharmacist at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, just south of London.

Last week, the U.K. became the first country to authorize the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine for emergency use. In trials, the vaccine was shown to have around 95% efficacy.

Vaccinations will be administered starting Tuesday at around 50 hospital hubs in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will also begin their vaccination rollouts the same day.


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