AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
CDC pleads with Americans to avoid Thanksgiving travel
NEW YORK (AP) — With the coronavirus surging out of control, the nation’s top public health agency pleaded with Americans on Thursday not to travel for Thanksgiving and not to spend the holiday with people from outside their household.
The Thanksgiving warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came as the White House coronavirus task force held a briefing for the first time in months and Vice President Mike Pence concluded it without responding to questions by reporters or urging Americans not to travel.
Other members of the task force — whose media briefings were a daily fixture during the early days of the outbreak — talked about the progress being made in the development of a vaccine.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech will seek emergency government approval for their coronavirus vaccine on Friday. And infection disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci sought to reassure the public that the vaccine is safe while still encouraging Americans to wear masks.
The CDC's Thanksgiving warning was some of the firmest guidance yet from the government on curtailing traditional gatherings to fight the outbreak.
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Health experts clash over use of certain drugs for COVID-19
Health officials around the world are clashing over the use of certain drugs for COVID-19, leading to different treatment options for patients depending on where they live.
On Friday, a World Health Organization guidelines panel advised against using the antiviral remdesivir for hospitalized patients, saying there’s no evidence it improves survival or avoids the need for breathing machines.
But in the U.S. and many other countries, the drug has been the standard of care since a major, government-led study found other benefits — it shortened recovery time for hospitalized patients by five days on average, from 15 days to 10.
Within the U.S., a federal guidelines panel and some leading medical groups have not endorsed two other therapies the Food and Drug Administration authorized for emergency use -- Eli Lilly’s experimental antibody drug and convalescent plasma, the blood of COVID-19 survivors. The groups say there isn't enough evidence to recommend for or against them.
Doctors also remain uncertain about when and when not to use the only drugs known to improve survival for the sickest COVID-19 patients: dexamethasone or similar steroids.
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Birthday time: Biden turns 78, will be oldest U.S. president
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden turned 78 on Friday. In two months, he'll take the reins of a politically fractured nation facing the worst public health crisis in a century, high unemployment and a reckoning on racial injustice.
As he wrestles with those issues, Biden will be attempting to accomplish another feat: demonstrate to Americans that age is but a number and he's up to the job.
Biden will be sworn in as the oldest president in the nation’s history, displacing Ronald Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 when he was 77 years and 349 days old.
The age and health of both Biden and President Donald Trump -- less than four years Biden’s junior — loomed throughout a race that was decided by a younger and more diverse electorate and at a moment when the nation is facing no shortage of issues of consequence.
Out of the gate, Biden will be keen to demonstrate he's got the vigor to serve.
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Trump, allies make frantic steps to overturn Biden victory
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his allies are taking increasingly frantic steps to subvert the results of the 2020 election, including summoning state legislators to the White House as part of a longshot bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Among other last-ditch tactics: personally calling local election officials who are trying to rescind their certification votes in Michigan, suggesting in a legal challenge that Pennsylvania set aside the popular vote there and pressuring county officials in Arizona to delay certifying vote tallies.
Election law experts see it as the last, dying gasps of the Trump campaign and say Biden is certain to walk into the Oval Office come January. But there is great concern that Trump's effort is doing real damage to public faith in the integrity of U.S. elections.
“It’s very concerning that some Republicans apparently can’t fathom the possibility that they legitimately lost this election,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who researches and teaches election law.
“We depend on democratic norms, including that the losers graciously accept defeat," he said. "That seems to be breaking down.”
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EXPLAINER: Why AP called Georgia for Biden
WHY THE AP CALLED GEORGIA FOR BIDEN:
More than two weeks after Election Day, The Associated Press has declared Joe Biden the winner of the presidential contest in Georgia, a longtime Republican state that the Democratic president-elect narrowly won by making major inroads in suburban areas that formerly favored the GOP.
Biden won the presidency on Nov. 7, after capturing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had swung for President Donald Trump in 2016. But his 0.3 percentage point lead over Trump in Georgia was so narrow that the state could not be called — until now.
It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is — or is likely to become — subject to a recount. While there is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.
The AP called the race for Biden on Thursday after state election officials there said hand-tallied audit of ballots cast in the presidential race confirmed the former vice president leads President Donald Trump by roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million counted.
