Alec051/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO and ROSA SANCHEZ, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — One lucky person is taking home the Mega Millions jackpot cash.
At around 1 a.m. ET Saturday, the list of lottery winners was announced. A person in Michigan won the jackpot, estimated at $1 billion or $739.6 million as a lump-sum, before taxes.
The winning ticket was sold at a Kroger located in Novi, a northern suburb of Detroit — about a 30-minute drive from the city — the state lottery website confirmed. The winning numbers were 4-26-42-50-60 with a Mega Ball number of 24.
The winner’s identity has not been revealed, but, per state lottery rules, they must come forward to claim their winnings.
The winner will have two options to collect the record prize, the lottery said in a statement: “The first is an escalating annuity that offers an initial payment, then annual payments for 29 years. The player also may select a one-time cash payment of about $739 million. If a player selects the cash option, they will receive about $530 million after tax withholdings.”
The Mega Millions jackpot increased to $1 billion for Friday night’s drawing.
It is the second-largest jackpot in Mega Millions history and the third-largest in U.S. lottery history, Mega Millions lottery officials said. The $1.537 billion won by a person in South Carolina on Oct. 23, 2018 is still the world’s largest lotto prize ever awarded on a single ticket.
This is the 18th Mega Millions jackpot won in Michigan, according to a lottery press release. The last winner in the state shared the prize with a Rhode Island winner on Oct. 13, 2017. Until Friday night’s win, the largest lottery prize ever won by a Michigan player was a $337 million Powerball jackpot. Donald Lawson, of Lapeer, won it on Aug. 15, 2012. On April 22, 2005, Port Huron couple Ralph and Mary Stebbins, won $208 million playing Mega Millions — it was the largest Mega Millions prize ever won in the state.
Michigan is one of the original founding members of Mega Millions.
“About 97 cents of every dollar spent on Lottery tickets is returned to the state in the form of contributions to the state School Aid Fund, prizes to players and commissions to vendors and retailers,” the state lottery said in a statement. “In the 2019 fiscal year, the Lottery provided more than $1 billion for Michigan’s public schools, its fifth record contribution in a row. Since it began in 1972, the Lottery has contributed more than $23 billion to support public education in Michigan.”
The Match 5 winners were two people in Florida, one in Maryland, one in Missouri, one in New Jersey, one in New York and two in Pennsylvania. Each will take home $1 million. Also, two people — one in North Carolina and one in Virginia — won the Match 5 + Megaplier. Each will take home $2 million.
On Wednesday, a winning Powerball ticket worth $731.1 million was sold in Allegany County, Maryland. The ticket was the fourth-largest in Powerball history and the sixth-largest in U.S. lottery history. Lottery winners in Maryland have the right to remain anonymous.
The previous jackpot, which was worth $120 million, was won by a person in Wisconsin on Sept. 15, 2020.
Powerball’s jackpot is resetting to $20 million for Saturday’s drawing. The next drawing is on Tuesday, Jan. 26.
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesBy STEPHANIE EBBS and CHEYENNE HASLETT, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Governors and state health officials are facing a frustrating reality as they try to make more people eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine: They can vaccinate only as many people as there are doses and the supply is falling short of demand.
“We can’t give you a vaccine shot if we don’t have the vaccines can we? We just can’t,” West Virginia GOP Gov. Jim Justice said Thursday, calling the situation “unacceptable.”
Health experts say speeding up vaccinations is critical to stopping the rapid spread of the virus, especially before new variants make the crisis worse.
“The amount of vaccine that comes into the state and is available to put into people’s arms is solely a federal solution,” Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said.
“It’s my hope that the president does everything in his power to increase production,” he said. “If we want to do this as quickly as possible, we need to have more.”
But even as the Biden administration pledges to amp up production of materials to administer vaccines — such as syringes — by using the Defense Production Act, it’s unclear how much faster vaccine doses can be made.
The two types of vaccines available now – made by Pfizer and Moderna –have never before been manufactured on such a massive scale. And while production is expected to increase this spring – Moderna has promised 100 million doses by the end of March with April considered the month the general public will be offered shots – the vaccine makers do not publicize weekly or monthly estimates.
