COVID-19 News from Around the Web

Nearly 40% of US Marines are declining Covid-19 vaccinations, according to data provided to CNN on Friday by the service, the first branch to disclose service-wide numbers on acceptance and declination. As of Thursday, approximately 75,500 Marines have received vaccines, including fully vaccinated and partially vaccinated service men and women. About 48,000 Marines have chosen not to receive vaccines, for a declination rate of 38.9%.

Duke University in North Carolina has announced that it will require students to have a COVID-19 vaccine when they return this fall. … Rutgers University in New Jersey was the first, and since then more than a dozen residential colleges have followed. The University of Notre Dame; two Ivy League universities, Brown and Cornell; and Northeastern University in Massachusetts are among those requiring the vaccine for the fall. Cleveland State University will do so for all students living on campus. As vaccines become more widely available, it's likely that many more colleges will add their own mandates.

"What we're seeing now is really an economy that seems to be much at an inflection point," Powell told "60 minutes" during the interview. "And that's because of widespread vaccination and strong fiscal support, strong monetary policy support. We feel like we're at a place where the economy's about to start growing much more quickly and job creation coming in much more quickly. The outlook has brightened substantially."

Brazil this week became just the third country, after the U.S. and Peru, to report a 24-hour tally of COVID-19 deaths that exceeded 4,000. India hit a peak of almost 127,000 new cases in 24 hours, and Iran set a new coronavirus infection record for the third straight day, reporting nearly 22,600 new cases. Brazil’s death toll has risen past 340,000, the second-highest total in the world behind the U.S., where nearly 560,000 people have been confirmed killed.

While a three- or four-week gap between shots is ideal, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says you can get your second shot within 42 days of the first one and still mount a full immune response. “Beyond that, we start to operate in an area where there’s simply less data,” Ratner says. That doesn’t mean your second shot will be ineffective if it’s given more than six weeks after the first. It only means that studies have not specifically measured how much protection the two-dose vaccines offer when the shots are given more than 42 days apart. Still, the CDC says you don’t have to start over if you can’t get a second vaccine within 42 days.

More than half of rural residents in the US have received a Covid-19 vaccine or plan to, but one in five still say they will definitely not get vaccinated, according to an analysis released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. KFF researchers surveyed 1,001 adults living in rural America and found that 54% said they have received a Covid-19 vaccine or plan to. One in five rural residents said they definitely won't get vaccinated. About 73% of these respondents lean Republican and 41% identify as White Evangelical Christians.

In the United States, the good vaccine news keeps coming. For much of the world, things look bleak. As of Thursday, just short of 20 percent of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated, giving some 66 million people a strong measure of protection against a disease that has already killed more than 500,000 Americans. By contrast, Covax — a World Health Organization-backed push for equitable distribution — aims to secure enough doses to cover up to 20 percent of the people in participating countries by the end of 2021, but it may not meet that relatively modest goal, experts warn. The gap between the vaccine “haves” and “have-nots” is widening, fueling frustration and potentially extending the pandemic.

The new report was published April 8 in the British Journal of Dermatology. For the study, Weller's group analyzed all recorded COVID-19 deaths in the continental United States from January to April 2020, and then compared that with data on levels of the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays in nearly 2,500 U.S. counties during the same period. People in regions with the highest level of exposure to UVA rays (which make up 95% of the sun's UV light) were less likely to die of COVID-19 than those in regions with the lowest levels of UVA exposure, the findings showed. The researchers conducted similar analyses in England and Italy and came up with the same results.

A more easily spread coronavirus variant first identified in England last year has now become the dominant strain in the U.S., the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The variant, known as B.1.1.7, spread quickly across the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning last fall, with the more infectious version of the coronavirus thwarting restrictions and lockdowns that had earlier helped keep the original strain in check. B.1.1.7 is "now the most common lineage circulating in the United States," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House media briefing on Wednesday. The announcement comes as the number of cases — particularly among younger Americans — has been on the rise in the U.S., fueling fears that the nation may be facing yet another deadly surge. Walensky said that the newer strain has been shown to be more transmissible among younger people and that new outbreaks in the U.S. have been linked to youth sports and day care centers.

