News Room

After the initial excitement following the authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccines, a harsh reality set in. People who want a vaccine can’t get it, some counties have more than others and older people are camping out for it the way they once might have for tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert. All of this would seem to be an indication of supply chain problems or systems breakdowns. In fact, it’s more about a shortage of employees to support the supply chains and distributions. Some states are even considering calling up the National Guard.

One takeaway from the past year is that many people who think they can model coronavirus infections and deaths often cannot. There’s the Cornell professor who predicted 1,200 cases at the Ivy League university, but wound up off by 66%, since the total amount through December 31 came out closer to 400. Now meet Sheldon Jacobson, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In June, he predicted up to seven college football players would die from COVID. “I guarantee someone is going to die,” Jacobson said in June, according to CBS Sports. “The virus does not discriminate.” But no one died during the college football season that ended earlier this week.

At least three lawmakers who sheltered in a secure room during last week’s storming of the Capitol said they have since tested positive for Covid-19, adding to fears about the virus’s spread during the attack. The lawmakers, all Democrats, said they had fled during the attack to the room where Republican lawmakers refused to wear masks. A video posted by Punchbowl News shows Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D., Del.) in the room offering masks to a group of House Republicans, who decline to put them on. The Capitol’s physician told lawmakers and staff this weekend that those who were in the room might have been exposed to someone infected with Covid-19.

One of the world’s leading experts on getting supplies to catastrophe survivors likens the nation’s struggle to get Americans vaccinated against Covid-19 to an understaffed grocery store. “From a supply chain perspective, you’ve got the production, you’ve got the distribution, it’s on the shelves and there is demand,” Philip J. Palin told NBC News. “But you don’t have enough check-out lanes and you don’t have enough checkers.” And Palin would know. The former National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine consultant and author of books like "Out of the Whirlwind: Demand and Supply After Hurricane Maria" is also the son and grandson of grocers.

John Hopkins Carey Business School professor, Tinglong Dai, on the federal government’s announcement that they are allowing states to vaccinate anyone over 65 and those with preexisting conditions.