Your Wednesday Briefing

China’s overwhelmed hospitals

China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But with Covid now spreading freely in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits, with patients lining the walls of corridors and emergency departments left exhausted.

Health workers on the front lines are also battling rampant infections within their own ranks. In some hospitals, so many have tested positive for the virus that the remaining few who haven’t say that they are forced to do the job of five or more co-workers.

To ensure that enough staff members are on the floor, some facilities have given up requiring doctors and nurses to test themselves before work. One doctor in the central city of Wuhan said her hospital’s staff had been so depleted that a neurosurgeon in her department recently had to perform two operations in one day while fighting symptoms of Covid.

Numbers: The actual scale of China’s health emergency has been difficult to gauge. But data released by local authorities suggests the virus is running rampant, with reports from several cities and provinces of hundreds of thousands of infections recorded daily. In Shanghai, one hospital predicted that half of the city’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected.

Russia responds to oil price cap

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said that starting Feb. 1, his government would ban Russian oil exports to any countries that agreed to the Western price cap put in place earlier this month. The impact of the move is likely to be limited, as the E.U., the region that is most dependent on Russian oil, has already banned most Russian oil imports.

After months of negotiations, G7 nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S. — and the E.U. this month agreed to cap the price of Russian crude oil at $60 per barrel. The move was aimed at weakening the Kremlin’s revenues and diminishing its financing for the war in Ukraine, without completely disrupting global oil supply.

The cap is set close to Russia’s existing selling price, and some countries — like Ukraine’s neighbor Poland — argued that it did not make much of a difference to the Kremlin. The cap is to be reviewed every two months. The Kremlin’s defiant response was somewhat anticipated, as Moscow had already insisted that it would not sell oil subject to a price limit.

In other news from the war:

‘A crying day’

In western New York, the death toll from a punishing winter storm continued to climb four days after the snow began on Friday; nearly 30 people were reported dead after the mayor of Buffalo reported eight more fatalities yesterday morning. Some were found in stranded vehicles or in snowbanks; others died after being without power for a matter of days.

Even as the rescue effort continued, official and emergency workers were reeling from what they said was the extraordinary challenge of saving people in the blizzard, which set records for its duration — 36 straight hours — and 79-mile-an-hour winds.

Thousands of U.S. flights were canceled by yesterday afternoon as airlines struggled to recover from the holiday storm, leaving passengers stranded. Many were booked onto flights with Southwest Airlines, which suffered what executives and analysts describe as its biggest operational meltdown in the company’s five-decade history.

First person: Anndel Nicole Taylor, a nursing assistant, was among those killed in the storm. On Christmas Day, her family gathered, mourning at what should have been a celebration. Her presents remained wrapped under the tree. “It was just a crying day,” her sister said. “All day long, we just cried.”

The iteration of Mickey Mouse who appears in the 1928 short film “Steamboat Willie” will enter the public domain in 2024. But those trying to take advantage could end up in a legal mousetrap.

“They won’t be able to go after everyone,” one copyright expert said, of notoriously litigious Disney. “Battle lines will have to be drawn.”

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

What Liverpool can expect from Cody Gakpo: Jürgen Klopp’s team has reached an agreement to sign the Dutch player in January — so what exactly are they getting?

The Premier League is back: Top-flight soccer in England returned on Boxing Day in entertaining fashion. Here’s what we learned after the World Cup break.

Erling Haaland’s links with Leeds: As the Manchester City striker prepares to face Leeds, those who know his father, Alfie, recall the family links to the Yorkshire club.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The flavors of 2023

Kim Severson, a food reporter for The Times, waded through dozens of reports and news releases and interviewed the best food forecasters in the game to peer into the 2023 food crystal ball. Here are some of the trends that stood out:

• Embrace the brine. Fresh, bracing marine flavors have spawned a craze for coastal cocktails garnished with crab claws and oysters.

• Japanese food is the cuisine all the other cuisines most want to hang out with: Chefs around the world are fusing Japanese flavors with foods from elsewhere.

• Ube, a slightly nutty-tasting, vanilla-scented purple yam from the Philippines, is showing up in all kinds of foods and drinks, from pies and waffles to lattes and ube coladas.

• Nigerian food, with its rich and varied layers, will be a breakout star in the U.S., as chefs and diners who are unfamiliar with West African cooking start to understand it from a regional perspective.

• Avocados will be leaving toast and arriving in cocktails and desserts, and avocado oil will be a favorite cooking medium. And in boozy trends, watch for the Mexican spirit called sotol and a retro interest in Galliano liqueur.