Category Archives: Corona Virus

Whether heading for a scorching Mallorca beach or dancing beneath neon flags at a music festival, millions of people will be hoping for a Covid-free summer. But it isnt working out like that. With infections soaring once more, how can people make sure they stay safe and keep holiday plans on track?

Crowded spaces are ideal for spreading infection, and the dominant Omicron strains BA.4 and BA.5 are reported to evade antibody immunity effectively and are spreading about a third faster than previous variants. So you may feel dismayed at having to squeeze into your seat on the plane next to a stranger who keeps clearing their throat.

But planes have an unfair reputation as reservoirs of infection, experts say, and the actual risk is lower than in many indoor environments. For trains and other transport it depends on how busy they are and whether they have modern ventilation systems. Definitely consider wearing a mask in crowded areas, on public transport, and in the airport where theres a crowd, said Prof Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. On the plane itself, ventilation is excellent so the risk is actually lower in your seat.

Masks may feel like a thing of the past to some in the UK, but this isnt the case in all countries, so check the rules before you set off. Italy, for instance, has retained a requirement to wear an FFP2 mask on public transport, with the exception of planes. Some airlines have also maintained a mandate.

You may also be motivated by wanting to be a responsible citizen, or by self-preservation. In this case, an FFP2 mask, which filters out potentially infectious particles in the air, is better than a cloth or disposable paper mask. If youre concerned, Id strongly advise a mask, said Dr Stephen Griffin, an associate professor at the University of Leeds. Its been turned into this token of freedom but its sensible and not much of a hassle. Its a no-brainer. Why spoil your holiday feeling rubbish?

This summer festivals are back, from Primavera in Spain to Tomorrowland, the worlds largest dance music festival, in the Belgium town of Boom. Do these huge gatherings lead to outbreaks? Anecdotally a lot of people reported testing positive for Covid after Glastonbury, but then 200,000 people attended and about one in 30 people in England had Covid last week. Its hard to pinpoint whether events like this make much difference to overall numbers at this stage.

If youre trying to assess your own risk, common sense applies: indoor, crowded places make transmission more likely. This scenario may be relevant at a festival or in a nightclub, but equally to highbrow holiday pursuits such as an afternoon in a stuffy museum or crowded art gallery, or exploring the vaults of a medieval church.

The one time Ive been abroad recently was a microbiology conference in Northern Ireland, where I got Covid, said Griffin. Id put all the provisions in place for the conference to be Covid safe, but came back with Covid. Im pretty sure I caught it in a restaurant.

Outdoor spaces are generally low risk and if anything people tend to have fewer social contacts while on holiday. Often people are with their families and theyre not usually making huge numbers of contacts outside their household, being off work and off school, said Prof John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Actually being on holiday is not particularly high risk. Theres exceptions going clubbing and in bars but I dont want to stop people from having fun.

Again, check the rules for your destination. Many places in Europe no longer require you to arrive at the check-in anxiously clutching a bundle of paperwork, but testing requirements have not evaporated across the board. UK travellers to France need to show a vaccine certificate or show a negative result from a PCR test taken within 72 hours or an antigen test taken within 48 hours pre-departure. Spain and Portugal have similar requirements. Outside Europe there is a spectrum of strictness.

Beyond the rules, should travellers feel a moral duty to take a test? Edmunds says he does not want to tell people what to do, but notes that a well-established rule of medical screening is that theres no point in taking a test if youre not going to act on a positive result.

If someone tests themselves, finds out that theyre positive and goes anyway, whats the point of that? he said. Ideally if youre positive you shouldnt be getting on an aeroplane or public transport, you are putting other people at risk.

At a time when many are struggling financially, cancelling a flight is painful. But some airlines still have specific refund rules if a flight has to be changed due to Covid and offer more flexibility about changing flights than pre-pandemic.

In some places, including the US, vaccination is an absolute requirement. For other destinations, no vaccine means taking tests. For anyone eligible for a booster or children who havent had their first dose, it may be a particularly good time to get up to date. We know that booster doses give that top-up of protection against severe disease, but for a couple of months the dose also gives relatively good protection against infection, said Cowling. Its the time to get the jab if youre due for one.

Some countries, such as the UK, now have minimal legal isolation requirements. But France and Italy, for instance, still mandate seven days isolation after a positive test. At the extreme end, some countries require hotel or hospital-based quarantine. One of my PhD students ended up spending 18 days in an isolation room in hospital in Shanghai while travelling to visit family, said Cowling. It could be a different kind of holiday from what youd planned if you spend it in an isolation room.

