Dr. Yacov Geva, President and CEO of G Medical Innovations, and Michael McDade, CEO ofMcDade Products, LLC, announced today that they acquired an undisclosed number of shares ofG Medical Innovations(NASDAQ: GMVD).
The CEO of McDade Products, LLC cited high confidence levels for sales of the co-branded LiveNow COVID-19 PCR Test Collection Kits announced this week and the forecasting of $30MM in revenues generated from the successful storefront COVID-19 testing locations operated by the company’s G Medical Tests and Services division.
G Medical Tests and Services currently operates storefront testing locations in California. During the next few months, the company expects to expand its network of storefront testing locations in California and other U.S. regions to be announced at a later date.
Pittsburgh-based McDade Products, LLC and G Medical Tests and Services have partnered to make millions of FDA EUA-approved COVID-19 PCR collection test kits available for retailers to sell by the end of January, in response to a national shortage of COVID-19 test options. The LiveNow COVID-19 PCR Test Collection Kits provide 24–48-hour certified lab results and retail for $9.99. Visit https://www.mcdadegrp.com/ to place orders for the LiveNow PCR Collection Kits.
“With the U.S. government’s shift to emphasize COVID-19 testing to combat this virus, I’ve acquired stock with G Medical on the open market because I strongly believe in the future of the company. As a trusted and proven mobile health and e-health company, G Medical is now making SARS-CoV2 certified lab testing even more accessible and convenient for consumers,” said Michael McDade, CEO of McDade Products, LLC.
McDade Products is a division of McDade Group, a privately held specialty sales, marketing, and distribution company serving the U.S. retail industry.
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc said on Friday it has applied for Japanese government approval for its oral COVID-19 treatment.
The application is based on global Phase II/III trials that Japan was part of, Pfizer said in a statement.
With COVID-19 cases surging again, Japan is betting heavily on oral treatments to keep serious infections and deaths at bay. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said last week he aimed to distribute the Pfizer pills next month after securing 2 million doses during a December call with Chief Executive Albert Bourla.
The government has already started distributing molnupiravir antiviral pills after agreeing to pay Merck & Co Inc and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics about $1.2 billion for 1.6 million courses. Japan's Shionogi & Co Ltd is working on its own pill, with plans to supply 1 million doses this year.
The highly infectious Omicron variant is driving a surge in COVID-19 cases. Japan recorded 18,859 new infections on Thursday, according to a tally by national broadcaster NHK, the most since Sept. 2 during what was the country's fifth wave of the pandemic
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), touted as the nation’s leading public health government agency, is struggling. Over the past two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the agency has demonstrated a lack of consistency and at times, poor judgment bordering on general ineptness, which has exacerbated the nation’s COVID-19 response.
There are several areas where the CDC has fallen woefully short in helping the nation move forward during the pandemic. Here is a report card on several domains within their rubric of activities.
Data: (Grade C-) Data are needed to make informed decisions. How data are collected is critical. For example, without consistent templates for collecting data, state public health departments were left on their own to define what constitutes COVID-19 deaths. Data on how the different vaccines performed and the proliferation of breakthrough infections was slow to materialize. More recently, with the omicron variant surge, the key markers for community spread are hospital admissions for COVID-19, not infections. Knowing the vaccination history of every COVID-19 hospitalized patient is critical to assess the COVID-19 landscape and gain insights into how the nation may need to move forward with the available vaccines. The CDC Data Tracker provides much-needed data now; it took an unacceptable amount of time to get this repository in place with the data that researchers need to inform the state of the pandemic.
Communication: (Grade: F) Communication always begins at the top. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is an outstanding infectious disease physician and scholar. Yet, she entered her current role ill equipped to provide a consistent and calming voice. For example, messages on booster shots that were in conflict with the White House created fodder for political adversaries and pandemic skeptics that fomented misinformation about the vaccines. Her recent comments on omicron deaths created a stir among conspiracy theorists. Her current effort to engage media consultants is an attempt to right the communication ship, something that she needed to do when she took the CDC director position almost one year ago.
Vaccination policy: (Grade B) The COVID-19 vaccines have been remarkably effective to dampen the most severe outcomes from COVID-19, namely hospitalization. The hope was that they would be more protective against infections and provide a longer horizon of protection before the need for a booster. Much of this confusion grew out of uncertainty surrounding how the vaccines would perform in the population. The widespread number of breakthrough infections cast a shadow of doubt around the CDC and trust in what they communicated about the vaccines. However, much of the performance of the vaccines was out of their control. What was within their control was how they communicated such information.
