The Latest on COVID-19

• President Joe Biden signed new executive actions this week designed to expand healthcare coverage amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The president will direct the Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period for HealthCare.gov, the federally run insurance marketplace, in February.
• For the first time, a person in the U.S. has been found to have a variant of COVID-19 originally found in South Africa. Experts are worried that COVID-19 vaccines will be less effective against that variant.
• A group of Oregon healthcare workers administered COVID-19 vaccines after their transport was stuck in the snow. The public health workers were worried that the vaccines would expire while stranded, so they offered them to other stranded drivers, according to the New York Times.