Covid-19 Live Updates: Thanksgiving Travel Drops as Americans Rethink Rituals

Americans have agonized over Thanksgiving this year, weighing skyrocketing case numbers and blunt warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against the need, after a grim and worrying year, to gather with family for a traditional, carbohydrate-laden ritual.

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Around 27 percent of Americans plan to dine with people outside their household, according to interviews conducted by the global data and survey firm Dynata at the request of The New York Times.

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Views on whether to risk Thanksgiving gatherings appear to track closely with political views, with respondents identifying as Democrats far less likely to be planning a multi-household holiday.

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Megan Baldwin, 42, had planned to drive from New York to Montana to be with her parents, but at the last minute, she canceled her plans.

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“I thought I would get tested and take all the precautions to be safe, but how could I risk giving it to my parents who are in their 70s?” she said, adding that they were not happy with the decision.

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“All they want is to see their grandkids, but I couldn’t forgive myself if we got them sick,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”

Others decided to take the plunge, concluding that the emotional boost of being together justified the risk of getting sick.

“We all agreed that we need this, we need to be together during this crazy, lonely time and we are just going to be careful and hope that we will all be OK,” said Martha Dillon, who will converge with relatives from four different states on her childhood home in Kentucky.

A Detailed Map of Where Americans Are Staying Home for Thanksgiving

Despite geographical and partisan splits, the vast majority say they are heeding pandemic warnings and planning a quieter holiday than usual.

Thanksgiving travel is clearly down compared to 2019.

The AAA has forecast a 10 percent overall decline in Thanksgiving travel compared to last year, the largest year-on-year drop since the recession of 2008. But the change is far smaller, around 4.3 percent, for those traveling by car, who make up the vast majority of those who plan to travel — roughly 47.8 million people.

About 917,000 people were screened by the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, according to federal data published on Tuesday, less than half of what it was on the same day in 2019.

Demand for travel by train is down more sharply, at about 20 percent of what it was last year, said Jason Abrams, a spokesman for Amtrak.

Susan Katz, 73, said she canceled plans to spend Thanksgiving with her daughter last Friday, after watching a monologue by Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, describing her partner’s bout of coronavirus and her fear that it would prove fatal.

“Her emotion, Rachel Maddow’s emotion, made it so real, it just moved us,” Ms. Katz said. “I probably called her within a few hours of seeing that.”

Ms. Katz, who lives in Raleigh, N.C., said she will spend the holiday alone with her husband. She is trying to decide whether to bother thawing a turkey breast.

But the question of Thanksgiving is a sensitive one, she said.

“I had a friend who got very annoyed with me when I said that for us, Thursday was just going to be another day,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, has strongly discouraged holiday travel as the number of new infections surges across the country

“Do you really want to have that gathering?” he said, in an interview with PBS. “Or should you say, I know it hurts not to do it, because this is such a beautiful, traditional season, but hang in there with us, because there will be future times when you can do it?”

Interest in travel generally has increased after recent announcements by pharmaceutical companies that their coronavirus vaccine candidates have been effective at preventing infections, according to preliminary data.

Travel bookings increased by about 25 percent after Pfizer said in early November that a vaccine it was developing with BioNTech was more than 90 percent effective, according to Skyscanner, a travel search engine.

The increase in travel during the holidays has been encouraging for airlines. But they collectively reported tens of billions of dollars in losses so far this year, and analysts expect demand to remain weak for a couple of years or more.

— Ceylan Yeginsu, Ellen Barry, Vikas Bajaj and Cora Engelbrecht

Britain will loosen most restrictions for a short period to allow people to celebrate Christmas.

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People passing Christmas lights in London on Monday. — Credit...Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

Britons from up to three households will be able to come together and celebrate Christmas under plans announced on Tuesday for a brief relaxation of the rules designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The decision, agreed upon by political leaders in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, means that people will be able to move freely around the United Kingdom between Dec. 23 and 27, regardless of whatever local restrictions are in force before those dates.

Those moving to or from Northern Ireland will be given an additional day to travel at both ends of that period to reflect the additional complexity of some of their journeys.

Under the rules, members of up to three households will be able to gather in private homes and outdoor spaces and travel together to places of worship. But the exemption will not allow these larger groups to meet in pubs or restaurants, where normal restrictions will still apply.

Those rules on indoor dining and drinking will vary from region to region. On Monday, the government in England said that when it ends a national lockdown on Dec. 2 the country will be divided into three tiers of restrictions, depending on the severity of the health situation in each area.