The most important question now is: Where does the CDC go from here? A change in leadership will not solve the problem, since many of the issues exposed during the pandemic are systemic.
Perhaps what our nation must rethink is how to ease the politics out of public health. The strategies and tactics of public health must be protected from the political whims of the national political leadership and that bipartisan support is needed to rethink how our nation invests in public health. One place to begin such a transition is not making the CDC director a political appointee.
Without substantive structural changes, the CDC will continue to be mired in a veil of uncertainty about its role and what it can accomplish. This serves no one’s interests, Republican, Democrat or independent, since a virus has no political leaning and can infect anyone with unpredictable consequences. The family and friends of the 840,000 people who have died prematurely with or from COVID-19 and the 120,000 people currently hospitalized can vouch for that.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a founder professor of Computer Science and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public health policy.
The Biden administration hasannounced a planto “ensure scientific integrity.” It’s about time.
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a 67-page report, says the task force aims “to ensure that science is conducted, managed, communicated, and used in ways that preserve its accuracy and objectivity and protect it from suppression, manipulation, and inappropriate influence — including political interference.”
It won’t have to look far: The United States government has been misbehaving on the scientific front for years, most notably in the COVID-19 pandemic. Political interference, suppression, manipulation and inappropriate influence have been standard, which is why trust in government, particularly on science, has fallen so far.
Ironically, even as this initiative was announced, damning new information about government scientists’ response to the COVID-19 outbreak came out. A series of just-released e-mails from top scientists revealed they were highly confident that the disease came out of a Chinese laboratory, even as their public statements treated any such suggestions as crazy talk, “conspiracy theory” and “misinformation.”
As science journalistMatt Ridley writes: “The e-mails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.’ ”
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins was reportedly worried about “doing great potential harm to science and international harmony” while discussing China’s potential role in the COVID pandemic.Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, observes Ridley, “was pithier, worrying about ‘doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’ Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting science’s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change one’s mind.”
The science establishment didn’t want people talking about the lab leak because it would have led to a discussion about why, exactly, the science establishment was tolerating — and in some cases funding, via Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — dangerous “gain of function” research in an insecure Chinese lab when such research was banned in the United States.
Notes Ridley, “These e-mails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible,for political reasons.”
This is a smoking gun pointing at very deep misconduct indeed, the very sort of thing that — quite rightly — leads ordinary citizens to view the science establishment with deep skepticism. Covering up the origins of a deadly disease, particularly when one played a role in those origins, goes beyond untrustworthy. It certainly demonstrates a lack of scientific integrity, as well as personal integrity.
Sadly, we’ve seen this sort of dishonesty since the beginning. Public-health officials first minimized the pandemic’s dangers, encouraging people to go on cruises and eschew mask-wearing. In short order they reversed course entirely, supporting damaging and ineffective mass lockdowns and other responses that had little or no scientific basis, then did their best to shut down any scientific discussion or debate.
As The Wall Street Journal recently noted, Fauci and Collins (who worried above that the truth about the virus’s origins could harm “science” and “international harmony”) colluded with the media to trash the reputations of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by eminent scientists who thought the standard governmental pandemic response was wrong-headed and destructive. Collins told The Washington Post that the esteemed scientists who disagreed with his policies were “fringe” figures. More recently, Fauci told CBS that Republicans criticizing him were “really criticizing science, because I am science.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently claimed that Republicans criticizing him were really criticizing science.Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
That’s not integrity of the sort that the White House task force should be promoting. It’s much closer to narcissism.
Then there was the (successful) effort by leading public-health figures to get Pfizer to delay releasing its vaccine until after the election, so that it wouldn’t help Trump. Enough said.
So how do you promote scientific integrity? To start with: by not lying. That alone seems like a stretch for Fauci, Collins and much of the rest of the public-health establishment. Treating disagreements about science in a scientific rather than political fashion would also help. And a sizable dose of personal integrity on the part of the people running these institutions is essential, though currently absent.
It’s more than clear that none of these things has marked our COVID response. Last year I called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to rigorously investigate all the wrongs in our response. These new revelations underscore its necessity.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
PresidentJoe Bidenwill nominate Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s next vice chair for supervision, arguably the nation’s most powerful banking regulator, according to people familiar with the matter.
