Day: December 22, 2021

LONDON — In the hospital in southwest England where Joanna Poole works as an intensive care doctor and anesthesiologist, the last few weeks have been a blur of canceled operations for lack of beds and a scramble to plug holes in schedules because of coronavirus cases among the staff.

From day to day she is unsure who will be available to work, including herself. One day this month, she said, most of her department had to go home to take tests after coming into contact with an infected colleague, throwing the staffing schedule into turmoil.

Dr. Poole, 32, wants to

California will require health care workers to get booster shots by Feb. 1, officials announced on Wednesday, as part of a series of measures intended to stave off hospital staffing shortfalls and to keep schools open despite the unsettlingly rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

The state will also require workers in high-risk congregate settings like nursing homes and prisons to get booster shots.

Public health officials said the Feb. 1 deadline applies to workers who are eligible for booster shots under federal guidelines because it has been six months since they received their second dose of

As lines at testing sites grow longer and coronavirus cases surge, the privately owned urgent care clinic CityMD has temporarily closed 19 of its 150 locations in New York and New Jersey, the company announced.

The company cited staffing shortages as the reason for the closures of the locations, 13 of which are in New York City. The closures began on Wednesday, and CityMD has not said how long they will last.

“Continuing to provide these services to the community is a top priority; however, our physicians and teammates are also a priority,” the company said in a statement late

We’re covering new data from Britain about the severity of Omicron and an easing of sanctions on Afghanistan.

JERUSALEM — In an effort to contain the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus, the Israeli authorities have barred most international travelers from entering Israel or the West Bank until at least the end of December, leaving holy sites in Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Old City of Jerusalem devoid of foreign visitors for a second Christmas.

But those who depend on tourism or whose relatives are unable to visit have been frustrated by the Israeli government, which they have accused of inconsistency, and even discrimination, in applying travel restrictions. The government allowed entry to international beauty pageant contestants and

Turkey granted emergency-use approval for a domestically developed Covid vaccine on Wednesday, adding a third inoculation option for its citizens, as the Omicron variant increasingly fuels outbreaks in Europe and beyond.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the vaccine, called Turkovac, was expected to be ready for widespread use by the end of December. It joins the two vaccines already being administered in Turkey: the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has shown initial success at stopping Omicron infections among people who have received booster shots, and the CoronaVac vaccine produced by the Chinese company Sinovac.

The Turkish authorities said they hoped the Turkish-developed

After President Biden laid out his administration’s new plan Tuesday to take on the Omicron variant, The New York Times’s DealBook team spoke with medical and policy professionals about what he got right — and where he could have gone farther.

And then, inspired by a post by Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute and drawing on insights from Dr. Joseph Allen of Harvard University and Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University, DealBook calculated the cost of what health experts think might be necessary to help end the pandemic.

Rapid tests. While experts welcomed Mr. Biden’s plan to