virus
How can I protect myself from the new omicron variant?
How can I protect myself from the new omicron variant?
The same way you guard against COVID-19 caused by any other variant:
Get vaccinated if you haven’t yet, get a booster if you’re eligible and step up other precautions you may have relaxed, like wearing a mask and avoiding crowds.
READ: India's Omicron cases rise to 21
For all the attention omicron is getting, the overwhelming cause of infections and deaths in many places remains the extra-contagious delta variant.
“Delta is the real risk right now. Omicron is an uncertain threat,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, told The Associated Press. Regardless of the coronavirus type, Collins said “we do know what to do.”
It will take a few weeks to learn key aspects about this latest variant, including whether it’s more contagious, causes more severe illness or evades immunity -- and if so, how by much.
In the meantime, “what we need to do is add more layers of protection,” says Dr. Julie Vaishampayan of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. That’s especially important with holiday travel and gatherings around the corner.
READ: Nepal reports first cases of omicron variant
A booster shot is one of those layers. The added dose triggers a big jump in virus-fighting antibodies. Even if the antibodies don’t prove quite as effective against omicron as they are against other variants, simply having more of them might compensate -- in addition to bolstering protection against delta.
In addition to masking, avoiding crowds and improving ventilation, testing is another protective step. That’s recommended for anyone who has COVID-19 symptoms or was potentially exposed to the virus. But it also could help ensure safety before holiday gatherings, even if everyone attending has been vaccinated, Vaishampayan says.
Study: Vaccinated people can carry as much virus as others
In another dispiriting setback for the nation’s efforts to stamp out the coronavirus, scientists who studied a big COVID-19 outbreak in Massachusetts concluded that vaccinated people who got so-called breakthrough infections carried about the same amount of the coronavirus as those who did not get the shots.
Health officials on Friday released details of that research, which was key in this week’s decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where the delta variant is fueling infection surges. The authors said the findings suggest that the CDC’s mask guidance should be expanded to include the entire country, even outside of hot spots.
The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.
The outbreak in Provincetown — a seaside tourist spot on Cape Cod in the county with Massachusetts’ highest vaccination rate — has so far included more than 900 cases. About three-quarters of them were people who were fully vaccinated.
Travis Dagenais, who was among the many vaccinated people infected, said “throwing caution to the wind” and partying in crowds for long nights over the July Fourth holiday was a mistake in hindsight.
“The dominant public messaging has been that the vaccine means a return to normal,” the 35-year-old Boston resident said Thursday. “Unfortunately, I’ve now learned it’s a few steps toward normal, not the zero-to-sixty that we seem to have undertaken.”
Dagenais credits being vaccinated with easing the worst of the flu-like symptoms in a couple of days. He has recovered.
Like many states, Massachusetts lifted all COVID-19 restrictions in late May, ahead of the traditional Memorial Day start of the summer season. Provincetown this week reinstated an indoor mask requirement for everyone.
Leaked internal documents on breakthrough infections and the delta variant suggest the CDC may be considering other changes in advice on how the nation fights the coronavirus, such as recommending masks for everyone and requiring vaccines for doctors and other health workers.
Read: Do I need to get tested for COVID-19 if I’m vaccinated?
The delta variant, first detected in India, causes infections that are more contagious than the common cold, flu, smallpox and the Ebola virus, and it is as infectious as chickenpox, according to the documents, which mentioned the Provincetown cases.
The documents were obtained by The Washington Post. As they note, COVID-19 vaccines are still highly effective against the delta variant at preventing serious illness and death.
The Provincetown outbreak and the documents highlight the enormous challenge the CDC faces in encouraging vaccination while acknowledging that breakthrough cases can occur and can be contagious but are uncommon.
The documents appear to be talking points for CDC staff to use with the public. One point advised: “Acknowledge the war has changed,” an apparent reference to deepening concern that many millions of vaccinated people could be a source of wide-ranging spread.
An agency spokeswoman declined to comment on the documents.
The White House on Friday defended its approach to rising virus cases and shifting public health guidelines, repeatedly deferred to the CDC while stressing the need for vaccinations.
“The most important takeaway is actually pretty simple. We need more people to get vaccinated,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Pressed about the changing guidance, Jean-Pierre repeatedly said, “We don’t make those types of decisions from here.”
