The more infectious Omicron variant of COVID-19 appears to produce less severe disease than the globally dominant Delta strain, but should not be categorised as "mild", World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Thursday.
Janet Diaz, WHO lead on clinical management, said early studies showed there was a reduced risk of hospitalisation from the variant first identified in southern Africa and Hong Kong in November compared with Delta.
There appears also to be a reduced risk of severity in both younger and older people, she told a media briefing from WHO headquarters in Geneva.
The remarks on the reduced risks of severe disease chime with other data, including studies from South Africa and England, although she did not give further details about the studies or ages of the cases analysed.
The impact on the elderly is one of the big unanswered questions about the new variant as most of the cases studied so far have been in younger people.
"While Omicron does appear to be less severe compared to Delta, especially in those vaccinated, it does not mean it should be categorised as mild," director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the same briefing in Geneva.
"Just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalising people and it is killing people."
He warned of a "tsunami" of cases as global infections soar to records fuelled by both Omicron and Delta, healthcare systems are overwhelmed, and governments struggle to tame the virus, which has killed more than 5.8 million people.
'BILLIONS COMPLETELY UNPROTECTED'
Tedros repeated his call for greater equity globally in the distribution of and access to vaccines.
Based on the current rate of vaccine rollout, 109 countries will miss the WHO's target for 70% of the world's population to be fully vaccinated by July, Tedros added. That aim is seen as helping end the acute phase of the pandemic.
"Booster after booster in a small number of countries will not end a pandemic while billions remain completely unprotected," he said.
WHO adviser Bruce Aylward said 36 nations had not even reached 10 percent vaccination cover. Among severe patients worldwide, 80% were unvaccinated, he added.
In its weekly epidemiological report on Thursday, the WHO said cases increased by 71%, or 9.5 million, in the week to Jan. 2 from a week earlier, while deaths fell by 10%, or 41,000.
Another variant B.1.640 - first documented in multiple countries in September 2021 - is among those being monitored by the WHO but is not circulating widely, said the WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove.
There are two other categories of greater significance the WHO uses to track variants https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants: "variant of concern", which includes Delta and Omicron, and "variant of interest".
Arguing that Albany was imposing an “autocracy” upon the state, Blakeman repeatedly ripped Hochul’s mask decrees prior to the signing.
“School boards are comprised of elected officials who make decisions based upon the unique circumstances of each district,” Blakeman said at a Thursday press conference. “They are in the best position to make these decisions, not an autocracy in Albany.”
“This executive order gives the school districts their own individual right to make decisions within the county under our home rule authority that we have as a county,” he said. “Our county is larger than nine states and we don’t need people in Albany telling us what we should be doing.”
Blakeman’s orders go against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s indoor mask mandate.G.N.Miller/NYPost
Blakeman signed two additional orders, one that allows public county workers to not wear masks indoors and another that formalizes his decision not to enforce Hochul’s mask mandates that “unfairly fine residents and small businesses thousands of dollars.”
“We are taking a very aggressive approach in fighting COVID-19,” he said. “But this aggressive approach must be balanced by keeping in mind the psychological and economic risks of every decision we make as well as individual constitutional rights.”
Blakeman also announced that the county will double distribution of free test kits this weekend, establish free vaccination sites and provide KN95 masks to all private and public school teachers and employees.
People protesting vaccine and mask mandates at the New York state Capitol building ahead of Hochul’s state of the state speech on Jan. 5, 2021.AP Photo/Hans PenninkStudents wearing masks in a school in Jericho in Nassau County last summer.Photo by Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images
“I think there is an unreasonable focus on these masks, especially the paper mask,” he said. “The data is not there that they materially provide the kind of protection that people would want. It’s a false sense of security. So what we are doing here in Nassau County is we’re doing meaningful things, we’re doing material things.”
Blakeman reiterated that Nassau cops and firefighters won’t enforce mask-related mandates from the state.
“They have far more important things to do than chase people around to see if they are wearing masks,” he said. “They will not be doing that.”