Coronavirus cases have increased steeply in recent weeks, with the latest figures showing about 2.3m across the UK last week. But at this stage, with high overall prevalence and many countries scaling back surveillance, its hard to pinpoint with much certainty which countries are going to be the hotspots two months from now. Its difficult enough to predict whats going to happen in the UK, and weve got better data than everywhere else, said Edmunds. I dont think its possible to do that with any accuracy.

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Coronavirus and summer travel: how to stay safe on holiday - The Guardian

How likely is it for people to catch COVID from someone who is asymptomatic? Its not impossible and may be more common than people realize, health experts say.

With coronavirus cases currently stuck at a high level across California as fast-spreading offshoots of the omicron variant crowd out their competitors, that means the chances of getting COVID from an asymptomatic person are heightened.

An estimated 5%, or about 1 in 20, asymptomatic patients coming to UCSF for procedures unrelated to COVID are testing positive for the virus, said Dr. Bob Wachter, one of the universitys leading infectious disease experts.

UCSF asks patients who show symptoms of COVID to postpone their visits. Patients are routinely screened upon arrival, meaning that those who test positive are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.

Though its not a perfect sample pre-op patients are more likely to be older, have an illness and be vaccinated because theyre seeking other medical care its a convenient way to measure how many people in the community may be infected and go about their day-to-day lives, Wachter said.

Its been a very useful measure of something that otherwise is very hard to get your arms around, which is the probability that somebody standing next to you in line at a Safeway in the Bay Area would test positive for COVID if I could test them now, he said.

The math is sobering: At the current 5.5% rate of asymptomatic test positivity, In a group of 50 people, I think its a 95% chance that at least one person will be positive, Wachter said. On an airplane of 150 people, theres over 99% chance theres somebody on the plane who has it.

Asymptomatic infections are not uncommon. Many people who routinely test themselves for COVID have received positive test results, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

But guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not advise vaccinated people who have been exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine unless they develop symptoms.

So although many people may have come in close contact with someone diagnosed with the coronavirus, they may not take the same stringent measures for mitigating transmission that they would have two years ago.

We can get a sense there are probably more people asymptomatically infected with SARS-CoV-2 with omicron and its subvariants than there were with delta, said Dr. John Swartzberg, a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert.

A 2021 study in the JAMA Network Open medical journal found that as many as 60% of COVID infections were transmitted by an asymptomatic person.

From the public health standpoint, the public needs to understand you can feel perfectly well and be infected and transmit this virus, Swartzberg said.

Obviously, infected people who show signs of sickness may generate more aerosols by sneezing or coughing. But while asymptomatic people shed less virus, they can still spread the virus without knowing theyve got it.

Fortunately, someone who is vaccinated has less viral load in nasal and throat secretions and vaccination rates for most Bay Area counties are among the highest in the nation, according to state and federal data.

But its still possible to have high viral load without showing signs of sickness, said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases expert at Stanford.

So what is responsible for driving the current surge? The recent variants of the coronavirus are many times more infectious than the original one back in 2020 and even more contagious than the omicron version last winter. Combine that with a relaxation of public health mandates on local, state and federal levels, and the opportunities to spread the virus, whether by symptomatic or asymptomatic people, are many times higher.

People who have very mild symptoms, such as a cough or sniffles, and who dont know that they have COVID may also be going out under the assumption that they have a cold or allergies, Wachter said.

How can people protect themselves? The high asymptomatic test rate combined with the plateau in infections in recent weeks has public health experts recommending outdoor dining, voluntary indoor masking and opting for a road trip versus a flight.

I prefer not to take those risks, Wachter said.

Gwendolyn Wu (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com

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What are the odds you'll get COVID from someone who's asymptomatic? Here's how to measure the risk now - San Francisco Chronicle

New SARS-CoV-2 variants are expected since the virus is continually evolving. The Alpha variant first appeared in early 2021, and the Delta variant emerged later that summer. The Omicron variant, which spread quickly throughout the nation in late 2021 and early 2022, is now the most common variation circulating in the US today.

New research shows that people with weakened immune systems are more likely to get chronic infections and produce virus variants that bear multiple antibody-resistant mutations. However, there is good news. While many distinct variations develop in immunocompromised individuals, their likelihood of spreading is small.

Co-author Adi Stern, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Credit: Tel Aviv University

According to recent research from Tel Aviv University, immunosuppressed chronic COVID-19 patients are thought to be the source of several SARS-CoV-2 variants. The researchers hypothesize that a compromised immune reaction, particularly in the lower airways of these chronic patients, may delay complete recovery from the virus and cause the virus to evolve often during the course of prolonged infection. In other words, the researchers explain that the viruss unrestricted survival and reproduction in the body of the immunosuppressed patient result in the emergence of numerous variants.