People with breakthrough infections make up an increasing portion of hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths among COVID-19 patients, coinciding with the spread of the delta variant, according to the leaked documents.
Although experts generally agreed with the CDC’s revised indoor masking stance, some said the report on the Provincetown outbreak does not prove that vaccinated people are a significant source of new infections.
Read: Should vaccinated people mask up with COVID-19 cases rising?
“There’s scientific plausibility for the (CDC) recommendation. But it’s not derived from this study,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University public health researcher.
The CDC report is based on about 470 COVID-19 cases linked to the Provincetown festivities, which included densely packed indoor and outdoor holiday events at bars, restaurants, guest houses and rental homes.
Researchers ran tests on a portion of them and found roughly the same level of virus in those who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.
Three-quarters of the infections were in fully vaccinated individuals. Among those fully vaccinated, about 80% experienced symptoms with the most common being cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches and fever.
Dagenais said he started to feel ill the evening he returned home and initially chalked it up to long nights of partying in packed Provincetown nightclubs.
But as the days wore on and the fever, chills, muscle aches and fatigue set in, he knew it was something more.
In the report, the measure researchers used to assess how much virus an infected person is carrying does not indicate whether they are actually transmitting the virus to other people, said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
CDC officials say more data is coming. They are tracking breakthrough cases as part of much larger studies that involve following tens of thousands of vaccinated and unvaccinated people across the country over time.
Biden lands win, but virus surge threatens to derail agenda
Joe Biden wagered his campaign and now his presidency on the premise that government itself could still work, even at a time of fractious political division.
When the Senate voted this week, with bipartisan support, to begin work on an infrastructure bill that Biden supported, he seemed to have proof of the concept.
But the triumph was overshadowed by the surging delta variant of the coronavirus that has forced the restoration of mask guidelines, imperiled the nation’s economic recovery and threatened Biden’s central promise that he would lead the United States out of the pandemic.
READ: Biden to launch vaccine push for millions of federal workers
“Democrats have to put wins on the board going into 2022, and COVID clouds on the horizon make getting infrastructure and reconciliation done all that much more important,” said Robert Gibbs, former press secretary to President Barack Obama. He added that it’s “imperative for the Biden administration to communicate on this regularly and prepare for us for the ups and downs of this pandemic.”
The president’s first six months in office, for which he has received strong marks in most public polls, featured the full vaccination of more than 60% of Americans, the creation of more than 3 million new jobs and the passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. And in recent days, he has made progress along the massive, two-pronged infrastructure track that could pour $4.5 trillion into the United States’ economy while he also eyed future moves on voting rights and immigration.
But the virulence of the delta strain coupled with stubborn vaccine hesitancy among a significant portion of the American population have raised alarms about another punishing wave of the pandemic, a prospect that has rattled financial markets already nervously eyeing the possibility of long-term inflation.
And now Biden has entered a more challenging phase of his presidency as the virus has once more proven to be an intractable foe that now endangers the nation’s fragile return to normalcy.
“I know this is hard to hear. I know it’s frustrating. I know it’s exhausting to think we’re still in this fight,” Biden said to reporters at the White House on Thursday. “And I know we hoped this would be a simple, straightforward line, without problems or new challenges. But that isn’t real life.”
At the same time, the administration response has hardly been seamless. The administration has been criticized about its messaging on the virus, including confusing guidance this week as to when and why even vaccinated people would need to resume wearing masks indoors.
Biden himself had decreed July 4th to be the day that American declared its “independence” from the virus in front of 1,000 mask-free people at the White House. But just weeks later, staffers and journalists working at the White House were required to don face coverings again, regardless of their vaccination status.
And across the country, Americans who reveled in a return to normalcy are now being asked to wear masks again, stirring resentment in some of those who have followed health guidelines throughout the pandemic, including getting the shot. And the rollback calls into question whether the Biden administration had been too quick to relax guidelines and now risked losing some of the public’s confidence.
READ: Biden woos working class with new ‘buy American’ efforts
“They broke their word. They broke their own rules,” said Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “And now they’ve broken the trust of the American people.”
To be sure, though, the vaccine hesitancy has been most pronounced in areas strongly associated with support for former President Donald Trump, and some conservative media outlets have amplified the wariness.
