Top government health officials warned Sunday that the United States is likely to see record numbers of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations as the omicron variant spreads rapidly and forces Americans to once again grapple with the dangers of a pandemic that has upended life around the globe.

“Unfortunately, I think that that is going to happen. We are going to see a significant stress in some regions of the country on the hospital system, particularly in those areas where you have a low level of vaccination,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease specialist, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked whether the United States could see record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Fauci described omicron as “extraordinary” in its transmissibility, with a doubling time of two to three days. The variant accounts for 50% of coronavirus cases in certain regions of the country, which meant it would almost certainly take over as the dominant variant in the United States, he added.

“It is going to be a tough few weeks, months as we get deeper into the winter,” Fauci said.

On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said that cases will rise steeply over the next couple of weeks and that the country could soon see 1 million new cases a day of omicron, dramatically exceeding the record of about 250,000 new cases per day set in January.

“The big question is, are those million cases going to be sick enough to need health care and especially hospitalization?” Collins said. “We’re just holding our breath to see how severe this will be.”

Fauci and Collins painted a stark but realistic picture of the winter ahead, on the heels of a week of coronavirus-related setbacks. Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths rose across much of the country last week, with officials warning of a surge just as millions of Americans – already weary after nearly two years of the pandemic – are expected to travel for Christmas and New Year’s. On Friday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that vaccines for children under 5 would be pushed back further into 2022, as the companies modified their trials to include a third dose.

Health officials have continued to urge the unvaccinated to get their shots and those who have received only two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines to get booster doses. Vaccines cannot be the only layer of protection against the omicron variant, Fauci said, but defeating the pandemic would not be possible without them.

There are still safe ways for vaccinated people to get together for the holidays, including wearing a mask while traveling, testing beforehand and knowing the vaccination status of everyone present at indoor celebrations, Fauci said on “Face the Nation.”

“If you do these things, I do believe that you can feel quite comfortable with a family setting,” he said. “Nothing is 100% risk-free, but I think if you do the things that I just mentioned, you’d actually mitigate that risk enough to feel comfortable about being able to enjoy the holiday.”

Collins stopped short of urging people to cancel holiday plans but said travel will be risky even for vaccinated people.

“This virus is going to be all around us,” he said. “I’m not going to say you shouldn’t travel, but you should do so very carefully … People are going ‘I’m so sick of hearing this,’ and I am, too. But the virus is not sick of us, and it is still out there looking for us, and we’ve got to double down on these things if we’re going to get through the next few months.”

Doctors, nurses and other health care workers are warning that the nation’s health system continues to strain under an unending stream of coronavirus cases. Confirmed U.S. coronavirus infections have surpassed more than 128,000 per day and confirmed virus deaths are near 1,300 per day, according to The Washington Post’s rolling seven-day average.

“For people trained to save lives, this moment is frustrating, exhausting and heartbreaking,” the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association said in a joint statement on Friday, urging more Americans to get booster shots.

Public health experts are bracing for a winter surge of cases driven by omicron, which can evade some protection conferred by vaccinations and prior infections, as well as cases linked to the older delta variant. Officials caution that they are still relying on preliminary data about omicron’s severity compared with earlier forms of the virus.

President Joe Biden plans to address the nation Tuesday on the status of the country’s fight against the virus, the White House said Saturday.

“We are prepared for the rising case levels,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote on Twitter, adding that Biden “will detail how we will respond to this challenge. He will remind Americans that they can protect themselves from severe illness from COVID-19 by getting vaccinated and getting their booster shot when they are eligible.”

The speech, coming just before Christmas and New Year’s Day, underlines Biden’s struggle to contain the pandemic nearly a year into office. On top of the emergence of new variants and attendant challenges, the administration has at times faced criticism for what some have described as mixed signals.

Biden won high marks from the public during the first half of the year as cases declined, the country opened up from lockdown and vaccines became widely available. But the past few months have been far more difficult. After he gave a speech on July 4 saying the country was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” the situation started changing. Case rates increased as the delta variant took a foothold and many Americans refused to get vaccinated.

And despite Biden’s promise that at-home rapid tests would become a widely available tool to fight the coronavirus, the tests remain hard to find in many parts of the country, as well as more expensive than in other places across the world.