Furthermore, the variations reported in chronically sick COVID-19 patients had many of the same mutations in their development as those found in variants of concern for severe illness, notably those linked with evading disease-killing antibodies. The new findings show that, although rapidly-spreading variations are rare among the numerous strains harbored by immunocompromised people, the likelihood increases and they do arise when global infection rates boom.

The study was led by Prof. Adi Stern and Ph.D. student Sheri Harari of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Dr. Yael Paran and Dr. Suzy Meijer of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov). It was published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine on June 20th, 2022.

Prof. Stern explains that since the outbreak of COVID-19, the rate at which the virus evolves has been somewhat puzzling. During the first year of the pandemic, a relatively slow but constant rate of mutations was observed. However, since the end of 2020, the world has witnessed the emergence of variants that are characterized by a large number of mutations, far exceeding the rate observed during the first year.

Various scientific hypotheses about the link between chronic COVID-19 patients and the rate of the accumulation of mutations have surfaced, but nothing definitive has been proven yet. In this new study, Prof. Stern and the team shed light on some pieces of this complex puzzle and try to answer the question of how variants are formed.

Prof. Stern explains: The coronavirus is characterized by the fact that in every population, there are people who become chronically infected. In the case of these patients, the virus remains in their body for a lengthy period of time, and they are at high risk for recurrent infection. In all of the cases observed so far, these were immunocompromised patients part of their immune system is damaged and unable to function. In biological evolutionary terms, these patients constitute an incubator for viruses and mutations the virus persists in their body for a long time and succeeds in adapting to the immune system, by accumulating various mutations.

The study involved an examination of chronic COVID-19 patients at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital). According to Prof. Stern, the results reveal a complex picture; on the one hand, no direct connection was found between anti-COVID-19 drug treatment and the development of variants. On the other hand, the researchers discovered that it is likely the weakened immune system of immunocompromised patients that creates pressure for the virus to mutate.

In fact, the researchers found that there were chronic patients who showed a pattern of apparent recovery, followed by recurring viral infection. In all of these patients, a mutated form of the virus emerged, suggesting that recovery had not been achieved; this is partially reminiscent of the modus operandi of HIV following inadequate drug treatment.

Upon closer examination of some patients, the researchers found that when such a pattern of apparent recovery is observed (based on negative nasopharyngeal swabs), the virus continues to thrive in the lungs of the patients. The researchers, therefore, suggest that the virus accumulates mutations in the lungs, and then traverses back to the upper respiratory tract.

Prof. Stern concludes: The complexity of coronavirus evolution is still being revealed, and this poses many challenges to the scientific community. I believe that our research has succeeded in peeling back a missing layer of the big picture, and has opened the door for further research efforts to discover the origins of the various variants. This study highlights the importance of protecting immunocompromised individuals, who are at high risk for the virus, yet may also be an incubator for the formation of the next variant, posing a risk to all of us.

Reference: Drivers of adaptive evolution during chronic SARS-CoV-2 infections by Sheri Harari, Maayan Tahor, Natalie Rutsinsky, Suzy Meijer, Danielle Miller, Oryan Henig, Ora Halutz, Katia Levytskyi, Ronen Ben-Ami, Amos Adler, Yael Paran, and Adi Stern, 20 June 2022, Nature Medicine.DOI: 10.1038/s41591-022-01882-4

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What Is the Origin of COVID-19 Variants Like Omicron? - SciTechDaily

The illness was mysterious. A 25-year-old graduate student had been hospitalized with a high fever, muscle and joint pain, a stiff neck, fatigue, sores in her throat, and a metallic taste in her mouth. She soon developed an angry rash. To make the diagnosis, her doctors had an important data point to consider: Days earlier, the woman had returned to the United States from a field expedition in South Sudan and Uganda, where she had been capturing and collecting the blood and tissue of bats and rodents. That information proved critical and is newly relevant given concerns that the pandemic may have come from a research accident. Three days after she was admitted to the hospital in 2012, tests determined that the student was infected with a novel virus that infects a type of fruit bat that lives in the rural areas of Uganda.

The graduate student recovered and left the hospital two weeks later. But the incident, which was written up in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2014, proved scientifically important. Not only did it allow for the identification of the Sosuga virus a paramyxovirus named for Southern Sudan and Uganda and the knowledge that the bat virus can infect and sicken people, the womans infection also pointed to the dangers posed by the kind of research she was doing: trapping, manipulating, and dissecting animals suspected of being infected with novel disease-causing viruses.