Biden will also nominate Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson to serve as Federal Reserve governors, according to the people, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely.
Each nominee will in the coming weeks face questioning from the Senate Banking Committee, the congressional body in charge of vetting presidential appointments to the central bank. Should the Senate confirm their nominations, Cook would be the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board while Jefferson would be the fourth Black man to do so.
That committee on Tuesday held a nomination hearing for Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Biden chose to nominate to a second term. The committee held a similar hearing for Fed Governor Lael Brainard on Thursday, whom Biden picked to be the central bank’s next vice chair.
In choosing Raskin for the vice chair for supervision post, Biden looks to make good on Democrats’ promises to reinforce laws passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis and restore aspects of a rule named for former Fed Chair Paul Volcker that had restricted banks’ ability to trade for their own profit.
Raskin has experience at the Fed and served as a governor at the central bank from 2010 to 2014 before serving as deputy secretary of the Treasury under the Obama administration. She is married to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
Powell and Brainard are both expected to clear the Senate without fanfare and with bipartisan support, but Raskin, Cook and Jefferson could see tougher confirmation odds. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, the ranking member of the Banking committee, was quick to pan Biden’s latest choices.
“Sarah Bloom Raskin has specifically called for the Fed to pressure banks to choke off credit to traditional energy companies and to exclude those employers from any Fed emergency lending facilities,” he said in a statement Thursday evening. “I have serious concerns that she would abuse the Fed’s narrow statutory mandates on monetary policy and banking supervision to have the central bank actively engaged in capital allocation.”
“I will closely examine whether Ms. Cook and Mr. Jefferson have the necessary experience, judgment, and policy views to serve as Fed Governors,” he added.
While Jefferson’s name had more recently come up in closed-door discussions to serve as a governor, Cook’s nomination was well telegraphed. CNBC reported in May that she was the top choice of Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Banking Committee’s chairman and an Ohio Democrat, to serve as a governor.
Cook is a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. She is also a member of the steering committee at the Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive Washington-based think tank that counts several of Biden’s top economists among its alumni. She also served as a senior economist in the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisors.
Jefferson, meanwhile, is vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Davidson College. His decadeslong career in academics has focused on labor markets and poverty.
Notable works of his include a 2005 study that evaluated the costs and benefits of monetary policy that promotes a “high-pressure economy” in which the Fed allows easier access to cash and lower interest rates to spur tighter labor markets.
He and other economists, including Brainard, have argued – in general and barring extraordinary economic conditions – that the added benefits of lower rates on maximum employment is worth the potential for warmer inflation.
Raskin and regulation
Since leaving the government, Raskin has pressed the Fed and other financial regulators to take a more proactive role to address the financial risks posed by climate change.
“While none of its regulatory agencies was specifically designed to mitigate the risks of climate-related events, each has a mandate broad enough to encompass these risks within the scope of the instruments already given to it by Congress,” Raskin wrote in September.
“In light of the changing climate’s unpredictable – but clearly intensifying – effects on the economy, U.S. regulators will need to leave their comfort zone and act early before the problem worsens and becomes even more expensive to address,” she added.
Former Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles, who recently left the Fed, played a major role in reducing capital requirements for U.S. banks with less than $700 billion in assets and relaxing the Volcker Rule’s audit rules for trades made by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks.
Fed officials in favor of an easier regulatory stance argue the industry is well-capitalized and not in need of some of the more restrictive measures enacted in the wake of the crisis.
Many Democrats, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have pushed back and said rollbacks leave the banking sector more vulnerable to shocks and liable to excess risk taking.
Inflation battle
The nominations come at a precarious time for the Fed, which has in recent weeks has started to wind down its easy-money policies in the face of recovering employment and the highest level of year-over-year inflation since 1982.
In times of normal economic activity, the Fed adjusts short-term interest rates to maximize employment and stabilize prices.
When the Fed wants the economy to heat up, it can cut borrowing costs to spur the housing market and broader economic activity as well as employment. But if it is concerned about an overheating economy or unruly inflation, it can raise interest rates to make borrowing more expensive.
In times of economic emergency, the central bank can also tap broader powers and purchase vast quantities of bonds to keep borrowing costs low and boost financial markets with easy access to cash. It did so in 2020 with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, a move that worked to pacify traders and soothe companies concerned about liquidity.