Fauci conceded Sunday that the administration needed to do better about increasing the availability of at-home coronavirus rapid tests, though he stressed that the country was in a much better place than it was a year ago, with 200 million to 500 million tests available per month, many of them free.

“We’re going in the right direction,” he said on CNN. “We really need to flood the system with testing. We need to have tests available for anyone who wants them, particularly when we’re in a situation right now where people are going to be gathering.”

Omicron also has challenged the nation’s coronavirus medicine cabinet, with evidence that the variant’s mutations will wipe out or weaken the effectiveness of treatments that can reduce the virus’s severity and keep patients out of hospitals. As a result, the Biden administration around Thanksgiving paused distribution of sotrovimab, the one monoclonal antibody that remains effective against omicron, with senior officials like David Kessler calculating that the drug should be maximally deployed when the variant becomes more prevalent.

By Thursday, administration officials decided to resume shipments of the drug, amid indicators that omicron was spreading faster in states such as New York and Washington than data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier in the week indicated, said two officials with knowledge of the deliberations.

“Shipment of product will begin soon, and jurisdictions will see product arrive as early as Tuesday, December 21, 2021,” the federal health department said in a statement on Friday, announcing that about 55,000 doses of sotrovimab would go out next week.

Doctors said they were desperate for treatments like sotrovimab as emergency rooms begin to crowd and case numbers soar to new heights. New York state on Saturday reported more than 21,9000 confirmed infections, breaking a record set the day before.

“Too slow! We are already seeing widespread omicron,” texted one infectious-disease doctor at a large New York City hospital, who estimated that at least 50% of patients had contracted the variant and requested confidentiality to discuss patient care. “It’s a lot of hospitalizations that could have potentially [been] averted because of slow response.”

Fauci said Sunday that he expected it to be months before antiviral drugs can be mass-produced and available to anyone who needs them. While he did not foresee the kind of lockdowns that were put in place in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci also noted that it would be difficult to keep the virus under control when there remained “about 50 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated.”

Similarly, several governors on Sunday shied away from the possibility of implementing more lockdowns to fight the spread of omicron. Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said on “Fox News Sunday” that his state, which has seen a 150% increase in hospitalizations over the past two weeks, was not considering lockdowns and instead was putting more resources into testing and encouraging vaccinations and boosters. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said on the same show that lockdowns remained “on the table” but that he didn’t think such a move was likely because a high percentage of the state’s population was vaccinated.

Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis emphasized that people in his state should keep themselves safe with “individual freedom and local control.” He also said Colorado officials were looking to change the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include three shots, as health officials in the country and around the world have signaled in recent days they are also considering.

“That’s certainly where it’s headed,” Polis said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “I wish they’d stop talking about [the third shot] as a booster. It really is a three-dose vaccine.”

Published : December 20, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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HONG KONG – In a rejection of Beijings new direction in Hong Kong, voters mostly stayed away from the polls Sunday in the territorys first “patriots-only” election, which was on pace to be the lowest turnout since the territorys handover to China in 1997.

An hour before polls closed, the turnout was just shy of 30 percent, less than half the percentage that voted in the 2019 local elections. It appeared to be a repudiation not only of the overwhelmingly pro-China candidates, but also of Beijing’s re-engineering of the territory. Ahead of the vote, Hong Kong authorities characterized casting a ballot as a vote of confidence in the political system and took unprecedented steps to boost participation after crushing the pro-democracy opposition.

“The call for a boycott as a solid form of political mobilization has taken effect, showing the will of the people [and] how angry they are at the regime,” said Ted Hui, a former elected lawmaker now living in exile in Australia.

Sunday’s vote will determine the makeup of Hong Kong’s legislature. Only a portion of the body has ever been directly elected, but until recently, it nonetheless acted as a check on the Hong Kong government. The legislative elections were scheduled for 2020 but postponed for 18 months, with authorities citing the pandemic.

During the delay, every prominent opposition leader was either jailed, under a new national security law that effectively criminalized dissent, or fled into exile. Beijing rewrote the electoral rules, reducing the number of directly elected seats from 35 to just 20. Apple Daily, the popular pro-democracy newspaper, shut down this year under government pressure.