Biosafety experts have long worried over the possibility that scientists seeking dangerous viruses in the wild could inadvertently become infected in the course of either capturing or coming into contact with the saliva, urine, or feces of the animals. The case of the Sosuga virus shows that those concerns are well founded.

Virus hunter Michael Callahan, an infectious disease doctor who has worked for federal agencies on global disease outbreak and the tracking of wildlife pathogens, has vividly described the high risks faced by field researchers. Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife, he wrote in Politico in 2021. The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.

With more than 6 million people now dead from Covid-19, the catastrophic potential of a researcher becoming infected with a wildlife pathogen has become inescapable. While the origins of the current pandemic are stillunclear, it remainspossible that virus hunting could have been the cause. Rocco Casagrande, a biochemist whowas hired bythe National Institutes of Healths Office of Science Policy to assess the risks of gain-of-function research, thinks anatural spillover of the virus from animals to people, a lab accident, or what he calls a prospecting based accident are equally likely potential causes of the initial outbreak.He imagined the prospecting scenarioas theresearchers in Wuhan looking for bat viruses found one and got infected outside of the lab.

Even as the very real chance remains that the search for new viruses led to this cataclysmic event, scientists hoping to prevent viral outbreaks continue toseek out newbat coronaviruses and other potential pandemic pathogens around the world.

The search for pathogens that infect animals is driven by the desire to prevent and prepare for their possible transmission to people. But that work, which spans the globe and is funded in large part by the U.S. government, can sometimes result in human infection exactly the outcome it is meant to prevent.

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Virus hunting or wildlife disease ecology, as DeeAnn Reeder prefers to call it is a field that has come under increasing scrutiny during the Covid pandemic. For Reeder, a professor of biology at Bucknell College who led the 2012 expedition on which the graduate student was infected, one of the central purposes of her research in Africa on bats immune responses to viruses is to understand how humans might react to the same infectious agents, knowledge she says can protect us if the pathogens jump from animals to humans. If you want to understand how to survive a coronavirus, or if you want to understand how to survive a filovirus Ebola fits within that context you need to ask the bats because they know how to do it, said Reeder.

Reeder, who put up her first bat net in South Sudan in 2008, continues to do wildlife research in Uganda. No one has previously reportedher connection to the work. Ive never been contacted by a reporter on that particular story, Reeder said, after being asked whether the Sosuga virus infection occurred during research on one of her projects. Ive always been surprised about that. Reeder would not confirm the identity of the researcher on her project who was sickened, citing privacy concerns.

The Sosuga case shows thatconcerns about viral transmission from wild animals to researchersare not just theoretical. It is still unclear exactly how the infection occurred. While the graduate student only occasionally used protective gear when working with animal specimens, when she visited the bat caves she wore a paper Tyvek suit thats become the hallmark of virus hunters, gum boots, bite-resistant gloves, and even an air-powered respirator known as a PAPR that looks like an astronauts helmet. The researcher did not report being bitten or scratched by any of the animals she encountered.

Maybe outside the cave before they put the respirators on, she leaned against a rock that had been peed on, because we know that it could be in the kidneys of this particular bat species, said Reeder. But thats just conjecture, which is the scary part.

CDC scientists approach Bat Cave in Queen Elizabeth National Park on Aug. 25, 2018, in Uganda.

Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Reeder carries a card in her wallet she hopes medical professionals will read should she herself wind up in the emergency room with a mysterious infectious disease someday. It says, Attention medical personnel: I study wildlife disease. Heres all the things you should test me for should I present to you in the emergency room, she explained.

Reeder describes herself and other researchers in her field as a little bit like cowboys and cowgirls we go to a foreign place and we catch exotic things. Yet shes grown increasingly cautious during her years in the field. When I first started this work, nobody was wearing PPE. It just wasnt a thing, she said. I thought we were good if I didnt have my coffee cup on the same table when I was doing dissections.

Despite her growing concern about biosafety, Reeder has still had a few worrisome interactions with bats herself. I had one bite me. That big canine tooth went right into my knuckle, and for like two years, whenever it was cold, my knuckle would hurt, she recently recalled. And in 2017, Reeder was stuck with a needle that had just come out of a bat that she knew could have carried the deadly Ebola virus.

I was like, wow, OK. So I make notes in my notebook, started counting 21 days, which is the incubation period for Ebola, said Reeder. Im mostly kind of flippant about that. But I can tell you I knew when that 21 days was up.