“I don’t think by late February we’re going to have vaccine in every pharmacy in this country,” Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC “Today” Show this week.
Meanwhile, almost 60% of older Americans say they don’t know how or when they can get the vaccine, according to a poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and only 3 in 10 adults in the poll gave the federal government positive marks on the vaccine rollout.
Until more people can be vaccinated with the limited supply, state and local leaders are left urging residents to be patient.
“There’s a natural bottleneck for vaccine production, you know. We’re not going to see a doubling of vaccine availability anytime soon. So I do want to temper expectations that it’s going to take a little while, almost certainly, to really see much increase in our vaccine supply,” Mississippi State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said.
The federal government anticipated that there would be challenges supplying enough vaccine for all Americans even with Operation Warp Speed’s efforts with vaccine companies to start producing doses even before any vaccines were authorized by the FDA.
Expecting a short supply initially, the CDC recommended that only specific groups of essential frontline workers or older Americans would be eligible during “phases” of distribution, helping to limit the demand to smaller populations at a time.
But in the final days of the Trump administration, the federal government called on states to expand eligibility so as to stop new cases and boost vaccination numbers
The directive sparked criticism of backlogs in states, but states said they were out of doses to give. Governors accused the Trump administration of creating the false expectations by promising to release a reserve of vaccine that had been released weeks ago.
“When they said they were opening it up to 65 plus, they also said they were going to increase supply and production, right. That’s when they said they were going to free up their reserves because they had more reserves and they were going to increase production. That never happened either, which made it worse,” New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a briefing Friday.
Cuomo said the state will use all of the doses allocated to them in the first five weeks as of Friday and will now only have one week’s supply of vaccine at a time. The state and New York City have had to cancel some vaccine appointments as the supply fluctuated but Cuomo urged providers not to book people for appointments until they know the amount of vaccine they’ll receive.
The CDC’s vaccine tracker shows states have vastly improved their ability to get vaccines out and into the arms of people who qualify — boosting arguments by governors who say they’ve worked out the kinks in distribution and are just looking for more supply.
As of Friday, nearly every state in the country had reported administering vaccines to more than 4,000 people per 100,000, a per capita measurement that shows the speed of vaccine injections regardless of how big or small a state’s population is.
Aside from Nevada and Alabama, every state has reported administering at this level, per the tracker, while some states, including Connecticut, Oklahoma and Colorado, have begun vaccinating more.
The Biden administration, just two days in, now holds the responsibility for muddling through the confusion, which they so far haven’t been able to answer for.
“What we’ve really got to do is go into the trenches, and I’ve said this so many times, and figure out, what is it that’s the cause of what we’re hearing, that sometimes doses are not being given and they’re hanging around, and another state is saying, we need more doses,” Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on CNN on Friday.
Asked how the public is supposed to understand the dysfunction in the system if Fauci doesn’t, he told CNN that he honestly doesn’t know.
“I have to tell you honestly, I don’t know right now. We have to go back and figure out what that is. And the important thing is to fix it,” Fauci said.
Governors are now working directly with the Biden administration to better understand their plans and push for changes to the process like notifying states further in advance how much vaccine they will receive each week.
“We would welcome the federal government coming in and setting up mass sites, but only if it means more vaccine is coming to Ohio,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a letter to Biden reported by the Dayton Daily News.
And governors like Justice say they’ll be pushing the administration to do anything they can to protect more people in their state.
“It is one thing and one thing alone is today, today right now if they send us vaccines we’ll put them in somebody’s arm. And as soon as we put them in somebody’s arm it’s going to be saving somebody’s life,” he said.
Samara Heisz/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ERIN SCHUMAKER, EMILY SHAPIRO and ROSA SANCHEZ, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 97.4 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 Friday. All times Eastern:
Jan 22, 9:03 am Fauci says lack of truthfulness from Trump administration ‘very likely’ cost American lives
When asked during an interview Friday on CNN’s New Day about whether the Trump administration’s lack of truthfulness in some cases regarding the coronavirus pandemic had cost American lives, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “it very likely did.”