The vote served as the first referendum on Hong Kong’s new, more authoritarian direction under Beijing’s tightened grip. Refusing to show up to vote on Sunday was one of the last ways Hong Kong residents could express their political will.

“Not participating in the government elections has already sent a strong political message in Hong Kong,” said Eric Lai, a legal and political analyst at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law.

Several registered voters said they found the exercise futile, with no candidate they wanted to vote for.

“I find no representation in the election,” said Michael, 28, who gave only his first name, fearing repercussions for boycotting the vote. His preferred candidate, Gwyneth Ho, is one of dozens in jail for participating in a primary election for the pro-democracy camp. “It is irrelevant.”

Of the more than 1 million who voted, many were seniors, traditionally a core demographic for the city’s pro-Beijing camp. Francis Mok, 81, who cast his vote in North Point Community Hall, said he supports the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s largest pro-Beijing party. He said he believes they are a force for stability.

Ginger Leung, 65, said she rejected the social unrest of 2019. She said she voted Sunday because she “realized the need to love the country in order to maintain stable lives.”

The most recent election in Hong Kong before Sunday’s vote was held at the end of 2019, after months of protests against Beijing’s increased control over the territory. More than 71 percent of registered voters cast ballots in district council races – some waited hours as lines snaked around buildings – granting the pro-democracy opposition a historic landslide win.

Opposition activists, hoping to build on that success, held a primary vote in 2020 to select the best candidates for the legislative council elections. More than 600,000 voted; the result was a slate of radical pro-democracy candidates who advocated for Hong Kong to regain more autonomy from Beijing. Most of the candidates have been detained since February and denied bail, accused of “subversion” under the security law.

Many of the district councilors who were elected in 2019 have since been disqualified or fled the territory after the security law came into force.

In an effort to boost turnout, authorities offered free public transport and allowed Hong Kong residents living in mainland China to vote at three border checkpoints – to little effect.

Passengers at bus and subway stations were instead heading out to beaches or country parks. Hiking trails, malls and restaurants were crowded. Theme parks including Hong Kong Disneyland were crammed.

A 60-year-old woman characterized hiking on Sunday as a form of protest.

“See if we the elderly will vote in unison?” she told local media. “We will only hike in unison.”

Chief Executive Carrie Lam dismissed concerns over sluggish participation as an indication that “the government is doing well.” Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Lam said that she would not be responsible for low turnout.

Chinese state media throughout the day presented a different reality. China Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, said the city was “gripped by election enthusiasm.” Wen Wei Po, another state-owned newspaper, focused on the 90 percent turnout among a voting bloc known as the election committee subsector, a group of around 1,500 pro-Beijing elites who have the power to elect the biggest bloc in the legislature.

But Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing stalwart running for reelection, made an emergency appeal for people to vote hours before polls closed.

“A number of people have traveled to other places with free transport instead of voting. … All the public transport systems are full,” she said, according to the South China Morning Post. “Naturally I hope to be able to return with high votes but currently it’s very dicey.”

Published : December 20, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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Like many New Yorkers, college student Nadia Wilemski has felt eerily reminded this week of the early surge of the coronavirus pandemic.

The vaccinated and boosted 20-year-old waited in a two-hour-long line in the city to get tested Monday after coming down with some of the telltale symptoms of the virus. After learning she was positive, her plans to travel home for the holidays quickly unraveled.

The musical theater student felt exasperated, unable to find a place to isolate when her dorm closed for winter break. Her mind quickly raced back to early 2020, when she felt like “it was the end of the world.”

“It’s giving those same vibes,” Wilemski said.

On Saturday, New York state set a record for the second day in a row with more than 21,900 reported daily cases, a number not seen even during the grim waves of last winter and spring, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post, although testing was less widely available in the early days. The rapidly climbing numbers have sparked concern the state’s outbreak could be a sign of what’s to come elsewhere.

In what felt like pandemic deja vu, a steady stream of New York City sites announced they are closing their doors in anticipation of a worsening wave of coronavirus cases. “Saturday Night Live” will have no live audience attend this weekend’s show and musical guest Charli XCX will not perform. Meanwhile, the famed Rockettes dance troupe, which had just returned to the stage, called off the remaining “Christmas Spectacular” shows because of “increasing challenges from the pandemic.”