Yet even after these experiences, Reeder said there are rare times when she still eschews personal protective equipment: If Ive got a live bat, I cant go into a village and show up in my space suit.

Most interactions with bats dont cause disease. But the risk of viral infections remains and many professional scientists and hobbyists dont even take the basic precautions to protect themselves from it, according to a study published in 2021 in Biodiversity Data. The authors, who include Reeder, analyzed 759 of the more than 43,000 photos of people holding bats taken that were uploaded since the 1980s to iNaturalist, a popular biodiversity tracking app. While the percentage of the apps users who wore gloves when they held bats has increased over time, even in 2021, less than half of the people holding bats, both dead and live, were wearing gloves.

This lack of adherence to even minimal biosafety practices may jeopardize both the safety of the bat and the handler, the authors concluded.

Reeder said those who continue to openly flout the recommendations to wear protective gear are increasingly met with disapproval within her scientific community. If somebody is at a conference and they show pictures of themselves in the field not wearing a face mask, and not wearing gloves, even latex gloves, theres a little bit of criticism, she said. A sort of public shaming.

As a recent report from the World Health Organization makes clear, there is still no definitive proof of how Covid-19 originated. And an infection that occurred during the collection of dangerous new coronaviruses frombats is among the possible explanations forthe initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in 2019. There is no question that the National Institutes of Health, which indirectly funded bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, is still struggling to fully understand the biosafety precautions taken around that research. Yet the U.S. government continues tosupport similar research around the world, with grants to numerous organizations including EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH grantee that worked with the Wuhan institute.

EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group based in New York, received a $3.1 million grant in 2014 from the NIH, some of which was spent on the collection of novel bat coronaviruses in rural China. Specifically, the organization awarded a subgrant of some $750,00 to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April 2020, at the request of President Donald Trump, the NIH suspended that grant. But four months later, the NIH awarded EcoHealth Alliance another, larger grant. (The Intercept obtained the grant documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the NIH.)

Like the first grant, the second grant titled Understanding the Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia pays for the collection of what it calls high zoonotic potential viruses from remote locations in Southeast Asia. It also funds experiments involving the infection of humanized mice with hybrid viruses created from the new viruses, which are designed to gauge the threat those viruses pose to humans. The grant is funded through 2025.

Other branches of the U.S. government also continue to fund the collection and study of novel viruses that could infect humans, including DEEP VZN, a $125 million project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program, which is jointly funded by NIH, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation.

Everybody has been just kind of winging it.

Despite concerns about biosafety lapses in U.S.-funded research in Wuhan and a lack of oversight from both NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, thereareno agreed-upon standards for ensuring the safety of ongoing research.

There is currently very little biosafety guidance specifically for this kind of biological fieldwork, Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert who works at Kings College London, wrote in an email to The Intercept. This is a major gap in biorisk management that urgently needs to be addresses both nationally and internationally, not least because this kind of fieldwork is on the rise.

During the pandemic, David Gillum, assistant vice president for environmental health and safety at Arizona State University, began meeting with a small group of experts over Zoom to discuss biosafety practicesfor researchers working with bats in the wild. Its guidance on what to wear as personal protective equipment, what vaccinations should you have before you go to a certain area, what medications should you bring, said Gillum.The groups recommendations are expected to published soon in the journalApplied Biosafety. Up until now, he said, Everybody has been just kind of winging it.

While Gillum and other biosafety experts say they hope national and international field work guidelines will ultimately be put in place, they expect the process to take years.

In the absence ofsuch clear recommendations and with institutions coming up with their own varied approaches to biosafety a range of researchersfacethe riskof infection from pathogens in wildlife, according to Casagrande,the biochemist. And that includes people specifically trying to find viruses but also people who arent, he said. Plenty of biologists who work with wildlifealso dont take precautions. And many times they get infected by things.

Researchers from the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Diseases Health Science Center take a saliva swab from a bat caught at Khao Chong Pran Cave, inside a makeshift lab set up nearby during a catch and release program in Photharam, Thailand, on Dec. 11, 2020.

Photo: Andre Malerba/Bloomberg via Getty Images

While the pandemic has sparked a debate about the safety of studying dangerous viruses, most scientists agree on the need for at least some viral surveillance. To Reeder, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has made the value of her work only clearer. Our understanding of the extraordinary diversity of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats in Southeast Asia is really critical for our pandemic preparedness, for our ability to predict whats going to bind to human receptors, she said. We need to understand whats there.