“I don’t want that, John, to be a soundbite, but I think if you just look at that you can see that when when you’re starting to go down paths that are not based on any science at all,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s John Berman. “Particularly when you’re in the situation of almost being in a crisis with the number of cases and hospitalizations and deaths that we have — when you start talking about things that make no sense medically and no sense scientifically, that clearly is not helpful.”
Fauci, who was a member of former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, had disagreed with Trump on how to approach the pandemic. At one point, Trump suggested he was considering firing Fauci.
“There’s no secret, we’ve had a lot of divisiveness,” Fauci, who is now the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told CNN. “We’ve had facts that were very, very clear that were questioned. People were not trusting what health officials were saying.”
Jan 22, 9:00 am NFL invites vaccinated health care workers to Super Bowl
The National Football League announced Friday that it’s inviting 7,500 vaccinated health care workers to attend the Feb. 7 Super Bowl in Florida “to thank and honor them for their continued extraordinary service during the pandemic.”
Jan 22, 6:12 am Reports that Japan is looking to cancel Tokyo Olympics are ‘categorically untrue,’ government says
Reports that the Japanese government has privately concluded that the upcoming Tokyo Olympics will have to be canceled are “categorically untrue,” according to Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat of the Headquarters for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“The renewed schedules and venues for the Tokyo 2020 Games, starting with the Opening Ceremony on July 23 this year, were determined at the IOC Session in July last year. All parties involved are working together to prepare for the successful Games this summer,” the cabinet secretariat said in a statement Friday. “We will implement all possible countermeasures against COVID-19 and continue to work closely with the IOC, the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in our preparations for holding a safe and secure Games this summer.”
The statement follows a report published Thursday evening by British newspaper The Times, which cited “a senior member of the ruling coalition” who said there is agreement that the Games are doomed and the focus now is on securing the event for the Japanese capital in the next available year, 2032.
The 2020 Summer Olympics were supposed to kick off in Tokyo last year on July 24. But in late March, amid mounting calls to delay or cancel the upcoming Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Japan’s prime minister announced that the event would be held a year later due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Games are now scheduled to open in Tokyo this summer on July 23, but doubt has surfaced as Japan — and much of the world — grapples with a resurgence of COVID-19 infections.
Jan 22, 5:21 am US reports over 188,000 new cases
There were 188,952 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Thursday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Thursday’s case count is lower than the country’s all-time high of 298,031 new cases, which were confirmed on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.
An additional 3,955 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Thursday, 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 holiday weekend and earlier holidays.
A total of 24,631,890 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 410,349 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 nearing 300,000 on Jan. 2.
Jan 22, 4:26 am ‘There is no plan B’ for Tokyo Olympics, IOC chief says
Despite rising COVID-19 infections in Japan, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said Thursday that there is “no reason whatsoever” to believe the Olympic Games in Tokyo will not open on July 23 as planned.
“This is why there is no plan B and this is why we are fully committed to make these games safe and successful,” Bach told Japanese news agency Kyodo in an interview Thursday.
However, Bach admitted he could not guarantee that the stands would be full or rule out the possibility that the Games would be held without spectators, according to Kyodo.
The 2020 Summer Olympics were supposed to kick off in Tokyo last year on July 24. But in late March, amid mounting calls to delay or cancel the upcoming Games, the International Olympic Committee and Japan’s prime minister announced that the event would be held a year later due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, Japan is facing a resurgence of COVID-19. The country of 126 million people reported the highest number of new cases in the Western Pacific region last week. The infection rate — currently at 32.8 cases per 100,000 people — increased by 4% over the previous week, according to the World Health Organization’s latest COVID-19 weekly epidemiological update.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare confirmed 5,662 new cases of COVID-19 as well as an additional 87 fatalities from the disease on Thursday, bringing the cumulative totals to 348,646 cases and 4,829 deaths.
Japanase Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has declared a state of emergency in Tokyo and 10 other prefectures due to climbing case counts and growing death tolls.
