Jan. 19 Coronavirus updates: US reports over 400,000 coronavirus deaths

The Justice Department closed its insider trading probe into Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., his lawyer said in a statement on Tuesday.

Burr faced calls to resign last year after reports that the powerful Intelligence Committee chairman privately warned well-connected donors of the dire impacts of the coronavirus pandemic while also selling off up to $1.6 million of his own stocks.

“Senator Burr is pleased that the Department of Justice has completed a thorough review of this matter and closed it without further action," Alice Fisher, Burr’s lawyer, said in a statement. "As the country continues to concentrate efforts on battling the challenges presented by COVID-19, Senator Burr’s focus will remain on the safety and security of North Carolinians and the United States as a whole.“

The DOJ also confirmed the investigation has been closed. 

On the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden stepped into the role ceded to him by departing President Donald Trump and led the nation in mourning the 400,000 people across the United States who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden was introduced at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool by Lori Marie Key — a Michigan nurse on the Covid-19 front lines — who sang "Amazing Grace."

"To heal we must remember," Biden said after he acknowledged the risks and sacrifices nurses have made during the pandemic. "It's hard sometimes to remember. But that's how we heal. It's important to do that as a nation."

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German supermarket chain Aldi on Tuesday became the latest firm in the grocery sector to offer incentives for U.S. employees getting a COVID-19 vaccine, saying it would give up to four hours of pay to those who choose to receive inoculations.

The retailer, which has more than 2,000 stores in 37 U.S. states, said it would cover costs associated with vaccine administration and implement on-site vaccination clinics at its warehouse and office locations.

Dollar General Corp last week offered frontline employees a similar incentive after they get the vaccine, while grocery delivery company Instacart said it would pay $25 to more than half-a-million gig workers if they chose to take time off to get vaccinated.

Aldi said it was working with officials across the United States to get workers priority access to the vaccine, joining other companies including Amazon.com Inc and Uber Technologies Inc lobbying to move workers closer to the front of the line for vaccinations.

However, conflicting state and local guidelines on how shots will be administered and to which workers have made the process of navigating the vaccine rollout confusing for corporations and industry bodies.

Most corporations globally have so far been quiet on whether they would try securing doses for employees, even as some Indian firms are considering buying COVID-19 shots outright for their employees, once the vaccines become available commercially.

More than 211,000 children were reported to have Covid-19 between Jan. 7 and Jan. 14, in the largest weekly increase since the pandemic began in the U.S., according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association.

"The data — while limited because of its reliance on how each state reports its cases — underscores the urgent need to control the virus in communities so students may return safely to in-school learning," the groups said in a joint statement.

In total, as of Jan. 14, roughly 2.5 million children have tested positive for Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. It appears that severe illness related to Covid-19 is still rare among children, however.

A widely cited model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is projecting that the United States could see more than 566,000 coronavirus deaths by May.

The model — which takes into account a number of scenarios based on masking mandates, rapid vaccine distribution and other behavioral changes — suggests that deaths in the U.S. won’t start leveling off until early March. Covid-19 fatalities in the country have been rising steadily since August and the U.S. surpassed 400,000 deaths on Tuesday. 

The model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was criticized early in the pandemic for including high degrees of uncertainty, which can result in imprecise predictions. Though the model underestimated the number of Covid-19 deaths nationwide in the first wave of infections, the projections have since proven to be fairly accurate. Last fall, the institute predicted that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. could total more than 378,000 by January.

There have been more than 2 million Covid-19 deaths recorded globally, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is projecting that the world could see nearly 1 million more deaths by May 1.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference Tuesday that the city has just 92,000 first doses of Covid-19 vaccine left, projecting it will hit zero by Friday.

De Blasio, a Democrat, said the city urgently needs federal support to keep up with demand. 

"It means if we don't get more vaccine quickly — a new supply of vaccine — we will have to cancel appointments and no longer give shots after Thursday for the remainder of the week at a lot of our sites," the mayor said.

The weatherman Al Roker received the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine live on the "TODAY" show Tuesday, after lucking into an appointment through New York's busy online booking system.

Roker qualified to be vaccinated in New York because he's over 65 years old.

On Tuesday's show, he explained that he kept logging into the New York State Department of Health website over the weekend, and he finally snagged an appointment at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital.

Lenox Hill made 300 appointments available on Sunday morning, and they were all claimed within 10 minutes.

"I kept hitting refresh, refresh, refresh on the browser and finally got in," he said. "Luck of the draw."

Before getting an injection of the Pfizer-BioNTech dose from nurse Jessica Callard, Al asked Lenox Hill's medical director, Dr. Daniel Baker, whether the vaccine was safe.

"The clinical trials really showed its efficacy. We've seen hundreds of thousands of doses since, and everybody's doing rather quite well," Baker said.

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There is no evidence to suggest patients who receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have an increased risk of death, Norweigan health officials said Tuesday.

It comes after a report published by the Norwegian Medicines Agency said 23 frail elderly people with severe underlying diseases had died six days after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine. 

“So far, there are no statistical analyses that indicate that coronavirus vaccination has had an increased risk of death among those vaccinated,” Sara Viksmoen Watle, senior physician at the Norweigan Institute of Public Health (NIPH), said in a statement online.

Watle said officials could not rule out that common vaccine side effects — such as headaches, fevers and joint pain — “may have led to a more severe course for some patients” and that officials were investigating the deaths to understand "the full picture."

A large proportion of nursing home residents, who have been prioritized for vaccination, “have severe underlying conditions or are in the last stages of life,” Watle said, adding that on average more than 300 people die in nursing homes in Norway every week.

Moderna says it is "fully cooperating" with California public health officials after some people were treated for possible allergic reactions to one lot of the company's Covid-19 vaccine.

"The company is fully cooperating with [the California Department of Public Health] in investigating these reported adverse events," Moderna said in a statement Tuesday, adding that it was not aware of "comparable adverse events" from other centers in the state that had vaccinated people from the same batch.

California epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan has said "fewer than 10 individuals required medical attention over the span of 24 hours" amid reports of possible allergic reactions.