A number of restaurants and theaters in New York City that rely on big December sales also temporarily closed in recent days. Broadway shows, including the blockbuster “Hamilton” and “Tina,” about the life of Tina Turner, canceled performances this week. On a smaller scale, friends and families are canceling holiday gatherings.

New York was the first center of the pandemic in the United States, and the latest uptick for some brought back memories of March 2020, though hospitalizations and deaths remain far below what they were at previous peaks. Already, though, the surge is upending the cautious return to normality some New Yorkers had begun to embrace.

“Everybody is pretty shaken up,” said Zeba Warsi, a student at Columbia University who was trying to get tested Saturday after coming down with covid-19 symptoms following exposure to someone who tested positive. “We didn’t see it coming.”

“This has been a little bit of a rude awakening,” said Alexandra Brodsky, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn and nixed her first post-pandemic vacation after testing positive.

Nonetheless, the latest wave of infections is much different from the early 2020′s surge, given the arsenal of tools to battle the virus, including vaccines and boosters, experts say.

“We were petrified last year in March,” recalled Mangala Narasimhan, the director of critical care services at Northwell Health, which has 22 hospitals across the state. “We didn’t know if the N95s were going to work. We didn’t even know where to put the patients we had. We had no space.”

Now, Northwell, which has about 400 covid-positive patients in its hospitals, or about half of the admissions this time last year, has therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies. Patients who are vaccinated are also staying for shorter periods, Narasimhan said. The hospital system, which has not paused its elective surgeries, is encouraging people with health issues unrelated to the virus to get medical help if they need it.

“It’s less scary,” Narasimhan said. “It’s just annoying we’re still dealing with this and annoying that people won’t do the right things so we’re not in this situation.”

Throughout the state, infections and hospitalizations are climbing at a higher rate among the unvaccinated compared with those who are immunized, according to New York Department of Health data as of the end of November. That was also the case at Northwell, where Narasimhan said the hospital system’s covid-19 patients were predominantly from areas with lower vaccination rates such as Staten Island.

The rising coronavirus numbers are a reminder “that the pandemic is not over yet,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, D, who this week reinstated a requirement for masks indoors. However, she added, the state, which has fully vaccinated over 70% of its residents, was better placed than it was 21 months ago.

“We have the tools to fight this virus,” she said.

The latest variant has only added to a winter surge in New York City in which the delta variant had been driving up cases after some summer respite.

Celine Gounder, a New York epidemiologist and infectious-diseases specialist who also advised President Joe Biden’s transition team, said that breakthrough infections will continue to happen but that vaccines are still doing their job to make most cases less severe.

“If all you have is basically a common cold with covid because you’re vaccinated and boosted, that’s a win,” Gounder said.

People who are vaccinated and boosted can still do their part to mitigate transmission, especially in the omicron-fueled wave, she said, adding that New Yorkers should continue to wear masks, gather in well-ventilated spaces and get tested before spending time with friends and family this holiday season.

There were mounting signs in much of the United States and elsewhere that omicron is on the rise. In countries with community transmission, the new variant was spreading faster than delta, with infection numbers doubling in 1½ to 3 days, the World Health Organization said Saturday. Omicron is spreading rapidly in countries with high levels of population immunity, but it remains unclear whether it evades immunity, is more transmissible or both, the health agency said, with clinical severity and vaccine efficacy also not yet known.

Given the new variant and resumption of in-person activities, public health officials have anticipated greater demand for testing. But the country has struggled with its testing supply, a problem that stifled mitigation at the start of the pandemic.

New York City, which announced this week that it would distribute 500,000 at-home tests and expand testing sites, has seen residents waiting in line for hours to get tested. Retailers have reported running low on rapid antigen tests, the rapid-result kind sold over the counter.

Warsi, a journalist who reported on the pandemic from India before arriving in New York City in the fall to attend Columbia University, said she went out to dinner with a small group of friends Tuesday. They were all vaccinated, she said, and because it was cold, they ate indoors.

She is not yet eligible for the booster; in India, she said, officials increased the amount of time between the first two doses, meaning she did not get her second shot until fall. A few days after the dinner, she came down with a fever and sore throat.

