Coronavirus updates: Los Angeles County to prohibit gatherings, close playgrounds
Cases are on the rise in Southern California.
A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 61 million people and killed over 1.4 million worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Latest headlines:
NFL closing team facilities Monday, Tuesday
The National Football League is closing all team facilities to in-person activities on Monday and Tuesday.
The ban doesn't apply to teams scheduled to play on those days, including a Steelers-Ravens game on Tuesday that's already been rescheduled twice.
The NFL cited in a league-wide memo rising COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and the "understanding that a number of players and staff celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday with out-of-town guests" as reasons for the closures.
ABC News' Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
LA County to prohibit gatherings, close playgrounds
Public and private gatherings with those outside your household will be prohibited in Los Angeles County starting Monday under a new public health order.
Playgrounds and cardrooms will also close, among other restrictions.
Religious gatherings and protests are exempt from the temporary order, which will remain in effect through Dec. 20.
The measures come as the county continues to see "alarming levels" of new COVID-19 cases and increasing hospitalizations, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said.
As of Wednesday, outdoor dining in the county is on pause for the next three weeks.
Officials had warned additional lockdown measures would come once the five-day average of cases reached 4,500. On Friday, that number was 4,751.
ABC News' Matthew Fuhrman and Bonnie Mclean contributed to this report
US tops 13 million cases
More than 13 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University.
The U.S. crossed 12 million cases six days ago.
Experts have cautioned against reading too much into data reported before next week, as some state updates may be spotty due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Vermont officials urge residents to quarantine after Thanksgiving
Vermont officials are urging people who had Thanksgiving gatherings with those outside their household to now quarantine.
“My request to Vermonters who may have participated in travel and/or multi-household gatherings is simply this: Please quarantine yourselves at home, and please get tested now and in seven days,” state Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine said during a press briefing Friday.
Gov. Phil Scott echoed the health commissioner’s request.
“If you have had one of those gatherings yesterday, then you shouldn't send your kids to school next week," he said. "You should quarantine your kids for at least seven days, get a test, and then we'll move forward."
Scott said earlier in the week that school officials will ask returning students if they attended a Thanksgiving gathering with people outside their household to determine quarantine requirements.
"We did all of this to try and protect Vermont, to try and prevent the rise in the number of cases," Scott said Friday.
ABC News' Joshua Hoyos contributed to this report
UK government asks regulator to assess AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine
U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Friday that he has formally asked the country's medicines regulator to assess whether a COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford "meets rigorous safety standards."
The move comes amid questions about preliminary results from late-stage trials of the vaccine candidate, called AZD1222, after the England-based pharmaceutical giant and the university acknowledged that the most positive findings actually stemmed from a dosing error.
On Monday, researchers announced the interim analysis of Phase 3 trials in the United Kingdom and Brazil, which looked at two different dosing regimens. One regimen showed vaccine efficacy of 90% when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart. A second regimen showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens showed an average efficacy of 70%.
Mene Pangalos, AstraZeneca's executive vice president of biopharmaceuticals research and development, later revealed during an interview with Reuters that the half-dose regimen was "serendipity." A portion of the trial -- less than 3,000 volunteers -- had received a lower initial dose by accident, which was only discovered as the group experienced far milder side effects.
"So we went back and checked," Pangalos told Reuters, "and we found out that they had under-predicted the dose of the vaccine by half."
The COVID-19 vaccine candidate is the second to reach the formal assessment stage in the United Kingdom, following one developed by New York City-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
