Category Archives: Corona Virus

On February 16, Scott Nguyen went hunting. And what he found is a bit surprising: a coronavirus variant that looks like a Frankenstein virus. It has the head of the omicron variant stuck onto the body of the delta variant.

Officially, Scott Nguyen is a bioinformatician at the Public Health Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He tracks emerging coronavirus variants around the city.

But on the side, Nguyen and a handful of scientists around the world have an intriguing hobby: "We're variant hunters," he says. "I think that's a pretty cool way to describe it."

Nguyen and other variant hunters search through millions of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences in a massive database, called GISAID, looking to uncover strains that could shift the course of the pandemic or simply give scientists a better understanding for how the virus evolves.

For instance, back in November one variant hunter found "a very weird set of ...mutations coming from a variant in South Africa," Nguyen says. "That became omicron."

Then early one morning in February, Nguyen detected not simply another variant but a whole new class of variants: variants that mix together parts of delta and omicron. And not just any parts, randomly put together. In some instances, the virus seems to be optimizing the combinations picking the best traits from each for infectiousness and immune evasion.

Specifically, Nguyen found a variant that's mostly delta but contains the spike protein of omicron the tiny studs on the surface of the virus that initiate infection. "So a good chunk of the virus' spike protein is omicron but the body of the virus is still delta," Nguyen says. "So yes, that's the best way to describe it."

So far, this variant, called XD, is rare. So, scientists have detected it in only France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. But there are likely many of these deltracrons out there. Scientists in San Mateo, California, have already found a handful of them in the U.S. At least one has emerged in the U.K. and Brazil.

Health officials, including those at the World Health Organization, are watching these hybrid variants closely. Because they demonstrate how the virus can take its most successful parts and combine them quickly into a supervirus. This process is called recombination, and it's how dangerous strains of flu are made.

"So very often recombination is the way in which we get pandemics of influenza. ," Dr. Mike Ryan with the World Health Organization said on Friday. "So we have to be very cautious ... we have to watch these recombinant events very, very closely."

For instance, omicron's spike protein is especially apt at hiding the virus from our immune system, especially our antibodies. And so the XD variant is essentially the delta variant wearing omicron's invisibility cloak.

"From the variant's perspective, it has the best of worlds," Nguyen says. ""It's surprising that the virus can really do this, and do it very well, as well.

So how does the virus do this? How does it create these Frankenstein hybrids?

For starters, a person has to catch both omicron and delta at the same time, says Shishi Luo, a bioinformatician at the genomics company Helix. "So a person has to be exposed to both variants in a short enough time frame so that they have both of them in this system."

Luo and her colleagues recently analyzed samples from nearly 30,000 Americans infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the rise of omicron in this country, from November until February. They found 20 people co-infected with both delta and omicron. In other words, they were infected twice.

"Omicron happened around Christmas and New Year, when there were many social gatherings," Luo explains. "So you can imagine, you go to one social gathering and got exposed to delta, and then you go to a different social gathering, and you catch omicron."

If both variants manage to infect the same cell, at the same time, then the virus can end up doing recombination, Luo says. In essence, during replication, one variant steals a chunk of genes from another variant. So the delta variant, in way, plagiarized part of omicron's genetic code.

"If you're writing a document, you can have typos where you change a single letter," Luo says. "But you can also copy and paste and move big chunks of text. That's recombination, where one variant, in this case delta, takes a big chunk of text from omicron."

Grabbing chunks of code instead of just single letters makes the virus more malleable or flexible, Luo says, so it can quickly evolve new variants, including ones that can evade our immune protection. "It just shows how SARS-CoV-2 has many tools in its kit for changing itself."

Scientists are just starting to understand how important recombination is for SARS-CoV-2 evolution. "It's been known that coronaviruses, in general, have a lot of recombination. For SARS-CoV-2, this is the first time we've seen so much evidence that it's happening," she adds.

In fact, recombination may be the reason SARS-CoV-2 exists in the first place. Last month, scientists at the University of Glasgow published a study in which they speculate about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Their analysis suggests an animal in the Wuhan seafood market could have been co-infected with two coronaviruses at the same time and that these two viruses recombined, just like omicron and delta are doing right now, to generate the initial version.