Medical regulators in Britain and the European Union on Wednesday said it was "plausible" that the Oxford-AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine is linked to rare but sometimes deadly blood clots, a development that could complicate plans to roll it out around the world. The European Medicines Agency stressed that the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks, as thousands of people die of the coronavirus across the continent each day. But British officials advised that adults under 30 be offered alternative vaccines, noting that the calculus is different for young and otherwise healthy people who are at relatively low risk of serious covid-19. Italy and Belgium also put new restrictions on the vaccine for people under 60 and 55 respectively, bringing them in line with other European countries, including Germany and France.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky anticipates that all schools will be fully in person and no longer remote in September 2021. "We should anticipate, come September 2021, that schools should be full-fledged in person and all of our children back in the classroom," the CDC director told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton during an Instagram Live conversation on ABC News. She said that parents and teachers should anticipate this regardless of whether children are vaccinated or not. "We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there's so much we can do," she said. Asked when she expects children will become eligible to get vaccinated, Walensky said by mid-May. Pfizer recently released promising data indicating its vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 12 to 15.

Many children and teenagers who developed the mysterious inflammatory syndrome that can emerge several weeks after contracting the coronavirus never had classic Covid-19 symptoms at the time of their infection, according to the largest study so far of cases in the United States. The study, led by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that in over 1,000 cases in which information about whether they got sick from their initial Covid-19 illness was available, 75 percent of the patients did not experience such symptoms. But two to five weeks later, they became sick enough to be hospitalized for the condition, called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which can affect multiple organs, especially the heart.

The U.S. government will allot nearly 85% less Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines to states next week, data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed. Only 785,500 J&J doses will be allocated, compared to 4.95 million doses this week. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and J&J did not immediately respond to requests, made outside regular hours, for comment on the drop in numbers. A New York Times report last week said that workers at an Emergent BioSolutions facility in Baltimore, which produced both AstraZeneca Plc and J&J doses, mixed up ingredients of the two vaccines, ruining 15 million J&J doses.

Two COVID-19 vaccines appear to work well against a rapidly spreading coronavirus variant that arose in California, but less effective against a variant that first emerged in South Africa, researchers report. "The good news is the California variant does not appear to be a problem for our current vaccines," said study author David Montefiori, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development at Duke University, in Durham, N.C…. When the blood samples from people who received both doses of the Moderna vaccine were exposed to the California variant, the vaccine remained strongly protective. The Novovax vaccine also performed well against it…. While researchers didn't test the Pfizer vaccine, they said the findings would be comparable to those for the Moderna vaccine because both use similar technology.

About 76% of Americans aged 65 and older have received at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccines since authorization in December, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the rate of new vaccinations among the group most vulnerable to adverse virus outcomes has dramatically slowed. It’s a growing source of concern, not only because of the potential for preventable deaths and serious illness among seniors in coming months but also for what it could portend for America’s broader population. “I want to make a direct appeal to our seniors and everyone who cares about them,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday, citing “incredible progress” but declaring it’s still not enough. “It’s simple: Seniors, it’s time for you to get vaccinated now. Get vaccinated now.”

COVID-19 death rates are significantly higher among Black American women than among white men, according to a new study, suggesting that race is a factor in survival differences between men and women. Researchers analyzed COVID death rates in Michigan and Georgia, the only states reporting data by age, race and sex…. The analysis by Harvard's GenderSci Lab found that COVID death rates among Black women are nearly four times higher than those for white men; three times higher than for Asian men; and also higher than for white and Asian women. COVID death rates among Black men are far higher than for any other sex and racial group -- including more than six times higher than for white men.