Bond yields fall as their prices rise, meaning that those purchases forced rates lower. But ending those types of emergency-era liquidity measures — and the prospect of higher rates — can have the opposite effect on markets.
The release of the Fed’s latest meeting minutes earlier in January, which showed several officials in favor of cutting the balance sheet and raising rates soon, sparked a sell-off on Wall Street.
Last week, GBH reported there’s noformal routefor Massachusetts residents to report to the state their results from rapid coronavirus tests taken at home.
Residents and public health workers are frustrated by the barriers to report results from home rapid tests, and count those numbers in a tangible way so the public has a greater understanding of the pandemic in their communities. Some towns have launched their own forms for collecting at-home test results. Meanwhile, there's no indication the state has plans to record those cases.
“Most at-home tests are not reportable to public health authorities,” a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health said. The exceptions are tests administered and observed during telehealth visits and tests that involve samples collected at home then mailed into a laboratory. The agency recommends people who test positive using at-home tests isolate and notify their close contacts.
The agency said individuals who test positive can enable MassNotify, a free service developed by Apple and Google, which allows users to anonymously report their COVID-19 cases. The tool doesn’t send information about rapid test results to public health authorities.
People want to know what the protocol is, and if they can find a way to self-report their rapid test positives.
On Jan. 2, John LaVoie felt sick and took a rapid test at his Newton home. He was worried after he tested positive, knowing that the result meant he exposed his wife and three young kids to the coronavirus. LaVoie and his wife alerted their childrens' pediatrician about the exposure but were told to wait until the kids had symptoms to get a PCR test. They decided they wanted to report LaVoie’s positive result from the rapid test, but weren’t sure how, so they called their public health department.
‘“They said, 'All right, thanks for telling us, you should isolate' and no additional information. It was a little disconcerting. ... There must be so many more people positive that are not being counted in the official numbers," he said.
LaVoie's doctor told him not to bother getting a PCR test, but if his oxygen level plummeted, to go to an emergency room. “They basically wanted nothing to do with me,” he said.
LaVoie said he’s uncomfortable with the ambiguity of reported numbers as a parent. “We make decisions about what activities you want to do and what level of exposure they might be willing to risk based on the number of cases that are actually out there in the community,” he said. “And although the PCR ones are probably some percentage of it, it's not the real number.”
"If we’re giving people the ability to test at home, we should be giving people the ability to report from home."
- ELIZA MULCAHY
In Dorchester, Eliza Mulcahy tested positive at home, and wanted to have it documented when she felt well enough.
“I contacted my doctor to check in with them. Then I tried to figure out how Massachusetts wanted us to report, and there was no answer,” said Mulcahy, who searched online, asked friends, and checked both the state and local public health websites.
Boston’s Public Health Commission said it urges residents who test positive using rapid tests to self-isolate and to "notify their close contacts and encourage them to get tested as well, given their possible exposure.” The commission did not reply to an inquiry on whether it will start collecting rapid test data.
Mulcahy attempted to report her result through MassNotify, thinking it would send her positive test result to the Department of Public Health, but she found the process too complicated and gave up. She was surprised to hear that even if she had succeeded in reporting through the service, the information wouldn’t have been shared with the state.
“If we’re giving people the ability to test at home, we should be giving people the ability to report from home,” she said.
Andrew Lover is an assistant professor of epidemiology at UMass Amherst’s School of Public Health and Health Sciences, and he acknowledged there’s an undercount of positive cases going on.
“I think the big challenge is that many local and state departments of health are, you know, really understaffed and overwhelmed right now with pandemic response — and certainly having a huge number of new tests reported just adds to that burden.” The data would be useful, but he thinks it’s a capacity issue.
Zoë McLaren, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s School of Public Policy, said people may not have the incentive to report results even when it is feasible. "So if you have a positive test, you may not want everyone to know. You may not want contact tracers to know. You may not want that as a record. You may not want that information to be made available to anybody else.” She still thinks there’s should be a national website to report a positive test for people in states that don’t collect.
“I think there’s a lot of room for very simple solutions,” McLaren said. She added that data collectors have to take into account who might report, what information gets captured and where it goes.
North Attleboro’s Health Department is giving their locals that option. Last week, they launched a voluntary online form for residents who test positive at home.
“From discussion with staff and nurses, we wanted to have a mechanism that we could capture some of that information if people chose to share that,” said AnneMarie Fleming, the town's health director.