Any president must be able to set aside the most organized, carefully laid plans to deal with a sudden crisis. Trump was overwhelmed by the pandemic, his best reelection argument — a strong economy — vanishing overnight while his administration’s erratic and sporadic response to the virus was judged harshly by voters.
Biden’s White House is more methodical and spent months carefully working on its infrastructure plan, which the president has prioritized for months even amid calls from some in his own party to focus on voting rights. The strategy was crafted to reach a bipartisan agreement by persuading at least 10 Republicans to lay down their partisan arms to reach a deal on so-called hard infrastructure — highways, broadband internet access, mass transit — while then proceeding on a larger, Democrats-only budget reconciliation vote for the rest of the plan.
Though the negotiations were left for dead more than once, Biden’s bet on reaching across the aisle paid off, as 17 GOP senators voted to advance the nearly $1 trillion bipartisan plan. It marked a significant win for the White House, even as numerous twists and turns surely lie ahead, including keeping all the Democrats in line for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan.
Biden had framed it as necessary to prove that the two parties could still work together as a demonstration that democracies could still deliver for their people.
“Our economy grew more in six months than most Wall Street forecasters expected for the entire year before we implemented our plan,” said Biden, who predicted that the infrastructure deal is “going to continue this momentum over the long term by making the most significant investment to rebuild America in nearly a century.”
Biden has pushed his broadly popular agenda directly into conservative strongholds — he has held about a half-dozen events in Republican-controlled districts in recent weeks — in an effort to paint Republicans as the party of no while hoping to rein in their turnout next fall when he tries to help preserve threadbare Democratic majorities in Congress.
With a wary eye on inflation, the president is betting that voters will reward him for his policies, as the White House argues it is Republicans who are running solely on identity politics rather than sincerely delivering for their voters.
But that strategy depends on the policy working — which is what makes the virus so dangerous.
READ: Russia and China vexing Biden
If another wave causes businesses or schools to close, not only would the public’s faith in Biden’s management of the virus surely waver, but the economic recovery would likely stagnate, jeopardizing the Democrats’ central arguments heading into next fall’s midterms.
“We’re not out of the woods,” Gibbs said.
Global Covid cases surpass 196 million
The overall number of global Covid cases has now surpassed the 196-million mark, as the world continues to battle against the devastating second wave of the pandemic.
According to the US-based Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total case count mounted to 196,521,631 while the death toll from the virus reached 4,196,442 on Friday morning.
So far, 3,993,341,219 vaccine doses have been administered across the globe.
Also read: Officials in Tokyo alarmed as virus cases hit record highs
The Delta variant of Covid-19 has now been detected in 124 territories worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) said recently.
The US, which is the world's worst-hit country in terms of both cases and deaths, has so far logged 34,745,035 cases. Besides, 612,105 people have lost their lives in the US to date, as per the JHU data.
Brazil registered 1,366 more Covid-19 fatalities in 24 hours, raising its national death toll to 554,626, the health ministry said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the total caseload rose to 19,839,369 in the South American country after 48,443 new cases were detected during the period.
Brazil currently has the world's second-highest pandemic death toll after the United States, and the third-largest caseload after the United States and India.
Also read: Should vaccinated people mask up with COVID-19 cases rising?
The third worst-hit country, India's Covid-19 case count and fatalities have risen to 31,571,295 and 423,244, respectively.
Situation in Bangladesh
Bangladesh recorded 239 more Covid deaths in 24 hours till Thursday morning, as the highly transmissible Delta variant continues to devastate the country.
Besides, 15,271 people came out Covid positive during the period after the test of 52,282 samples, according to a handout issued by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The fresh cases took the country’s Covid death tally to 20,255 and the caseload to 1,226,253, the DGHS said on Thursday.
The country has been seeing nearly 200 deaths a day for the past two weeks, shattering the records of daily cases and deaths almost every other day.
Also read: Bhutan fully vaccinates 90% of eligible adults within a week
Meanwhile, the daily test-positivity rate declined slightly to 29.21% from Wednesday's 30.12% while the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a 5% or below rate.
However, the case fatality rate remained unchanged at 1.65% during the period, said the DGHS.
The recovery rate too increased slightly to 85.64% from Tuesday’s 85.54% with the recovery of more 14,336 patients.
Dhaka, the worst hit division, recorded the highest 76 deaths, followed by 57 in Chattogram, 45 in Khulna, 14 each in Barishal and Sylhet, 13 in Rajshahi, 11 in Rangpur, and nine in Mymensingh divisions.