Shares of Humana Inc. HUM, -15.20% tumbled 13.0% toward a three-month low in afternoon trading Thursday, to pace the S&P 500's SPX, +0.08% decliners, after the health insurance services company slashed its full-year membership estimate for its Medicare Advantage products. Humana's stock was headed for the biggest one-day selloff since it slid 13.9% on March 16, 2020. Humana disclosed earlier Thursday that it now expects 2022 net membership growth for its individual Medicare Advantage products of 150,000 to 200,000 members, down from a previous estimate of 325,000 to 375,000 due primarily to "higher than anticipated terminations" during the annual election period, combined with expectations of higher than originally expected terminations for the rest of 2022. The company expects 2022 adjusted earnings per share of approximately $20.50, compared with the FactSet consensus of $20.53. Meanwhile, for the Humana Premier Rx Plan (PDP), the company now estimates a net membership decline of 125,000 members in 2022, compared with previous estimates of a loss of "a few hundred thousand members," citing better-than-expected sales of the Walmart Value plan and lower-than-anticipated terminations.
With China facing the prospect of an omicron-driven wave of COVID cases that's worse than anything the country has seen since it first unleashed SARS-CoV-2 upon the world, analysts on Wall Street are trying to suss out exactly what all this could mean for China's economy, and by extension, the world.
It's clear that an outbreak carries economic costs. Spending on COVID prevention measures could crowd out spending on manufacturing and infrastructure.
Taking into consideration the economic risks and political considerations, a team of analysts at Goldman Sachs expects Beijing to maintain its zero-COVID policy - or ZCP - through late 2022 at the very least. So far, China's outbreaks have been concentrated in a small number of provinces, as the charts below reflect.
Now, Goldman's team acknowledges that the advent of the omicron variant has already prompted its economists to lower their expectations for global growth. And it's not only China that's imposing more restrictions on both travel and its domestic economy. The Netherlands and South Korea are just two examples of countries that have adopted lockdowns to try and stop the spread of omicron.
As far as China's policymakers are concerned, the Zero COVID Policy has a few major benefits, and a few major costs. The benefits are as follows: 1) domestic containment of COVID — few new cases, hospitalizations or deaths, with social order under control; 2) less squeeze on domestic healthcare resources, and 3) a favorable environment for manufacturing production and goods exports.
It also carries clear economic costs, including: 1) constant disruptions to the recovery of close-contact services sectors; 2) weakening the multiplier effect of fiscal expenditure as spending on some COVID prevention measures may crowd out some infrastructure spending, with the former usually less effective than the latter in boosting private consumption and investment, 3) relative isolation from the rest of the world due to substantially less cross-border passenger flows for economic and cultural cooperation.
Taking all this into consideration, the Goldman team expects Beijing to maintain its ZCP through at least late 2022 - so the better part of a year.
But already, China's tourism industry is already struggling from the ZCP.
The Goldman team has sketched a rough analysis of what's to be expected should their base case come true. They have also worked up a "downside" and a "severe downside" scenario as the bank tries to keep ahead of the worst-case scenario.
Baseline: The current approach is still effective in containing small occasional Omicron outbreaks in only a few cities. In this case, our ELI stays at 10 in Q1, followed by a gradual decline towards year-end.
Downside: Omicron cases spread to multiple provinces, the same as the wave in August 2021, with the epicenter in a densely-populated coastal province Jiangsu. In this case, we assume our ELI increases to an average of 20 in Q1, similar to its level in August 2021, before moderating to around 5 in Q4 this year.
Severe downside: Community transmission of Omicron cases happens in most provinces, leading to a national lockdown in Q1 (comparable to the initial Covid-19 outbreak across the country during February-March 2020). Given the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant, some social distancing measures may remain in place until the end of 2022. In this case, our ELI increases sharply to a peak of 80 in January before normalizing gradually to around 10 in late 2022.