In the lead up to the decision, North Attleboro parents were calling schools to report when their kids had a case of COVID-19, then would call the Board of Health. So the IT department came up with a webpage and a simple spreadsheet to collect contact information, the number of people who tested positive, and other basic details. Fleming said a dozen people have reported positive cases through the form since Tuesday.
On Facebook, Winthrop’s Town Manager office shared a link to a Microsoft Office form where residents can self-report any positive results from home test kits.
“We were unable to keep up with the phone calls of people calling with clarification and guidance,” said Meredith Hurley, director of the Department of Public Health and Clinical Services.
She said the town wanted to keep people’s electronic medical records updated, even if they test positive at home. It’s also helping the Board of Health track reinfections among people who get COVID-19 more than once. They’ve had 44 people report rapid test positives in the week since the form launched.
"We're only good as the data that we have. We're losing data that could be very useful for lessons going forward in this pandemic."
- MEREDITH HURLEY, DIRECTOR OF WINTHROP'S DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND CLINICAL SERVICES
Hurley thinks the state should also collect rapid test data.
“I just don't know how they would do it. That's the barrier,” she said. Data collection can strain already hampered health systems, but at the same time, having a broader view of infections in the community could help.
“We're only good as the data that we have. We're losing data that could be very useful for lessons going forward in this pandemic,” she said.
In North Attleboro, Fleming thinks the reason why the state isn’t collecting rapid test data is because of its quality. “It’s that issue that they [the state] don’t feel that it’s data they can collect that has any type of integrity, that we can say this was done by a health professional.”
Other states and municipalities are asking people to voluntarily submit their positive rapid test data on new websites.
Over 63,400 people have self-reported to Washington, D.C.’s system since October, with more than 7,500 of them being positive results. D.C. includes that information on a spreadsheet posted daily to its count site, and considers it probable case data. The voluntarily reported data has a disclaimer: “Probable cases can be used in conjunction with confirmed cases to track disease spread but will be reported separately from confirmed cases to be consistent with CDC definitions. Probable case data is NOT reflected in other DC Health metrics, to include case counts, as data is self-reported and cannot be verified.”
A form used by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment to collect rapid test data from residents.
Screenshot by Sarah Betancourt, GBH News / Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment
Colorado’s rapid test reporting system launched in September, with 5,445 individuals reporting positive results at home. The state bolstered its marketing of the effort recently, so 4,179 of those happened in the last month.
“We encourage all individuals who test positive using at-home tests to report their results,” the Colorado State Joint Information Center told GBH in a message. “When individuals report their positive results, they are entered in our surveillance system with other cases for investigation. We want individuals to report their positive Rapid At-Home results because it helps us obtain important information about possible close contacts and provide important information about possible treatment options and guidance for isolation and quarantine.”
The state gives out a lot of free tests manufactured by Abbott, including the Binax over-the-counter test, and said people who get tests from other companies can also submit their results. Those positive cases are classified as “suspect cases” by the state, and aren’t included in our daily case counts, which only include confirmed and probable cases. But they are being tracked.
The state of Massachusetts does have a new opportunity for rapid test data collection. Gov. Charlie Baker announced Tuesday his administration secured 26 million rapid tests through iHealth Labs for educators, students and the childcare system. iHealth antigen rapid tests are one of several that allow users to report their negative or positive results to the company, which can subsequently share that anonymized information with the state. iHealth didn’t return GBH’s request for an interview, but another rapid test company that collects this data from users did.
An On/Go COVID-19 antigen self-test. Each box is a 2-pack test kit.
Courtesy of Intrivo
In December, the Baker administration ordered 4,640 boxes of On/Go rapid test kits from Intrivo, each containing two tests, for $88,160 total.
Ron Gutman is co-CEO of Intrivo, and said his test actually allows people to upload a picture of their result, dubbed the “tap, swab, snap.”
Users start the app, swab their nostril, and take a quick picture of the test cassette with a phone camera. The On/Go app generates a secure testing badge that can be shared or used to gain access to businesses.
“This is really anonymized data that will go to really figure out outbreaks,” he said. Because the data is protected and anonymized, Gutman said he’s happy to share it to any public health entity to track cases.
“We’re working with states right now and we're happy to work with the state of Massachusetts together to make this thing happen,” he said.
Most access to a major city adjacent to Beijing was suspended Thursday as China tried to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious omicron variant, which poses a test to its “zero-tolerance” COVID-19 policy and its ability to successfully host the Winter Olympics.