Of the deceased, 123 were men and 116 women.
Tokyo records record virus cases days after Olympics begin
Tokyo reported its highest number of new coronavirus infections on Tuesday, days after the Olympics began.
The Japanese capital reported 2,848 new COVID-19 cases, exceeding the earlier record of 2,520 cases on Jan. 7.
It brings Tokyo’s total to more than 200,000 since the pandemic began last year.
Tokyo is under its fourth state of emergency, which is to continue through the Olympics until just before the Paralympics start in late August.
Also read: 10 new Covid cases reported at Olympic village
Experts have warned that the more contagious delta variant could cause a surge during the Olympics, which started Friday.
Experts noted that cases among younger, unvaccinated people are rising sharply as Japan’s inoculation drive loses steam due to supply uncertainty. Many serious cases involve those in their 50s. They now dominate Tokyo’s nearly 3,000 hospitalized patients and are gradually filling up available beds. Authorities reportedly plan to ask medical institutions to increase their capacity to about 6,000.
Japan’s vaccination drive began late and slowly, but picked up dramatically in May for several weeks as the supply of imported vaccines stabilized and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government pushed to inoculate more people before the Olympics.
Also read: Tokyo Olympics begin with muted ceremony and empty stadium
The government says 25.5% of Japanese have been fully vaccinated, still way short of the level believed to have any meaningful impact on reducing the risk for the general population.
Still, Japan has kept its cases and deaths much lower than many other countries. Nationwide, it has reported 870,445 cases and 15,129 deaths as of Monday.
Suga’s government has been criticized for what some say is prioritizing the Olympics over the nation’s health. His public support ratings have fallen to around 30% in recent media surveys, and there is little festivity surrounding the Games.
Also read: Pandemic Olympics endured heat, and now a typhoon’s en route
South Africa returns to stricter lockdown, virus 'surging'
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Sunday that his country will return to stricter lockdown measures in the face of a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases that indicate the virus is “surging again” in Africa’s worst-affected nation.
Positive cases in South Africa in the past seven days were 31% higher than the week before, and 66% higher than the week before that, Ramaphosa said in a live TV address. He said some parts of the country, including the commercial hub Johannesburg and the capital city Pretoria, were now in “a third wave.”
“We do not yet know how severe this wave will be or for how long it will last,” Ramaphosa said.
In response, Ramaphosa said that from Monday the nighttime curfew would be extended by an hour to start at 11 p.m. until 4 a.m. A maximum of 100 people would be allowed at indoor social gatherings and no more than 250 at an outdoors gathering. The number of people attending funerals will be limited to 100 people and after-funeral gatherings were banned completely, Ramaphosa said. Nonessential businesses must close by 10 p.m.
“We have tended to become complacent,” Ramaphosa said, warning virus infections were “surging again” at a time when the country moves into its winter months and people were more likely to gather together indoors, likely further increasing infections.
South Africa’s decision to go back to a stricter lockdown reinforces — as the crisis in India has already done so starkly — how the global pandemic is far from over.
READ: South African variant found in 81% Covid-19 samples since third week of March
“We have seen in other countries the tragic consequences of leaving the virus to spread unchecked,” Ramaphosa said. “We cannot let our guard down.”
South Africa has more than 1.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 56,000 deaths, more than 30% of the cases and 40% of the deaths recorded by all of Africa’s 54 countries, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. South Africa recorded 4,515 new cases over the past 24 hours and Ramaphosa said the “positivity rate” among tests conducted was now “a cause for concern.”
South Africa had been under lockdown level one, the lowest of its five levels, but was now reverting to an “adjusted level two,” Ramaphosa announced. Authorities did stop short of reimposing the strict measures like limits on people’s movements during the day and a ban on the sales of alcohol and tobacco products that were in place at times last year.
South Africa has seen two previous surges in infections, the first in the middle of last year and a second, much worse wave in December and January, when the emergence of a variant pushed infections and deaths to higher levels than the first surge. The virus was currently following “the same trajectory” as those waves, Ramaphosa said.
Experts have warned that this wave, arriving with the Southern Hemisphere winter, might be even worse.