However, the government is not expected to announce which regions will be placed in which tier until Thursday.

Michael Gove, a senior British cabinet minister, said that, while “the Christmas period this year will not be normal,” successful talks with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish leaders meant that “families and friends will now have the option to meet up in a limited and cautious way across the U.K. should they wish.”

That message was echoed by Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales. “Everyone has done so much to help control the spread of the virus and to save lives,” he said in a statement. “But that has meant many sacrifices, including not seeing family and close friends. We are all looking forward to Christmas and a chance to spend some time with all those we hold dear.”

— Stephen Castle

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In the first distribution push, 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine will be shipped across the U.S.

Vials of coronavirus vaccine candidate BNT162b2 are inspected at a Pfizer manufacturing site in Kalamazoo, Mich. — Credit...Pfizer, via Reuters

Around mid-December, 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine will be shipped out across the United States in an initial push after it receives an expected emergency authorization, officials leading Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s push to fast-track a vaccine, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday.

The first doses — which are expected to go to health care workers and potentially a few other vulnerable groups — will be allocated to all 50 states and eight territories, as well as six major metropolitan areas. The quantities will be based on how many adults live in each jurisdiction.

“We wanted to keep this simple,” said Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services.

Officials decided on that allocation formula, as opposed to one that would prioritize the hardest-hit parts of the country, in part because the virus is spreading rapidly nationwide, Mr. Azar said.

Operation Warp Speed notified states late Friday night of how many doses they’d be receiving in the first push to assist them in their planning, officials said Tuesday. Governors and other local leaders will be responsible for deciding where the shipments should go.

Pfizer will ship doses of the vaccine via UPS and FedEx in special coolers packed with dry ice that will hold a minimum of 975 doses, which must be used up within a few weeks or stored in an ultracold freezer for up to six months.

Pfizer’s vaccine, which was developed with the German company BioNTech, was found to be 95 percent effective in a late-stage study earlier this month. An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to meet on Dec. 10 to discuss Pfizer’s clinical-trial data and vote on whether to recommend that the agency authorize it.

From there, it’s not clear how long it will take to make a decision. The agency could take “days” to deliberate on whether to authorize the vaccine, F.D.A. Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said in an interview with USA TODAY published Tuesday.

But Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, said during a television appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the first doses could be administered as soon as Dec. 11. Federal health officials have said the first Americans will start getting vaccinated within 24 hours of an authorization being issued.

Another leading vaccine developer, Moderna, is expected to soon follow Pfizer’s lead in filing for emergency authorization for its vaccine candidate, which an early analysis found to be 94.5 percent effective.

The path forward in the United States is less clear for AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which on Monday announced that they had zeroed in on a promising dosing plan for their vaccine candidate.

All three of those vaccines require people to get two doses, spread several weeks apart.

After the initial distribution push, vaccine shipments will go out to states and other jurisdictions on a weekly basis. Federal officials have said they expect to have 40 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines available by the end of the year.

Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker

A look at all the vaccines that have reached trials in humans.

— Rebecca Robbins

Pennsylvania bans booze sales on one of the busiest nights of the year.

The night before Thanksgiving is usually a busy one in Pennsylvania’s drinking spots, but they will have to stop serving at 5 p.m. this year, the state has ordered. — Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Bars and restaurants in Pennsylvania have been ordered by the state to stop selling alcohol at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, in an effort to head off uninhibited pre-Thanksgiving gatherings where the coronavirus could spread rapidly.

“It turns out, the biggest day for drinking is the day before Thanksgiving,” Gov. Tom Wolf said at a news conference on Monday. “I don’t like addressing that more than anyone else does, but it’s a fact. And when people get together in that situation, it leads to the exchange of the fluids that leads to the increased infection.”

“We’re going to defeat this virus,” the governor added. “That should be what we’re focused on, not whether we want to get a transitory benefit from going out with friends the day after tomorrow and having some drinks. Let’s forgo that, this one time.”

The regulation, which allows alcohol sales to resume at 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, was immediately slammed by restaurant and bar owners, who said it put further strain on businesses that are already struggling to survive.

Marc Vetri, a Philadelphia restaurateur, described Mr. Wolf on Twitter as the “dumbest governor in history,” and used an obscene expression that caused a brief social media storm because it appeared to refer to the state’s secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, using the pronoun “he.” Mr. Vetri quickly deleted the remark and apologized.

