Coronavirus live updates: US reports under 200,000 new cases for first time in two weeks

January 18, 2021January 18, 2021 WKXA

Ovidiu Dugulan/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 95 million people worldwide and killed over two million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Here’s how the news is developing Monday. All times Eastern:

Jan 18, 6:24 am
Oklahoma school district stops basketball games due to ‘super-spreader event’

A public school district in Oklahoma City canceled basketball games on Friday night after witnessing what it called a “super-spreader event.”

Millwood Public Schools said it “made the decision to put kids and families first,” pulling its basketball players off the court during games against Community Christian School in Norman, about 20 miles south of downtown Oklahoma City. The school district posted photos on Facebook showing a crowded gymnasium with no social distancing and few people wearing masks.

“We will NOT subject our kids and families to a super-spreader event just to compete,” Millwood Public Schools wrote in the Facebook post Friday night.

Community Christian School’s athletics director, Mat McIntosh, told Oklahoma City ABC affiliate KOCO-TV that the photos shared on social media showed the home side, which “was three-fourths full.” He said that they “would never put any students at risk.”

“During [Friday] night’s game when the decision was made to pull the players off the court, we were caught off guard,” McIntosh said in a statement. “We hated that. It has been our desire to keep things as normal as possible. We have policies in place for COVID during athletic events. As a school, we have listened to the governor’s statement to stay at 50% capacity. We feel even [Friday] night, our overall capacity was under 50%.”

Jan 18, 5:25 am
Germany has vaccinated over one million people

More than one million people have received the first of two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Germany, according to the country’s public health agency.

As of Saturday, 1,048,160 first doses had been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Robert Koch Institute. So far, the European Medicines Agency has approved two COVID-19 vaccines for use in the European Union — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna.

There were 7,141 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Germany on Sunday. An additional 214 deaths from the disease were also registered nationwide. That brings the country’s cumulative totals to 2,040,659 cases with 46,633 deaths, according to the Robert Koch Institute.

Jan 18, 4:19 am
US reports under 200,000 new cases for first time in two weeks

There were 174,513 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Sunday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It’s the first time in two weeks that the country has logged under 200,000 newly confirmed infections in a 24-hour reporting period. Sunday’s tally is far less than the country’s all-time high of 302,506 new cases on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.

An additional 1,723 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Sunday, down from a peak of 4,462 new deaths on Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins data.

COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the holidays followed by a potentially very large backlog.

A total of 23,936,772 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 397,600 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of the pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up over the summer.

The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before topping 300,000 on Jan. 2.