(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — Officials in Columbus, Ohio, plan to invest nearly $5 million in new body-worn cameras and introduce new legislation targeting police response following the death of Andre Hill, a Black man who was shot and killed by a police officer last month.
The city has set aside $4.5 million to fund the “next generation of body-worn cameras to ensure cameras are recording and audio is captured when we need it most,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said during a press briefing Thursday.
The announcement comes nearly a month to the day after Hill was fatally shot by an officer dispatched to a “non-emergency” disturbance call.
Adam Coy, the officer who shot Hill, was fired by the city earlier this month after an investigation determined that his use of deadly force was not reasonable.
Coy did not turn on his body camera until after shooting Hill on Dec. 22, authorities said. Body-camera footage released earlier this month also appeared to show responding officers handcuffed Hill before rendering any first aid.
The city invested millions to first outfit the Columbus Division of Police officers with body-worn cameras in 2016. The upgraded body-worn cameras will provide “common-sense changes that will protect our officers and the public,” Mayor Ginther said Thursday.
The new cameras, which the city will begin installing this year, will automatically activate when an officer exits a cruiser on a priority call, sync with new dashboard cameras that are currently being installed and have improved resolution and video clarity, the mayor said.
The city is also working to enhance the “look-back” feature to ensure the cameras are recording both video and audio. The look-back function on Coy’s camera recorded 60 seconds of the incident without sound.
“Bottom line, if this technology were in place in December, we would have higher-resolution video and audio evidence leading up to and including the shooting death of Andre Hill. Period,” Ginther said.
The city is working with the Columbus police union to ensure the look-back setting is aligned with the contract, the mayor said.
The Columbus City Council also plans to introduce new legislation in the wake of Hill’s fatal shooting to “make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Council President Shannon Hardin said during the briefing.
“Andre’s Law aims to ensure that safety officers use their body-worn cameras properly and call for medical aid or deliver medical aid themselves,” Hardin said.
The proposed legislation, which Hardin aims to pass “in short order” after its introduction on Monday, would require that body-worn cameras be activated during any enforcement action and require police to request or render aid under certain circumstances.
Those who violate the law could be subject to discipline, or even criminal charges, Hardin said.
“Andre’s Law will not solve all police violence. But it’s one more step in the right direction — to ensure we know what is happening on the scene based on body-cam footage, and ensure that if residents are hurt, peace officers are there to render aid,” Hardin said. “And if officers don’t comply, that there can be greater accountability.”Columbus to invest nearly $5M in police bodycams after Andre Hill shooting.
Myriam Borzee/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ERIN SCHUMAKER, EMILY SHAPIRO and ROSA SANCHEZ, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 96.9 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 Thursday. All times Eastern:
Jan 21, 9:12 am US withdrawal from the WHO ‘was very disconcerting to everybody,’ Fauci says
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on the coronavirus pandemic, said rejoining the World Health Organization was “very important” and that the country’s withdrawal from the United Nations agency “was very disconcerting to everybody.”
“It’s going to be really very important. When you’re dealing with global pandemic, you have to have an international connectivity, and for us to not be in the WHO was very disconcerting to everybody, all the member countries including the health officials here in the United States,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News’ Michael Strahan in an interview Thursday on Good Morning America.
Earlier Thursday, Fauci announced via video link to the WHO’s executive board in Geneva that the United States will remain a member, will fulfil its financial obligations to the organization and will stop reducing its staff there.
Fauci also told the board that U.S. President Joe Biden will issue a directive Thursday that shows the country’s intent to join the COVAX Facility, a global initiative to ensure rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries regardless of income.
The announcement came just hours after Biden, who was sworn-in Wednesday, signed an executive order reversing former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the WHO. Trump had accused the organization of failing to correctly respond to the coronavirus pandemic and of allegedly giving too much power to China.
“The official announcement that we are rejoining, we’re going to live up to our financial commitments and a whole bunch of other things, it was really a very good day. I mean, the response I’m getting from my colleagues all over the world is really very refreshing,” Fauci said on GMA.
Fauci, who is Biden’s chief medical adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, said he will meet with the president later Thursday to brief him on the U.S. outbreak and the vaccine situation.