Bottom line: Goldman expects scattered outbreaks to shave 0.9% of GDP growth off during the coming year as Beijing stands by its "Zero COVID" policy.
The worst case scenario would see 3.3% taken off the country's growth forecast.
Not that it matters much, but popular opinion is already growing weary of the latest lockdowns. Is there any chance that the CCP listens to its people and decides that ZCP simply isn't sustainable?
India’s top health research body announced on Wednesday that it won’t be adding Merck’s COVID-19 antiviral pill molnupiravir to its national treatment protocol, citing concerns over its safety.
The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said it had become aware of “major safety concerns” that prompted the decision, despite India’s drug regulator in December approving the drug for emergency use.
It comes after France in December also canceled its order for the drug, developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, following disappointing trial data suggesting its drug was markedly less effective than previously thought.
“Molnupiravir has major safety concerns including teratogenicity, mutagenicity, muscle and bone damage. If this drug is given, contraception must be done for three months as the child may have problems,” ICMR Director-General Balram Bhargava told local media on Wednesday.
Bhargava noted that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization for Merck’s COVID-19 pill based on 1,433 patients with a 3 percent reduction in moderate disease when given in mild cases.
Members of the FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee in November voted 13 for and 10 against the emergency use authorization for molnupiravir, agreeing with the idea that the drug’s benefits outweigh its potential risks, including concerns about potential birth defects.
However, “we must remember that this drug has major safety concerns,” Bhargava said, adding that the drug causes teratogenicity, or the ability to cause defects in a developing fetus, mutagenicity, or permanent transmissible changes in the structure of genetic material of cells, cartilage damage, and can also be damaging to muscles.
Moreover, Bhargava said contraception would also have to be given to individuals who take the drug—regardless of whether they are male or female— because “the child born could be problematic with teratogenic influences.”
“The WHO has not included it, the UK has not included it as of now. As of now, the current recommendation stands that it is not part of the national taskforce treatment,” Bhargava said.
However, Bhargava said that experts will continue to discuss the potential use of the treatment in the country, where virus case numbers are currently surging.
Molnupiravir is intended for use at home by adults with mild to moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk of developing severe disease. The drug is taken orally in pill form, twice a day for five days, within five days of symptoms onset.
Both FDA staff scientists and Merck have suggested the drug should not be recommended during pregnancy. Company studies in rats showed that the drug caused birth defects when given at very high doses. FDA staffers concluded the data “suggest that molnupiravir may cause fetal harm when administered to pregnant individuals.”
Merck says that there is “no available human data on the use of molnupiravir in pregnant individuals to evaluate the risk of major birth defects, miscarriage or adverse maternal or fetal outcomes.”
Around 13 Indian companies, including Cipla, Sun Pharma, and BDR, are manufacturing molnupiravir.
Indian multinational pharmaceutical company Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories was set to roll out a generic version of the oral antiviral medication starting from next week at an extremely affordable treatment rate of 1,400 rupees ($18.84), 37 times cheaper than in the United States.
The Epoch Times has contacted Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and Merck for comment.
Just the other day, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said during an interview withCNBCthat her goal is to "never shut down again", in reference to a lockdown that economically devastated small business owners. During this interview, Lightfoot insisted that schools weren't a locus of the spread, which of course is in line with the CDC's own guidance.
"Our schools are not the source of significant spread. The issue is community spread. But we need to keep our kids in schools, which is what we’re going to do in Chicago," she said, adding that:
...she “will not allow” the union “to take our children hostage.”
She took issue with the union demanding that all educators, students, and volunteers test negative for COVID-19 before returning to school.
“We are not going to rob parents of their right and their obligation to tell us if they want testing or not on their children. It’s not going to happen. It’s morally wrong,” Lightfoot said.
Yet, two days later, millions of parents in the city of Chicago are scrambling Thursday morning as the city's public schools have once again been shut down by a teacher's union that's determined to strike until they get more tests for members who are worried about "safety", despite the fact that even omicron hasn't been shown to spread in schools and among children.
