Coronavirus Watch: Young adults drive infections, study suggests

Young adults are driving the spread of COVID-19, a study suggests.

At least 65% of new U.S. infections originate from people 20-49, according to researchers at London's Imperial College. The researchers used cellphone location data, public COVID-19 case and mortality data and mathematical models.

Older adults and children drove very little of the spread, the study says. So should vaccination efforts target young adults first?

"It's a really good question," Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School professor, told Paste BN. "Do we vaccinate the most vulnerable or the ones most involved in transmission?"

It's Thursday, and this is the Coronavirus Watch from the Paste BN Network. Here's more news that you need to know:

• The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits declined to 779,000 last week. Last week’s total dropped from 812,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday, and is the lowest in two months. Still, before the virus erupted in the United States in March, weekly applications for jobless aid had never topped 700,000, even during the Great Recession.
• San Francisco has taken a dramatic step in its effort to get kids back in public schools, suing its own school district to try to force the reopening of classrooms. Meanwhile, 70,000 Chicago Public Schools students did not return to classrooms this week, as initially planned, amid ongoing negotiations between the teachers union and City Hall.
• Yankee Stadium will open as a COVID-19 mass vaccination site starting Friday to serve residents of the Bronx in an effort to bolster equity in New York's vaccine distribution, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a joint statement Wednesday.
• Oregon will soon begin offering vaccinations to as many as 11,000 inmates in the state’s prisons, Gov. Kate Brown’s office said. The decision came after a federal magistrate ordered inoculations to begin in response to disproportionately high rates of coronavirus spread and death in the state’s 14 prisons.
• Weekly new infections continued to fall Wednesday: The seven-day total dipped to 958,965. That's down 45% from the peak just a few weeks ago. But daily deaths remain high. The U.S. topped 450,000 deaths Wednesday, less than two months after reaching 300,000 deaths in December. The first 150,000 U.S. deaths, by comparison, took six months.

Today's numbers: The U.S. has reported more than 26.5 million COVID-19 cases and 451,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, there have been more than 104.5 million cases and more than 2.2 million deaths.

See the numbers in your area here, check out where cases are rising here, and see how many vaccines your state has received here.

– Grace Hauck, Paste BN breaking news reporter, @grace_hauck