COVID-19 updates: Anti-vaccine protesters halt vaccinations at Dodger Stadium

Demonstrators carrying anti-mask and anti-vaccine signs blocked the entrance.

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 102.5 million people worldwide and killed over 2.2 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.


0

South Carolina confirms its 1st case of UK variant

An adult in South Carolina’s Lowcountry region has become the state’s first confirmed case of the United Kingdom COVID-19 variant, South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control said.

The person "has an international travel history," the department said.

The U.S. has confirmed at least 434 cases of the B.1.1.7 U.K. variant across 30 states, South Carolina officials said.

"Experts agree that existing vaccines work to protect us from this variant, even if we don’t know just how effective they are," the South Carolina officials said. "At this time, there’s no conclusive evidence to prove that the B.1.1.7 variant causes more severe illness."

ABC News’ Josh Hoyos contributed to this report.


Coachella, Stagecoach canceled

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts and Stagecoach Country Music festivals, set for April, were canceled on Friday by Dr. Cameron Kaiser, health officer for Riverside County, California.

Riverside County’s positivity rate stands at 20%. The county has 0% bed availability in its intensive care units.


US surpasses 90,000 deaths in January

January has been the deadliest month since the pandemic began, with 90,844 total deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. coronavirus death toll stands at 436,810 -- with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention projecting that more than 77,000 deaths could be reported by Feb. 20.


Brazil variant detected in California

California is now the second U.S. state with known detection of the Brazil P.1 variant.

Minnesota health officials confirmed earlier this week the nation's first known COVID-19 case associated with the variant.

Inside Stanford's Clinical Virology Laboratory, Dr. Benjamin Pinsky and his team found two strains of the virus: the Brazil strain and the U.K. strain, KGO reported Saturday morning.

"It's in about 17% of the samples that we've sequenced," Pinsky told KGO.


Fauci describes what it was like working with Trump

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, opened up about his experience working with former U.S. President Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times that was published Sunday.

When COVID-19 began to rapidly spread in the northeastern part of the country last year, particularly in New York City, Fauci said Trump had "almost a reflex response" to try to "minimize" the situation.

"I would try to express the gravity of the situation, and the response of the president was always leaning toward, 'Well, it's not that bad, right?' And I would say, 'Yes, it is that bad,'" Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the newspaper. "It was almost a reflex response, trying to coax you to minimize it. Not saying, 'I want you to minimize it,' but, 'Oh, really, was it that bad?'"

Fauci, who was a key member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, said another thing that made him "really concerned" was the former president taking input from non-experts on unproven methods to treat COVID-19, like hydroxychloroquine.

"It was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, 'Hey, I heard about this drug, isn't it great?' or, 'Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal,'" Fauci told the newspaper. "And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.'"

"He would take just as seriously their opinion -- based on no data, just anecdote -- that something might really be important," Fauci added. "That’s when my anxiety started to escalate."

When the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force changed hands last February, with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence coordinating the government's response and Trump at the podium taking questions from reporters during the press briefings, Fauci said it went from "the standard kind of scientifically based, public-health-based meetings" to "the anecdotally driven situations, the minimization, the president surrounding himself with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense."

"Then I started getting anxious that this was not going in the right direction," he told the newspaper. "We would say things like: 'This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.' And then he would get up and start talking about, 'It’s going to go away, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear.'"

That's when Fauci said it became clear to him that he needed to speak up, even if it meant contradicting the president.

"He would say something that clearly was not correct, and then a reporter would say, 'Well, let’s hear from Dr. Fauci.' I would have to get up and say, 'No, I’m sorry, I do not think that is the case,' he told the newspaper. "It isn’t like I took any pleasure in contradicting the president of the United States. I have a great deal of respect for the office. But I made a decision that I just had to. Otherwise I would be compromising my own integrity, and be giving a false message to the world. If I didn’t speak up, it would be almost tacit approval that what he was saying was OK."

This upset Trump's "inner circle," Fauci said.

"That’s when we started getting into things I felt were unfortunate and somewhat nefarious -- namely, allowing Peter Navarro to write an editorial in USA Today saying I’m wrong on most of the things I say," he told the newspaper. "Or to have the White House press office send out a detailed list of things I said that turned out to be not true -- all of which were nonsense because they were all true. The very press office that was making decisions as to whether I can go on a TV show or talk to you."

Fauci said there were a couple times where Trump even called him personally to say, "Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive."

Fauci said he and his family have received death threats, beginning last March, and that his wife once suggested he consider quitting.

"But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth," he told the newspaper. "Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody's minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away."