What you need to know about the coronavirus right now

(Reuters) – Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

Fewer than 1 mln U.S. kids get COVID-19 shot in first eligible week, White House says

More than 900,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 11 are expected to have received their first COVID-19 shot by the end of Wednesday, the White House said, as the government ramped up vaccinations of younger children. The United States began administering Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 to 11 on Nov. 3.

The seven-day average of total COVID-19 cases in the United States was flat at about 73,300 over the past week, CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky said during the briefing, with the hospitalization rate also flat at 5,000 a day. The U.S. seven-day average of daily deaths fell 11% to about 1,000 per day.

France experiencing start of fifth wave of COVID epidemic

France is at the beginning of a fifth wave of the coronavirus epidemic, Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Wednesday as his ministry registered 11,883 new cases, the second day in a row with a new case tally over 10,000. New cases have seen double-digit percentage increases week-on-week since around mid-October.

“Several neighbouring countries are already in a fifth wave of the COVID epidemic, what we are experiencing in France clearly looks like the beginning of a fifth wave,” Veran said on TF1 television, adding the circulation of the virus was accelerating.

Moderna COVID-19 vaccine patent dispute headed to court, U.S. NIH head says

U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists played “a major role” in developing Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine and the agency intends to defend its claim as co-owner of patents on the shot, NIH Director Dr Francis Collins told Reuters on Wednesday.

In a story first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday, Moderna excluded three NIH scientists as co-inventors of a central patent for the company’s multibillion-dollar COVID-19 vaccine in its application filed in July.

Moderna, in a statement emailed to Reuters, acknowledged that scientists at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) played a “substantial role” in developing Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, but the company said it disagrees with the agency’s patent claims.

U.S. brokers J&J-COVAX deal to send vaccines to conflict zones, Blinken says

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday the United States has brokered a deal between Johnson & Johnson and the COVAX vaccine-sharing program for the delivery of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine to people living in conflict zones.

A senior administration official said the deal means doses of J&J’s vaccine can be distributed in conflict zones and other humanitarian settings by organizations other than governments, which have in the past been restricted by liability concerns. Under the deal, 300,000 doses of J&J’s single-shot vaccine would be made available to front-line humanitarian workers and U.N. peacekeepers, the official said.

Severe sleep apnea tied to severe COVID-19

The risk of severe illness from COVID-19 is higher in people with obstructive sleep apnea and other breathing problems that cause oxygen levels to drop during sleep, researchers say.

While the chance of being infected did not increase with the severity of their problems, people with higher scores on the “apnea-hypopnia index” – a measure of the severity of their sleep-related breathing problems – had higher odds of needing to be hospitalized or dying from COVID-19, doctors Cinthya Pena Orbea and Reena Mehra of the Cleveland Clinic and colleagues reported on Wednesday in JAMA Network Open. It is not clear if treatments that improve sleep apnea, such as CPAP machines that push air into patients’ airways during sleep, would also reduce the risk of severe COVID-19, said Pena Orbea and Mehra.