As she sees it, that benefit is worth whatever risk it entails. And, in the case of the graduate student infected with the Sosuga virus, the cost wasnt great. The virus didnt kill her and, critically, it didnt spread from her to other people. Looking ahead, Reeder said, improved adherence to protective gear should protect against future viral jumps from animals to researchers.

I think you just do your best, right? said Reeder. You try to look for those gaps. You put your gloves on, then you put your Tyvek suit on over those, and then you take Gorilla tape, and you wrap your wrist with Gorilla tape to make sure that you dont have a gap as you move your arms, she said, noting that colleagues in the field tend to help one another. You can call each other out on stuff. You know, Hey, it looks like your mask has slipped. But its never perfect, and this case just sort of illustrates that for us.

The case of the woman who was infected working with bats in Uganda also taught Reeder how, at least that time, luck was on her side: This could have been really, really ugly.

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Infection of Wildlife Biologist Highlights Risks of Virus Hunting - The Intercept

Continuing their rapid march across the United States, the Omicron subvariants known as BA.4 and BA.5 have together become dominant among new coronavirus cases, according to new estimates on Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of the week ending Saturday, BA.4 made up 15.7 percent of new cases, and BA.5 was 36.6 percent, accounting for about 52 percent of new cases in the United States, numbers that experts said should rise in the weeks to come.

The statistics, released Tuesday morning, are based on modeling and can be revised as more data comes in, which happened in late December, when the agencys estimates missed the mark.

In the less than six months since BA.4 and BA.5 were first detected in South Africa, the two subvariants appeared in the United States to be overtaking two earlier Omicron subvariants, including BA.2, which was the prevailing version for a time earlier this spring. The other, BA.2.12.1, was dominant alone as of the week ending June 18, according to C.D.C. estimates. Over the winter, the form of Omicron that first emerged in the United States sent case counts soaring. Before that, the Delta variant had been dominant in the United States since early summer.

BA.4 and BA.5 exhibit the qualities of escape artists, able to elude some of the antibodies produced after coronavirus vaccinations and infections, including infections caused by some earlier versions of Omicron. That may explain why these subvariants have spread even faster than others in the Omicron family. But there is not yet much evidence that they cause more severe disease.

The BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants have been detected throughout the world, and they fueled a surge of cases in South Africa in the spring, despite widespread pre-existing immunity to the virus. The wave was not as high as South Africas earlier waves, and deaths did not rise as sharply. Just last week, South Africa repealed its rules that required masks in indoor public spaces.

In recent weeks, more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported each day on average in the United States, according to a New York Times database, a figure that captures only a portion of the true number. Many infections go uncounted in official reports. Some scientists estimate that the current wave of cases is the second-largest of the pandemic.

As of Monday, hospitalizations in the United States were up 6 percent in the last two weeks, to an average of more than 31,000 each day, according to federal data. New deaths have stayed below 400 per day on average, data from state and local health agencies show. That is a fraction of the thousands seen daily during the winter Omicron peak.

But in my mind, 250 deaths a day is still too many, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said last week in Aspen, Colo. The deaths that were seeing are generally among people who are either elderly, frail, many comorbidities, whove had a lot of vaccine shots or people who are unvaccinated.

Many Americans with risk factors have said that they feel ignored and abandoned as their governments and neighbors have sought a return to normal.

As always, the spread of the virus is a regional affair. In the Northeast and Midwest, known cases have been declining for weeks, while in the South and West, cases are increasing.

Across the nation, public health rules continue to be lifted, including the ending on Saturday of an indoor mask mandate for Alameda County, the San Francisco Bay Areas second-most populous county. In New York City, Broadway theaters save for one are retiring their mask requirements beginning Friday. Even the longstanding requirement to test for the coronavirus before flying to the United States from abroad was dropped this month.

While the recent availability of vaccines for children ages 6 months to 5 years was a welcome development for many parents and day care centers, experts do not expect the availability of pediatric doses to change the overall trajectory of the pandemic in the United States.

The natural waning of vaccine protection against infection over time, along with the immune evasiveness of BA.4 and BA.5, might explain why these subvariants have been able to spread quickly. It has also lent urgency to the development of Omicron-targeted boosters. While vaccine manufacturers have raced to develop these, they are based on other versions of Omicron, and it was not yet clear how well they could protect against infection with BA.4 and BA.5.

Preliminary evidence from laboratory research suggests that unvaccinated people who were infected with the version of Omicron, known as BA.1, might be easily reinfected by BA.4 or BA.5. Vaccinated people are likely to fare somewhat better, the study suggests.

But as the virus evolves, no one can tell whether retooled vaccines could become outdated by the time they become available.

