Good morning. We’re covering China’s warnings and restrictions following community spread, 12 stories from this year to boost your mood and why Italians are using flowers to promote their vaccination campaign. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | Mass testing in Dalian, China, last week. The virus is once again set to interrupt Lunar New Year celebrations. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Officials have been testing hundreds of thousands of people in Beijing and millions in the port city of Dalian, after the country recorded 42 locally transmitted coronavirus cases in the past week. The outbreak interrupted months of near-zero case numbers. Residents of Dalian have been advised not to leave the northern port city. | | | The resurgence comes ahead of the Lunar New Year, during which hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel to their hometowns. The authorities are already looking forward with caution: This year’s travel helped spread the virus. | | | The government is discouraging Beijing residents from traveling and gathering. Travel companies have been told not to organize any group tours to Beijing during the holiday, which next year falls on Feb. 12. | | | Other parts of the country are taking precautions as well. Anhui Province, home to many of China’s migrant workers, intends to test and monitor all those who return for the holiday. Experts say a plan to vaccinate 50 million people (although with unproven vaccines) and efforts to ramp up testing are reasons not to worry about the travel period. | | ■ Novavax says it is starting the final stage of testing for its coronavirus vaccine. The company has promised doses to New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia, among others. The doses must be kept refrigerated but do not require freezing, making storage easier than other vaccines. ■ President Trump signed a $900 billion pandemic relief bill, restarting unemployment benefits that had lapsed and providing stimulus checks of $600 for most Americans. ■ Indonesia will bar entry to international visitors for two weeks from New Year’s Day to stem the spread of new, potentially more contagious strains of the coronavirus, Reuters reported. | | | At the border, in Humera, between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Two countries that once fought a bitter war now appear to be allied in a fight to subdue the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Eduardo Soteras/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | For weeks, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has denied that soldiers from Eritrea — a country that Ethiopia once fought in a brutal war — had entered Tigray. | | | The soldiers have rampaged through refugee camps, committing human rights violations, officials and witnesses say. It remains unclear how many soldiers are there, but a communications blackout has slowly been lifting and more accounts are becoming available. | | | Context: Mr. Abiy and President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea have a shared hostility toward the rulers of Tigray. For Mr. Abiy, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front was a dangerous political rival — a party that had once led Ethiopia. For Mr. Isaias, it was a deeply personal feud — a story of grievances, bad blood and ideological disputes that stretched back to the 1970s, when Eritrea was fighting for independence from Ethiopia. | | | Bar owners and workers holding a sign that reads, “We are waiting for support!” during a demonstration against the government’s pandemic restrictions in Istanbul last month. Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Turkey had been grappling with a falling currency and double-digit inflation for two years when the coronavirus pandemic hit in March. | | | Critics say President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fixes came too little, too late. His party’s standing has dropped to around 30 percent, its lowest point in 19 years. “The next elections are not a slam dunk,” one analyst said. | | | Context: Things came to a head in November, when the government admitted that it had been understating the extent of Turkey’s outbreak by not recording asymptomatic cases, and new data revealed record infection levels in the country. | | | Jane Stockdale for The New York Times; Dado Galdieri for The New York Times; Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times; Tang Chhin Soty/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Yahuen Yerchak for The New York Times; Brian Otieno | | | A teacher in Iran inherited $300,000. Instead of buying a new car, he decided to buy 343 tablets for students shut out of remote learning because their families could not afford them. His friends and family told him he was crazy, but the teacher said that “seeing the sweet smile on the children’s faces and knowing I had given them the gift of education is enough.” | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Trial in China: Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer who became a citizen journalist during the lockdown in Wuhan, was sentenced to four years in prison for documenting the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. She is the first person known to be tried for challenging the Chinese government’s narrative about the pandemic. | | | Saudi women’s rights: One of the country’s best-known prisoners, the activist Loujain al-Hathloul, was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison. Ms. al-Hathloul was first arrested in May 2018 along with others who had pushed to end a ban on women driving. | | | Snapshot: Above, an example of one of the 1,500 pavilions to be decorated with primroses in Italy. The flowers have been designated the official symbol of the country’s vaccination campaign and will mark the locations where people can get inoculated. The slogan for the program: “With a flower, Italy comes back to life.” | | | What we’re reading: This BBC article on the concept of “Feierabend,” which helps Germans separate work from free time. We could learn a lot from setting clear boundaries between the different parts of our day, with simple actions like changing clothes or taking a bike ride. | | | Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Prop Stylist: Cindy DiPrima. | | | Watch: “Wonder Woman 1984,” starring Gal Gadot, packs in a lot of stuff and characters but without purpose or urgency, our reviewer writes. | | | Do: Some people re-evaluated their relationship to things in 2020 and decided to stop buying. Here’s what they learned. | | | To help you bid farewell to 2020, have a look at our At Home collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch and do while staying safe at home. | | | Tens of millions of people are waiting their turn for a coronavirus shot and many are wondering what to expect. The first Americans to be part of the biggest vaccination program in U.S. history spoke to our reporters about how they felt afterward. | | | Recipients of vaccines recounted a wide spectrum of responses, from no reaction at all — “Can’t even tell I had the shot,” a hospital worker in Iowa City said — to symptoms like uncontrolled shivering and “brain fog.” A nurse assistant in Glendora, Calif., wondered whether the fever he ran was a side effect of the vaccine or a sign that he had been infected by one of his patients. | | | And there was a dizzying variety of sore arms. Some likened the pain to that from a flu shot; for others, it was considerably worse. | | | Dr. Matthew Harris, 38, an emergency medicine doctor in Great Neck, N.Y., was up all night with a fever, shivering underneath a blanket, after receiving the first shot. He had joint pain in his wrists and shoulders that lasted into the next day. | | | He later posted about his reaction, with the hashtag #stillworthit. “Everyone has read, ‘This is the light at the end of the tunnel,’” Dr. Harris said in an interview. “But are people going to feel great 100 percent of the time after this vaccine? No. And if we’re not honest with them, how can we expect them to trust us?” | | | Most vaccine recipients who spoke to The Times for this article stressed that they had no regrets about getting the shot. The Food and Drug Administration has found the vaccines to be safe and remarkably effective. And public health leaders say mass vaccination is the only hope for controlling the virus. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Melina | | Thank you
Carole Landry helped write this briefing. Thanks to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