Mr. Wolf said he was fully aware of the ill will the decision had engendered. “The virus is what’s doing this — it’s not me, and it’s not the administration, it’s not the government,” he said. “The more we learn about it, the more we know that this is the kind of place that speeds the transmission of the disease.”

Facing the same concerns in neighboring Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan announced that the state police and local authorities would step up enforcement of pandemic restrictions on bars, restaurants, nightclubs and catering halls starting on Wednesday, including cutting off alcohol sales at 10 p.m. and other measures the governor imposed last week.

In Utah, on the other hand, Gov. Gary Herbert partly relaxed the state’s restrictions on casual private gatherings this week for the holiday. The governor said on Monday that he was not extending an expiring earlier order that banned indoor gatherings of people from more than one household; the state’s mask mandate and other restrictions remain in force.

— Ellen Barry

The surge in California shatters records as officials scramble to head it off.

Some people brought lawn chairs as they waited in line to take Covid tests in Los Angeles on Tuesday. — Credit...Bryan Denton for The New York Times

As Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was briefing reporters on a video conference call on Monday, he stopped to cough. He started to say something more, and coughed again. Then he paused and smiled.

“That’s tea that got in my throat,” he said. “Nothing more.”

It was only natural to wonder. The realities of the coronavirus surge that has reached every corner of California had just penetrated the governor’s mansion as well: Mr. Newsom and his family had gone into quarantine early that morning because three of his children had been in contact with someone who later tested positive.

California reported 17,694 new cases on Monday, well more than it or any other state had ever done before, according to a New York Times database. Over the past week, it has averaged 12,712 new cases a day — more than Maine’s total for the whole pandemic. And the trajectory in California has lately been almost straight up.

With infections and hospitalizations each rising at an alarming rate in the state, officials annou nced a curfew late last week for counties in the state’s purple reopening tier — in other words, the counties where almost all of the state’s nearly 40 million residents live.

Officials have implored Californians to take precautions and to reconsider traveling, even within the state. And some local officials have gone further, including closing down outdoor dining in Los Angeles “to reduce the possibility for crowding and the potential for exposure” — an order that takes effect on Wednesday and has drawn pushback.

California is far from the only state where new case reports are shattering records. Oregon hit a new daily high on Sunday, Wyoming did so on Monday, and three states — Rhode Island, Connecticut and Kansas — that do not report separate daily figures over weekends set records for three-day periods ending Monday.

As of Monday night, 11 states — Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kentucky, Minnesota, Idaho, Tennessee, Illinois, Oklahoma, Indiana and South Dakota — had added more deaths in the last week than in any other week since the pandemic began.

— Jill Cowan

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For Biden, the start of the transition means his battle against the coronavirus begins.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harrris met with a group of mayors from around the United States on Monday. — Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Until now, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 task force has had to prepare its battle plan without the keys to the government agencies leading the pandemic response.

That changes this week, when Mr. Biden can finally dispatch what are known as landing teams to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

They will have prepared the traditional welcome gift: enormous briefing books that detail nearly everything the agencies have been working on for the past four years; lists of friendly lawmakers, budgets, accomplishments, roadblocks; and suggested targets for the new administration.

The president-elect will also inherit something nobody would want: a national crisis that is accelerating by the day. The daily average of new cases in the United States over the past week is at record levels, a staggering 173,000, and growing. Forty-five states are recording sustained caseload increases, and nine are reporting more than twice as many new cases a day as they did two weeks ago.

In the weeks since Election Day, the dire outlook has been tempered by encouraging early results from three major vaccine developers. But Mr. Biden and his top aides have said their ability to effectively plan a pandemic response had been stymied by President Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his victory and the refusal of the head of the General Services Administration to formally authorize the transition process that would grant Mr. Biden’s transition team access to funds, equipment and government data. That argument has been seconded by a growing chorus of senior Republican lawmakers, business executives and other public figures.

On Monday, President Trump’s government finally authorized Mr. Biden to begin a formal transition process. It is supposed to be led by career staff, not political appointees — and the Biden team can expect to find a warm welcome from them, particularly scientists on the team who Mr. Trump has criticized for years.

But in a pandemic, there is no time to waste. The F.D.A. landing team will need to get up to speed on a planned vaccine roll out, as well as the most promising new vaccine candidates and therapeutics. It may also designate a career staff member to be the agency’s acting commissioner if the current one, Stephen M. Hahn, leaves before a replacement can be nominated and confirmed.

At the C.D.C., one of the most pressing issues will be taking over a public education campaign, now in development, to persuade the public to trust — and take — the vaccine.