As the NYT explains, nowhere in the US is the situation more "acrimonious and unpredictable" than in Chicago. The city retaliated to the Teachers' Union vote by calling off school altogether, refusing the teachers' call for remote instruction. The enmity between the teacher's union and city hall is something that's been years in the making, according to the NYT. And with violence surging in the city's streets following its most murderous year in decades, there's never been a time where leaving children unsupervised could put them more at risk.
One city activist put things perfectly: the city is now in an "untenable situation."
"If they are in class and Covid is rampaging, that’s a problem. If they are not there and out on the streets, that’s a problem," said Tamar Manasseh, who leads an anti-violence group in the city, and who said she was looking into ways to help children with nowhere to go during the day. "This has put us in an untenable situation."
To get a better picture of the situation that Chicago parents are dealing with: parents weren't informed about the cancellation of school starting Wednesday until 2300 Chicago Time on Tuesday night.
The decision impacts the more than 300K schoolchildren in Chicago, and it's unclear when classes will resume. Union leaders insist that their members are only asking for basic safety precautions like regular testing for students and proper protocols for quarantining and shutting down schools experiencing an outbreak.
Their attacks on Mayor Lightfoot have grown surprisingly personal, with one top official complaining to a NYT reporter that Lightfoot doesn't "understand partnership and collaboration."
Jesse Sharkey, the union president, said an increase of cases in the school system and the onslaught of Omicron, which causes milder illness than other variants but frequent breakthrough infections, had heightened members’ concern. He called for testing all students before classrooms reopened, as well as stepped-up surveillance testing after that. The district had instituted an optional testing plan over winter break, but most of the 150,000 or so mail-in P.C.R. tests given to students were never returned; of the ones that were, a majority produced invalid results.
"If you want to get us back into the schools quicker, provide testing,” he said.
Mr. Sharkey and Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s vice president, also criticized the mayor for her approach to negotiations and for her repeated public criticisms of the union. Members of Ms. Lightfoot’s administration have defended the school system’s efforts to make classrooms safe and have emphasized that children rarely face severe outcomes from Covid-19.
"The mayor wants to fight when we should be working,” Ms. Davis Gates said. “She’s fighting us instead of the virus. I don’t understand it."
She said the mayor’s “her-way-or-the-highway” leadership style had made matters worse.
"The mayor, bless her heart, she doesn’t understand partnership and collaboration,” Ms. Davis Gates said.
Some activists are blaming Mayor Lightfoot, saying the decision to close schools was made in response to a "political beef".
But in Chicago, some said they did not believe that the district had adequately adjusted to the incursion of Omicron. Ja'Mal Green, an activist and former mayoral candidate who lives on the South Side, said he held his son out of kindergarten this week because he did not think the district had adequate virus precautions.
Mr. Green praised the union’s actions, and said he worried about the convergence of the pandemic, street violence and educational disruption in the city.
"The mayor really has a political beef with the union and doesn’t want to come to any type of compromise because she wants to beat them over the head for the strikes and the things that have happened in the past," said Mr. Green, who has frequently criticized Ms. Lightfoot.
One would think that failing to keep the schools open is a basic failure for a mayor.
The mayor has received backing from the White House, which said earlier Wednesday that all schools should remain open, including in Chicago, but the union has thus far stood firm on its demands.
A new study raises significant doubts about whether at-home rapid antigen tests can detect the Omicron variant before infected people can transmit the virus to others.
The study looks at 30 people from settings including Broadway theaters and offices in New York and San Francisco where some workers were not only being tested daily but were, because of rules at their workplaces, receiving both the antigen tests and a daily test that used the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which is believed to be more reliable.
On days 0 and 1 following a positive PCR test, all of the antigen tests used produced false-negative results, even though in 28 of the 30 cases, levels of virus detected by the PCR test were high enough to infect other people. In four cases, researchers were able to confirm that infected people transmitted the virus to others during the period before they had a positive result on the rapid antigen test.
