As the New Year’s Eve countdown began, people worldwide hoped 2021 would bode better than the unprecedented 2020, though just 4 days into the new year, the coronavirus that has shaken the world for just about a year continues to do damage. 

England’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson just authorized the nation’s third lockdown of the pandemic after record high case reports. According to CNN, the UK faced 58,784 cases on Monday, the largest daily increase they’ve experienced in months. This tumultuous week has left the United Kingdom with a total of 2,713,563 cases and 75,431 deaths through the whole pandemic. This spike in cases is due to the new variant of the virus found in the UK, that has reportedly also been detected in 6 cases in California and is present in 37 countries already. The England lockdown is said to last until at least mid-February. At this point, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are already in lockdown.

Over the weekend, New York state reached over 1 million coronavirus cases (1,017,153 cases as of Sunday) and 130 NYC schools are now shut down due to the pandemic. The US as a whole currently has faced 350,000 of the 1.8 million COVID-19 deaths according to CNN, the most out of any nation worldwide. US federal health officials acknowledge that the vaccination process is going slower than planned, with 15.4 million vaccines (still 5M short of the 20 million distribution goal by 2021) distributed but only 4.5 million people have received it, which amounts to less than 30% of the total distributed. Though officials assure nothing is wrong, the process is merely taking longer than anticipated

Katherine Conway ‘21, Local/World News Editor