Tianjin, a port and manufacturing center with 14 million people, is one of a half-dozen cities where the government is imposing lockdowns and other restrictions as part of a policy that aims to track down every virus case. But the outbreak in a city so close to the Olympic host is particularly worrying.
Throughout the pandemic, authorities have been especially protective of Beijing since it is the seat of government and home to senior politicians. With the Games opening there in just over three weeks and China’s national pride on the line, the stakes are even higher now.
On Thursday, Tianjin suspended train, taxi, bus and ride-hailing services to other cities. Flights and high-speed train services were canceled earlier and highways closed. People leaving the city were required to present negative virus tests and receive special permission.
That’s all part of the sweeping restrictions on movement China has repeatedly imposed since early 2020. It started with the then-unprecedented step of sealing off 11 million people in the central city Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, and other parts of surrounding Hubei province.
Along with mass testing and digital surveillance of people’s movements, those measures have kept the virus from spreading into a full-fledged national outbreak so far. The country’s vaccination rate now also tops 85%.
Other countries that tried a similar zero-tolerance approach have abandoned it, deciding instead to try to live with the virus, while mitigating its worst effects.
China persists, but may find the strategy increasingly difficult since the omicron variant is more contagious than previous versions of the virus and is better at evading vaccines. That challenge comes just as China is welcoming thousands of people from abroad for the Olympics, which start Feb. 4.
“I think it truly is a critical juncture for China. Can it stave off omicron?” said Dali Yang, a Chinese politics expert at the University of Chicago.
China reported 124 domestically transmitted cases on Thursday, including 76 in Henan province and 41 in Tianjin.
Authorities have reported a total of 104,379 cases since the pandemic began and 4,636 deaths, a figure that hasn’t changed in months.
During the Tokyo Olympics in July, Japan saw a widespread outbreak driven by the delta variant, but the measures at the Olympics themselves were mostly effective in stopping transmission, said Kenji Shibuya, research director at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research and a public health expert.
The rules in Beijing will be even stricter than Tokyo’s.
The Games are being conducted under a “closed loop” system that is meant to prevent all contact between the outside world and athletes, journalists, staff and officials at the Olympics.
Those inside the Games bubble will travel between hotels and competition venues in special vehicles. Anyone who leaves the sealed environment will be required to quarantine for three weeks.
Police even went so far as to warn anyone involved in a collision with an Olympics vehicle to avoid contact with people on board and wait for a special team to handle the situation.
Such measures should be able to prevent the spread of the virus within the bubble, said Kei Saito, a virologist at the University of Tokyo.
But outside, it could be a different story.
“Omicron is three to four times more transmissible than delta,” said Saito. “I think it’s almost impossible to control the spread of omicron.”
Furthermore, the lack of widespread outbreaks means the Chinese population is protected only by vaccines and not by antibodies produced by previous infections, said Dr. Vineeta Bal, an Indian immunologist.
The domestically made vaccines China is using are also generally considered less effective than those widely used in other countries, such as the Pfizer or Moderna shots.
Despite these challenges, China has shown no signs of giving up on its efforts to stop the spread of the virus in its tracks.
Tianjin conducted mass testing for a second time Wednesday. The government asked people to wait at home until they receive a negative result, and communities in Beijing asked their residents to report if they’ve visited the nearby port city in recent weeks.
Trucks carrying food and medical will be allowed into Tianjin, but drivers were told to wear masks and take other steps to avoid transmitting the virus, according to a city government notice.
Automaker Volkswagen AG said it shut down two factories in the city on Monday and employees have been tested twice. “We hope to resume production very soon,” it said in a statement.
Despite that, the disruptions for people in Tianjin remain lighter than in other cities that are completely locked down.
“Everything is fine, the supermarkets and restaurants, you can go to all normally,” said Yu Xuan, who works at a university in Tianjin.
Wang Dacheng, another resident, said his father who has trouble walking was able to get tested in their apartment.
“Everyone’s been very calm and collected,” Wang said.
Restrictions in Xi’an, a city of 14 million people, and the central province of Henan have prompted complaints people sequestered in their apartments were running out of food.
Organizers are determined the Games will go on despite the pandemic and controversies including a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott over accusations of human rights abuses against mostly Muslim minorities in China’s northwest.
“The world is turning its eyes to China,” President Xi Jinping said during an inspection tour last week. “And China is ready.”