What we dont know is whats going to happen with a new vaccine in the fall, Dr. Walensky said while in Aspen. I do think were going to need more vaccines.

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The Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have together become dominant in the U.S., the C.D.C. estimates. - The New York Times

A study suggests people who catch covid-19 at least twice have double the risk of dying from any cause and are three times as likely to be hospitalised in the next six months, compared with people who test positive just once

By Michael Le Page

A person waits at a drive-in covid-19 PCR test site in Miami, Florida, in May

Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

You have been vaccinated and recently had covid-19, so you dont have to worry about catching it again, right? Wrong. A large study suggests that every time a person is reinfected, they have additional health risks, both during their immediate illness and in the months afterwards.

Every reinfection is like rolling the dice again, says Ziyad Al-Aly at VA St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. A second infection is still bad for you.

These findings

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Covid-19: What are the risks of catching the virus multiple times? - New Scientist

AUSTIN (KXAN) COVID-19 metrics, including hospitalizations, are starting to trend upward again in Austin-Travis County. The local health authority attributed the uptick to the BA.4 and BA.5 offshoots of the omicron variant in a Travis County commissioners court meeting Tuesday.

Those mutations are starting to show up in both wastewater and in variant surveillance locally, according to the health authoritys report. They could be more severe than previous mutations.

With each mutation, it [COVID-19} is becoming adept at evading our immune systems defenses and that is why these two particular variants are starting to become more predominant. Dr. Desmar Walkes said.

As of Monday, Walkes reported there are nearly 100 people in area hospitals with COVID-19, 18 of those people are in intensive care units. Roughly half of the people hospitalized are there primarily for COVID-19.

More people that are requiring oxygen and starting to require life support, Walkes said, noting that research done on BA.4 and BA.5 shows the mutations may impact lung tissue more than previous mutations. She also said for people who had COVID-19 during the winter omicron surge, reinfection with BA.4 and BA.5 could be more severe.

With each subsequent infection, there is an increase in the impact, Walkes said. Reinfection is not benign.

Travis County is presently in the medium level of risk based on the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions risk tracker. Under that level, APH is recommending people at high risk, and people who live with someone who is high risk, wear a mask in public.

For people who had COVID-19 during the original omicron surge, immunity is likely waning. The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium talked about that when case numbers started to trend upwards earlier this month.

Its been four or five months after the first omicron wave, where we had so many infections, and so we expect that there will be many people losing immunity at a rapid speed, said Anass Bouchnita, a postdoctoral fellow with the consortium.

People who previously had COVID-19 may also be at greater risk of getting seriously sick if they do catch COVID-19 again, Walkes explained. Staying up-to-date on vaccinations are still the best protection against the virus, she said.

We are still seeing good coverage and protection that is offered to people who are vaccinated from severe illness, hospitalization and death. We are still recommending vaccinations and boosters for those who are eligible, Walkes said.

Continued here:

COVID-19 mutations spreading in Austin-Travis County, reinfections may be more severe - KXAN.com

Dr. Gregory Poland, an infectious disease physician at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS the original vaccines against the COVID-19 virus did a terrific job keeping people out of the hospital and preventing death, but he said moving forward better vaccines need to be developed.

The current vaccines offer only mild benefit, in terms of infection, against those new variants, said Poland. So, the idea is, and both Moderna and Pfizer both plan no doing this, to devise vaccines that cover the Omicron variant.

Poland told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS the goal is to possibly have an updated COVID vaccine by early fall by using part of the original vaccine and the vaccine that was used during the Omicron surge.

But, Poland said the ultimate goal is to develop a so-called Pan-Corona Vaccine which would offer better protection against all of the variants that have emerged with the virus.

The idea that we, and others are working on, is a Pan-Corona virus vaccine. Or, if you will, a universal Corona virus vaccine, said Poland. Thats still a ways off, but thats the goal.

Dr. Peter Bornstein, with St. Paul Infectious Disease Associates, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS he agrees with the push by the Food and Drug Administration to come up with a more effective vaccine.

We definitely need better vaccines. How much the virus itself will keep mutating, and have immunological escape from the vaccines, we just dont know yet, said Bornstein.

The FDA met Tuesday to discuss the future of new COVID vaccines, but did not yet offer any recommendations.

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'Better vaccines' needed to cover COVID variants, infectious disease experts say - KSTP

The Omicron BA.2.12.1 subvariant is now the dominant COVID-19 variant in the US, responsible for 58% of recorded new coronavirus cases in the last week alone. "I'm in Connecticut, and it's like 80% of all sequences that we see right now," says Anne Hahn, PhD., postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Public Health. Here are the five most dangerous spots to catch COVID-19, according to experts. Read on to find out moreand to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss Already Had COVID? These Symptoms May "Never Go Away".