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Azerbaijani army enters territory ceded by Armenian forces
MOSCOW (AP) — Units of the Azerbaijani army have entered the Aghdam region, a territory ceded by Armenian forces in a cease-fire agreement that ended six weeks of heavy fighting over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said Friday.
The truce, brokered by Russia last week, stipulated that Armenia hand over control of some areas its holds outside Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders to Azerbaijan. The first one, Aghdam, is to be turned over on Friday.
Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994. That war left not only Nagorno-Karabakh itself but substantial surrounding territory in Armenian hands.
Heavy fighting that flared up Sept. 27 marked the biggest escalation of the decades-old conflict between the two ex-Soviet nations in over a quarter-century, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people.
The truce last week halted the violence after several failed attempts to establish a lasting cease-fire. It was celebrated as a victory in Azerbaijan, but sparked mass protests in Armenia, with thousands regularly taking to the streets to demand the ouster of the country's prime minister.
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In multiple countries, alarm over hunger crisis rings louder
ABS, Yemen (AP) — The twin baby boys lay on a bed of woven palm leaves in a remote camp for displaced people in Yemen’s north, their collar bones and ribs visible. They cried loudly, twisting as if in pain, not from disease but from the hunger gnawing away at them.
Here, U.N. officials’ increasingly dire warnings that a hunger crisis is growing around the world are becoming reality.
U.N. agencies have warned that some 250 million people in 20 countries are threatened with sharply spiking malnutrition or even famine in coming months.
The United Nations humanitarian office this week released $100 million in emergency funding to seven countries most at risk of famine — Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Congo, and Burkina Faso.
But David Beasley, head of the World Food Program, says billions in new aid are needed. Without it, “we are going to have famines of biblical proportions in 2021,” he said in an Associated Press interview last week.
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India's total number of coronavirus cases crosses 9 million
NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s total number of coronavirus cases since the pandemic began crossed 9 million on Friday.
Nevertheless the country’s new daily cases have seen a steady decline for weeks now and the total number of cases represents 0.6% of India’s 1.3 billion population.
The Health Ministry reported 45,882 new infections and 584 fatalities in the past 24 hours on Friday. The death toll since the pandemic began is more than 132,000.
Authorities in capital New Delhi are fighting to head off nearly 7,500 new cases a day while ensuring that the flagging economy doesn’t capsize again. The government hiked the fine for not wearing a mask four times to 2,000 rupees ($27) as it considered fresh restrictions.
"The next four weeks are crucial. The road is very bumpy,” said Dr. S.K. Sarin, director of New Delhi’s Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences.
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Mexico tops 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, 4th country to do so
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico passed the 100,000 mark in COVID-19 deaths, becoming only the fourth country to do so amid concerns about the lingering physical and psychological scars on survivors.
José Luis Alomía Zegarra, Mexico’s director of epidemiology, announced late Thursday that Mexico had 100,104 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, behind only the United States, Brazil and India.
The milestone comes less than a week after Mexico topped 1 million registered coronavirus cases, though officials agree the number is probably much higher because of low levels of testing.
The coverage of the back-to-back milestones has raised the hackles of some government officials.
Mexico’s pointman on the pandemic, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell, bristled when asked about Mexico reaching the 100,000 deaths point, criticizing the media for “being alarmist," in the same way he has criticized those who suggest the government is undercounting COVID-19 deaths or providing contradictory and weak advice on using face masks.
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AP Photos: Spanish nurses witness grim solitude of COVID-19
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — For nurse Marta Fernández, the fall resurgence of COVID-19 in Spain has been less traumatic in medical terms than during the initial spring outbreak.
But seeing her patients die in the Barcelona hospital where she works, without visits from family or friends, forced into grim solitude by the coronavirus, was no easier.
“The worst thing about this pandemic is seeing how patients deal alone with the entire disease process, even with their own death,” says Fernández. “Seeing them die alone is the hardest of all.”
Fernández, who has been working at the Hospital del Mar for more than 25 years, is one of the staff who have helped patients deal emotionally with the isolation of being hospitalized with COVID-19.
The virus shrinks their worlds to a hospital ward, and in the absence of loved ones they are deeply grateful for the nurses’ care.