The surge in cases also cast more attention on South Africa’s lagging vaccine rollout. Only around 1.5% of the country’s 60 million people have received a vaccine. Health workers were the No. 1 priority but less than 500,000 of the 1.2 million health workers have been vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson one-dose shot. South Africa only began vaccinating its elderly citizens two weeks ago. In total, 963,000 South Africans had received a vaccine by Sunday, the government said, although half of those have only received the first of two required doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
READ: South Africa scraps AstraZeneca vaccine, will give J&J jabs
South Africa has “secured” more than 50 million vaccines, Ramaphosa said, but currently has only 1.3 million in the country. More Pfizer-BioNTech doses are expected to arrive next week, and weekly after that, he said. South Africa hopes to vaccinate around 40 million people by the end of the year, a target that looks increasingly unlikely.
In India’s northeast there’s fear of a virus surge to come
With experts saying the coronavirus is likely spreading in India’s northeastern state of Assam faster than anywhere else in the country, authorities were preparing Monday for a surge in infections by converting a massive stadium and a university into hospitals.
Cases in Assam started ticking upward a month ago and the official seven-day weekly average in the state on May 9 stood at more than 4,700 cases. But a model run by the University of Michigan — which predicts the current spread of cases before they are actually detected — says infections in Assam are likely occurring as fast as any other place in the country.
Add to that recent elections in the state — and the huge political rallies that accompanied them — and experts fear a uncontrolled surge is on the horizon.
Worryingly, along with cities in India’s northeastern frontier — which is closer to Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan than it is New Delhi — cases have also started to spike in some remote Himalayan villages in the region.
Nationwide, India’s Health Ministry reported 360,000 new cases in the past 24 hours Monday, with more than 3,700 deaths. Since the pandemic began, India has seen more than 22.6 million infections and more than 246,000 deaths —- both, experts say, almost certainly undercounts.
Officials in Assam were racing to prepare for a virus surge because similar onslaughts in infections have overwhelmed hospitals in much richer Indian states.
“We are adding 1,000 beds a week to prepare ourselves in the event of cases spiraling,” said Dr Lakshmanan S, the director of the National Health Mission in Assam.
The state’s largest government-run hospital, the Guwahati Medical College Hospital has more than doubled its number of intensive care beds to 220 and health officials are building another 200 in the hospital’s parking lot.
A football and cricket stadium is being converted into a hospital for COVID-19 patients with 430 beds. The private Royal Global University in the state capital, Gauhati, has been converted into a hospital with 1,000 beds.
The state is sending doctors, paramedics and medicine to these facilities and the university said it would provide books and newspapers for patients to read.
“This is the least we thought we could do in this time of huge crisis for our country,” said Dr AK Pansari, the university chairman.
There are 2,100 beds reserved in government centers for COVID-19 patients in Gauhati, with hundreds more planned. That’s in addition to the existing 750 beds for patients at private hospitals in the state.
Even as infections have increased, the rates of vaccination have fallen in Assam and the other states in the region since India expanded its coverage to include all adults on May 1.
Adding to concerns is confirmation the virus has started spreading into more remote Himalayan villages with poor health infrastructure. These areas are home to indigenous tribes, whose are already face some of the lowest access to health care in the nation.
The region had largely been untouched by the virus earlier and many people behaved like COVID-19 didn’t exist. But it now appears the virus was spreading in even remote villages without people knowing until it was too late.
The lack of awareness about the virus, lack or resources and the remoteness is complicating contact tracing in such areas, said Dr. Mite Linggi, the medical superintendent at the district hospital at Roing in Arunachal Pradesh state.
Despite the limited medical infrastructure and even more limited medical supplies, Linggi said what they really feared were power cuts.
“Power is crucial for running oxygen supply. We have patients gasping for air when the power comes and goes out,” he said.
Virus variants, vaccine inequity responsible for rising Covid caseload: WHO
Noting that Covid-19 cases globally are on track to rise for a fourth week in a row, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said that both virus variants and vaccine inequity are responsible for the spike.
Americans largely back Biden's virus response
Joe Biden is enjoying an early presidential honeymoon, with 60% of Americans approving of his job performance thus far and even more backing his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
With virus aid in sight, Democrats debate filibuster changes
With President Joe Biden on the verge of his first big legislative victory, a key moderate Democrat said Sunday he's open to changing Senate rules that could allow for more party-line votes to push through other parts of the White House’s agenda such as voting rights.