Indoor gatherings such as weddings and parties are still dangerous, warns the World Health Organization. "In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no 'zero risk' when it comes to any kind of gathering especially events that bring groups of people together," says the WHO. "Regardless of the size of the event, you are at risk from COVID-19 whenever you get together with people. The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads easily indoors, especially in poorly ventilated settings."

Planning a family cruise this summer? The CDC has lifted its warning on cruise ship travel, but virus experts are still recommending caution. "This means to prepare for the cruise, all four of you should be fully vaccinated and boosted," says Jessica Justman, infectious diseases specialist and epidemiologist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who recommends travelers make sure their ship has opted into the CDC's Covid-19 Program for Cruise Ships. "I suggest completing all booster doses a few weeks, and at least one week, before the trip starts. I would also be interested in how many inpatient beds and medical personnel are on the cruise and compare that to the number of passengers. One might confirm that the cruise follows guidelines such as the cruise ship health care guidelines from the American College of Emergency Physicians."

Buffets are risky due to close contact with both customers and staff. "While common utensils theoretically could lead to transmission of COVID from hand to spoon to hand, we actually don't have any good examples in clusters of COVID illnesses that surfaces really matter as much as people all standing close to each other does," says Benjamin Chapman, Ph.D., professor and food safety specialist in the department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at North Carolina State University. "Managing social distancing and line-ups is really the hardest part. Or in situations where staff will serve patrons from a buffet, the staff and patron interaction is the riskiest part."6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

Indoor gyms are still highly problematic in terms of catching the virus, experts warn. "If you're not willing to get COVID don't go," says Dr. Michael Klompas, a hospital epidemiologist and infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "At a time like now, when there's a lot of COVID around, it is a high risk proposition."

Social distancing is practically impossible in airports, with people standing next to each other in check in and security lines and sitting close together on planes. "Avoid common-touch surfaces, hand hygiene wherever possible, masks, distancing, controlled-boarding procedures, try to avoid face-to-face contact with other customers, try to avoid being unmasked in flight, for meal and drink services, apart from when really necessary," says David Powell, physician and medical adviser to the International Air Transport Association. "The greatest protection you can give yourself is to be vaccinated and boosted."

Follow the public health fundamentals and help end this pandemic, no matter where you liveget vaccinated or boosted ASAP; if you live in an area with low vaccination rates, wear an N95 face mask, don't travel, social distance, avoid large crowds, don't go indoors with people you're not sheltering with (especially in bars), practice good hand hygiene, and to protect your life and the lives of others, don't visit any of these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.

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The 5 Most Dangerous Spots You Can Catch Coronavirus Eat This Not That - Eat This, Not That

AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) COVID-19 cases are rising across the Amarillo area, Texas, and the nation.

The city of Amarillo is seeing more than 800 more active cases than we had this time last month.

Dr. Rodney Young, Regional Chair of Family & Community Medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center said what is causing the rise in new cases is a new subvariant.

It started with the Omicron, then with the BA.2 and now there is a subvariant of BA.2, said Dr. Young.

He said cases are likely to continue to rise as July 4th draws near and families gather.

When you have occasions to gather, that is the way it spreads very easily person to person, said Dr. Young.

Dr. Young added as cases do continue to rise, an upside is that they have not seen a rise in hospitalization the way they did in the earlier stages of the pandemic.

He said patients with the subvariant are not presenting with severe COVID-19 symptoms, some are presenting with a little cough, runny nose, and watery eyes.

A number of the cases that we are diagnosing now that werent COVID a few weeks ago, tend to be folks they are feeling like they are having flares in allergy symptoms or cold type symptoms, said Dr. Young.

Dr. Young said that those who are vaccinated and who get subvariant COVID illnesses are less likely to get less severe forms of the illness or experience long covid.

Dr. Young added the virus is here to stay and it will always be a part of the disease landscape to some extent and added what the medical community hopes to happen is that it moves from a pandemic to an endemic.

Some years or some times are worse than others, but hopefully there is enough immunity around and enough measures that we can take to help mitigate the spread within a community, said Dr. Young.

Dr. Young said he doesnt have an exact answer to when that could happen, but he said its possible we could be seeing the early stages of that now.

Dr. Young reiterates that the best way to keep yourself protected from these rising cases is social distancing, good hygiene practices, and getting boosted if you havent done so already.

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Coronavirus cases on the rise once again - KAMR - MyHighPlains.com