“The president has made this his top priority,” he said. “His goal is to get 100 million people vaccinated within the first 100 days of his presidency. I mean, I feel fairly confident that that’s going to be not only that but maybe even better.”
Fauci said the contractual agreements the U.S. has made to procure COVID-19 vaccines will help meet that goal, along with new initiatives to open community vaccination centers and make the vaccines available in pharmacies. He said Biden may also use the Defense Production Act “wherever he needs it.” The 1950 wartime law requires private companies to prioritize any product orders from the federal government over others.
“As he says, he’s going to do everything that he needs to do to make sure we have a successful roll out of the vaccines, get it into peoples arms and get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can,” Fauci said. “I think we can look forward to having more companies supplying vaccines in addition to the two now that are doing it, namely Moderna and Pfizer.”
Fauci said an RNA virus like the novel coronavirus can be expected to mutate but some of the new strains that have emerged are “concerning” and must be followed “very, very carefully.”
“There are some concerning variants, there’s one in the U.K. and we have that right now in the United States. It appears to be transmitted more efficiently, it doesn’t appear to be more virulent,” he said. “We’re looking very carefully to make sure that our vaccines that we’re distributing and putting into peoples arms [are] going to continue to protect against those variants.”
Jan 21, 9:09 am 900,000 Americans filed for unemployment insurance last week
Some 900,000 workers in the United States lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday.
This is a decrease of 26,000 jobless claims compared to the previous week.
The Department of Labor said Thursday that nearly 16 million people were still claiming some form of unemployment benefits through all government programs as of the week ending Jan. 2. During the same week last year, that figure was 2.2 million.
The coronavirus pandemic as well as measures to curb the virus’ spread have gutted the U.S. labor market. Before the pandemic hit, in February 2020, the national unemployment rate was at a half-century low of 3.5%. As of last month, the unemployment rate was 6.7%.
Jan 21, 7:33 am CDC projects up to 508K virus deaths in US by mid-February
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now projects that the country will have recorded up to 508,000 COVID-19 deaths by mid-February.
The CDC on Wednesday published its latest national ensemble forecast, which predicts that 17,000 to 29,300 new fatalities from COVID-19 will likely be reported in the week ending Feb. 13. A total of 465,000 to 508,000 deaths from the disease are projected to be reported nationwide by this date.
Last week’s national ensemble forecast predicted there would be a total of 440,000 to 477,000 COVID-19 deaths reported nationwide by Feb. 6.
Jan 21, 4:40 am Fauci announces US will remain member of WHO
The United States will remain a member of the World Health Organization.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, made the announcement during a WHO executive board meeting Thursday morning.
“I am honored to announce the United States will remain a member of the World health Organization,” he said.
The news came hours after President Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing former President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations agency.
Trump previously moved to withdraw the country from the WHO, accusing the organization of failing to correctly respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and of allegedly giving too much power to China.
Now, under Biden, the U.S. will stop reducing staff at the WHO, and will pay its financial obligations to it, Fauci said at the WHO meeting.
Fauci also said that Biden Thursday will order the U.S. to support projects to deploy COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics to people in need around the world.
Jan 21, 4:09 am US reports over 178,000 new cases
There were 178,255 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Wednesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
The latest daily case count is far less than the country’s all-time high of 298,031 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.
An additional 4,231 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Wednesday, just under the 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 holiday weekend and earlier holidays.
A total of 24,438,720 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 406,147 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 nearing 300,000 on Jan. 2.
Jan 21, 12:44 am New CDC director extends eviction ban until end of March
Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who began her role after President Joe Biden’s inauguration Wednesday, released a statement saying she is extending the eviction ban due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“As a protective public health measure, I will extend the current order temporarily halting residential evictions until at least March 31, 2021,” she said in the statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a historic threat to our nation’s health. It has also triggered a housing affordability crisis that disproportionately affects some communities.”
She said that as cases continue to rise, it’s important to “keep people in their homes and out of congregate settings — like shelters — where COVID-19 can take an even stronger foothold.”
Alec051/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO and ROSA SANCHEZ, ABC News