On Saturday, she was considering which testing facility might offer the shortest wait time. A friend, she said, waited more than two hours outside to get tested. Local pharmacies were out of at-home kits. And she gave up on calling the city’s covid-19 hotline after being placed on hold for 36 minutes.

“The symptoms are pretty mild,” Warsi said. “But it’s the anxiety of not being able to get access to health care in a city like New York.”

Published : December 19, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40010160

Once again parents are facing the dreaded prospect of school closures across Europe as a wave of virus infections hits the young and the omicron variant ramps up concern.

Governments are accelerating vaccinations to try and head off more economic pain in 2022. But with cases rising faster among children, many schools have shut early for Christmas break. The question parents have is whether they’ll reopen as currently scheduled in January.

In Germany, where schools in some states have already closed, cases among the under 15s are running almost twice as high as the national average. The U.K. is seeing a similar trend, as are European Union countries including Austria and Ireland.

School closings would hit kids’ education and be a headache for workers and businesses, forcing parents to work from home, if they can, or take time off.

The latest Covid-19 surge in the U.K. and Europe is already causing havoc. It’s led to a raft of restrictions, including vaccine mandates, lockdowns and new travel rules.

Added to that is the growing evidence that omicron is the most contagious mutation yet and is better at evading vaccines. It’s put Europe on alert that even with hundreds of millions of Covid-battling shots administered, the situation could get worse before it gets better.

U.K. lawmaker Ben Spencer put the worry bluntly during a lengthy parliament debate on new Covid measures this week: “Please, please, please, will the minister confirm that there are no plans for mandatory restrictions on schools and that we will never again close our schools?”

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said there’s no certainty the government will be able to keep classrooms in England open.

In France, there were so many class closures last month that the government backtracked on a rule that classes would shut for a week as soon as one student was found to be positive, instead requiring the entire class to get tested. The rate of children under nine years old testing positive skyrocketed to 634 per 100,000 by Dec. 6, up from fewer than 100 in early November.

“Children are the biggest contamination pool at the moment,” Karine Lacombe, who heads the infectious-disease department at Saint Antoine hospital in Paris, said on RTL radio Tuesday.

Denmark’s government closed all primary schools on Tuesday, as much as a week ahead of schedule. That’s also happened in the Netherlands and parts of Switzerland.

One reason for the spread within schools is the fact that young children are among the last group in the population to get vaccinated. Shots for 5-to-11-year-olds are in the early stages of rollout in Europe, and drugmakers are still conducting trials on preschool children and babies.

While children haven’t directly suffered as much from Covid-19, often contracting the virus asymptomatically or mildly, they’ve not been completely spared.

A small number have developed multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a sometimes deadly pediatric condition associated with Covid. A much larger number have long Covid — symptoms such as fatigue and brain fog that persist long after the infection.

But beyond the immediate fallout, children are another means of transmission to vulnerable adults and grandparents. The arrival of winter has meant more time spent indoors in classrooms with closed windows.

On the other hand, children may be at greater risk of catching Covid outside of the classroom, especially if schools adhere to strict measures including frequent testing and masks. That’s been the case in Germany, where full-year data shows that infection rates in schools stayed stable despite the circulation of increasingly infectious virus strains, according to Joerg Doetsch, president of the German Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Countries are now trying to address the vaccination gap. Germany started giving shots to children aged 5-to-11 this week, although it only recommended vulnerable kids with preexisting medical conditions receive them. Greece and Italy also opened vaccinations for this age group in recent days and Belgium is set to follow.

In the U.K., vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds may be authorized before Christmas. Britain also changed its guidance on a second dose for 12-to-15-year-olds in the face of omicron. Switzerland plans to start inoculating under-12s in January.

But if omicron takes hold, and authorities see schools as a key route for transmission, reopenings may be delayed.

For some, school closures are a last resort. Christoph Berger, the head of Switzerland’s Federal Vaccination Commission, said this week that closures are possible, but there may be other measures — more mask wearing, regular tests — that can be done first.

In Belgium, some government officials have made clear it’s the nuclear option.

Even with omicron, “schools are absolutely essential,” said Michael Devoldere, a spokesman for the Flemish ministry for education. “Schools should be closed only when there really is no other resort.”

Published : December 19, 2021

By : Bloomberg