In the absence of a formal transition, Mr. Biden had been left trying to signal to Americans that he is prepared to take charge of a disjointed federal virus response.

“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day,” Mr. Biden said in Delaware in early November after announcing a coronavirus task force. “It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives — American lives.”

— Sheila Kaplan and Ron DePasquale

NEW YORK ROUNDUP

The organizers of a gigantic Brooklyn wedding will be fined $15,000 for violating pandemic rules.

Thousands attended an ultra-Orthodox wedding in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Nov. 8 that flouted health restrictions intended to stop the spread of the virus.

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered to celebrate a wedding inside a cavernous hall in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood earlier this month, dancing and singing with hardly a mask in sight. The wedding was meticulously planned, and so were efforts to conceal it from the authorities, who said that the organizers would be fined $15,000 for violating public health restrictions.

The four-hour wedding, held on Nov. 8 by the leaders of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, is the latest incident in a long battle between city and state officials and members of the ultra-Orthodox community, who prize autonomy, chafe at government restrictions and have frequently flouted guidelines like mask-wearing and social distancing.

In October, state officials announced a series of restrictions in several neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with large Orthodox Jewish populations after the positive test rate in those areas rose above 4 percent. Many residents protested the restrictions, which included the closing of nonessential businesses and limiting capacity at houses of worship.

While the rates in several of these areas have decreased since the implementation of the restrictions, tensions between city officials and area leaders have continued.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the fine on Monday night after video of the wedding — and a florid account of the event and the extensive efforts to conceal it appeared in a Hasidic newspaper — drew backlash online. He said additional penalties could be imposed on the organizers.

“We know there was a wedding,” the mayor told the local news network NY1. “We know it was too big. I don’t have an exact figure, but whatever it was, it was too big. There appeared to be a real effort to conceal it. Which is absolutely unacceptable.”

Representatives for the Satmar community did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Elsewhere in New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an agreement with Verizon to offer internet service to half a million households, prioritizing public housing units and community districts known to lack broadband. Mr. de Blasio said he hoped the new access would offer families an alternative way to connect during the holiday season and support students who were scrambling now that schools are closed indefinitely. The effort to bridge the digital divide was first initiated by the former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who struck an agreement with Verizon in 2008 to make high-speed Fios internet service available to every household in the city. Nine years later, under the de Blasio administration, the city sued the company for failing to fulfill its obligations.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, facing a barrage of condemnation after discussing his Thanksgiving dinner arrangements in a radio interview, changed his plans. The governor was accused of hypocrisy after he said on Monday that his 89-year-old mother and two of his daughters would be traveling to Albany to join him; he has been pleading with New Yorkers for days to reconsider family gatherings as cases of the virus spike across the nation.

— Liam Stack and Juliana Kim

A coalition of African nations launches a clinical trial of treatments for less severe Covid-19 cases.

Dr. John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, outside the organization’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in September. — Credit...Mulugeta Ayene/Mulugeta Ayene, via Associated Press

Thirteen African countries will take part in a clinical trial aimed at identifying treatments that could prevent moderate coronavirus cases from becoming more severe. The randomized trial will be carried out by ANTICOV, a consortium of 26 African and European clinical institutions, and the study’s authors hope the results will lead to fewer hospitalizations, which could overwhelm fragile health systems in the continent.

While many Western countries are preparing plans to distribute a successful vaccine in the coming months, vaccine nationalism and a $4 billion gap in procurement financing in Africa could mean that many countries there experience delays or are left out of the rollout. Governments in these countries are instead exploring other ways to manage any potential case surges.

The clinical trial will explore therapeutic medicines currently used to treat malaria, H.I.V. and certain cancers, among other diseases. Testing is already underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with Kenya expected to follow soon. Once individual countries give regulatory approval, the Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Sudan, and Uganda will also come on board.

Africa has largely avoided the devastating spikes that have swept across Western nations. Experts believe this could be because of younger populations, existing cross-immunity and fewer travel links, among other reasons. Some have suggested numbers may be underreported, although lower hospitalization rates would seem to rule out huge numbers of undetected cases.

But the continent is experiencing a new uptick in cases, and experts warn the holiday season may lead to new outbreaks as families travel or relax social distancing measures.

Africa this week passed the two million cases mark, with the bulk of recorded infections — almost 800,000 — coming from South Africa, the most developed economy in the sub-Saharan region.

— Monica Mark

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