“I think that with every new variant that comes, scientists have to question whether the things that were previously true are still true,” said Blythe Adamson, the lead author of the paper and the principal epidemiologist at Infectious Economics in New York. “This one has a different way it travels, a different mechanism of action of symptoms, it has different windows of transmission.”
Adamson, who is also an employee of Flatiron Health, an affiliate of Roche, said that it was also possible there were more cases of transmission than the authors were able to confirm.
“It’s absolutely likely there were many more than four transmissions,” Adamson said. “We named four because there were four that were confirmed through contact tracing and epidemiology investigation. There were likely many more.”
The study included both the Abbott BinaxNOW and Quidel QuickVue rapid antigen tests, both of which are authorized by the Food and Drug Administration.
The results were published in a preprint, meaning they have not yet been reviewed by outside researchers.
A chart from the study shows significant false negatives in the early days after infection.BLYTHE ADAMSON/INFECTIOUS ECONOMICS
The results mean that rapid tests — both Abbott BinaxNOW and Quidel QuickVue — aren’t catching people during their first couple days of infection.
“We know that PCR tests are more sensitive than antigen tests — this is not new information,” Abbott Laboratories said in a statement. “We also know that PCR tests are so sensitive that they do not indicate infectiousness and thus are not a practical tool for keeping the workforce and economy moving.”
Despite its small size, the results in the study are remarkably consistent. Not a single rapid antigen test detected the virus until nearly two days after the initial positive PCR result. Additionally, the cases of infection from people who had received false negative results could raise alarm bells.
Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied Covid testing, said the results show rapid tests are not catching cases during the first days of infection. Meanwhile, people are facing hour-long lines for PCR tests and multiple-day waits for results.
“[The] results strongly suggest that we will be unable to effectively test our way out of the current surge, even if we each had a week’s supply of rapid tests on the counter,” Larremore said. He was not involved with this study.
Other data from the group indicate that viral loads peaked in saliva one to two days before they peaked in tests taken from nasal swabs, adding to evidence that swabs taken from the mouth or throat may detect the SARS-CoV-2 that causes Covid better than the nasal swabs used for many PCR and antigen tests.
“The major unknown is what it has been for weeks now: Are the [rapid antigen tests] inherently less able to detect Omicron, or is there less Omicron to detect on nasal swabs?” asked John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. He noted that a paper from South Africa had also shown that there was more virus in saliva than in the nose.
“Does it replicate more in the throat/mouth and hence accumulates in saliva, more than it does in the nose and is present on nasal swabs?” Moore asked. “Remember that Omicron infections are not generally causing loss of smell, which happens when the virus damages nasal tissue and the nerves within the tissues. Is that another indicator of less replication in the nose?”
At this point, researchers see riddles, not solutions.
However, many emphasize, this does not mean that rapid antigen tests are not useful. The tests also detected the virus in every case – it just took longer than with PCR. So while the tests may not work as an early warning, a positive test result at home does likely mean that the person taking the test has Covid-19.
Anne Wyllie, a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health and a co-author on the paper, said that the reports she is seeing from the general public on social media also raise her level of concern.
“If the general public is seeing this and reporting on it, you know, this is also a lot of evidence for me,” Wyllie said. “Like they’re actually seeing it. This is a lot more widespread than just this one outbreak that we were observing.”
During the pandemic, Adamson and Infectious Economics became consultants to many Broadway productions that were trying to keep their staffs safe from Covid. The risk to audiences was relatively easy to control, but cast and crew members worked in cramped quarters where lots of safety precautions, including vaccination, masking, and the use of rapid tests were all necessary to keep people safe.
She said that as soon as Omicron hit, there were anecdotes about rapid antigen tests remaining negative until days after the infected people had already developed symptoms. She said she started to feel anxiety about whether precautions to keep cast members safe would be enough. Since then, numerous Broadway shows, including “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill,” have announced Covid-related closures.