"You know, early on in the pandemic, we were all expecting SARS-CoV-2 to not mutate too much," Scott Nguyen says. "But this virus has surprised us at every corner. So I think these recombinant variants provide some interesting clues to how this virus is going to evolve next" and just how quickly the next variant of concern may appear.

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Delta and omicron met up in one person and combined to create 'deltacron' : Goats and Soda - NPR

Chris Newman, a wildlife biologist at the University of Oxford and a co-author of one of the studies, said that his Chinese colleagues saw a number of wild mammals for sale at the Huanan market in late 2019. Any of them might have been responsible for the pandemic, Dr. Holmes said.

You cant prove raccoon dogs yet, but theyre certainly a suspect, he said.

Some critics have questioned how sure Dr. Holmes and his colleagues can be that a Huanan animal was to blame. Although many of the earliest Covid cases were linked to the market, its possible that other cases of pneumonia have not yet been recognized as early Covid cases.

We still know far too little about the earliest cases and there are likely additional cases we dont know about to draw final conclusions, said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity at Kings College London. I remain open to both natural spillover and research-related origins.

Another problem: If infected animals indeed started the pandemic, theyll never be found. In January 2020, when researchers from the Chinese C.D.C. arrived at the market to investigate, all the animals were gone.

But Dr. Holmes argues that theres more than enough evidence that animal markets could spark another pandemic. Last month, he and Chinese colleagues published a study of 18 animal species often sold at markets, obtaining them either in the wild or on breeding farms.

They were absolutely full of virus, Dr. Holmes said.

Over 100 vertebrate-infecting viruses came to light, including a number of potential human pathogens. And some of these viruses had recently jumped the species barrier bird flu infecting badgers, dog coronaviruses infecting raccoon dogs. Some of the animals were sick with human viruses, too.

The simplest way to reduce the odds of future pandemics, Dr. Holmes has argued, is to carry out studies like this one at the interface between humans and wildlife. His own experience discovering new viruses has convinced him that it doesnt make sense to try to catalog every potential threat in wildlife.

You could never possibly sample every virus out there and then work out which one of those can infect humans, Dr. Holmes said. I dont think thats viable.

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He Goes Where the Fire Is: A Virus Hunter in the Wuhan Market - The New York Times

The United States may be vulnerable to an unseen surge of COVID-19 cases right now, according to multiple health experts.

Why it matters: The United States has reached a lull period in the coronavirus outbreak. All of that could be upended without much foresight because of how Americans are currently handling the pandemic.

Driving the news: Experts are worried theres not enough public data on COVID-19 cases and there are fewer COVID-19 testing sites, forcing the U.S. to fly blind in the face of a resurgence.

What theyre saying: Comprehensive case data is critical to an effective response. As we have seen throughout the pandemic, lack of data leads to poor decision making and ultimately costs lives, Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Childrens Hospital, told ABC News.

Yes, but: PerBloomberg, data from wastewater testing sites across the country could warn us of a potential rise in COVID-19 infections because traces of COVID-19 end up in peoples waste.

What to watch: Coronavirus cases are expected to rise in the coming weeks because of the BA.2 subvariant, which has been spreading throughout Europe.

What theyre saying:I would expect that we might see an uptick in cases here in the United States because, only a week or so ago, the CDC came out with their modification of the metrics for what would be recommended for masking indoors, and much of the country right now is in that zone, where masking indoors is not required,Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, toldKGTVlast week.

The bottom line: System-wide modernization and change to benefit all of public health requires CDC to have the authority to coordinate and guide how data are reported and shared for evidence based decision-making, an unnamed CDC representative told ABC News. The nation can no longer continue with the current, fractured approach of collecting public health data to be better prepared for future pandemics.

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New COVID surge: Why the US wont see the next COVID wave - Deseret News

If youre hoping to get pregnant, you may have heard rumors that getting the COVID-19 vaccine can cause infertility. Lets debunk that myth right up front: No credible scientific evidence shows the COVID-19 vaccine has a negative impact on fertility.

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COVID-19 vaccination does not decrease female fertility, confirms Ob/Gyn and reproductive infectious disease specialistOluwatosin Goje, MD. What can impact your fertility, though, is getting COVID-19 which means theres just one more reason to get your vaccine.

Dr. Goje talks about where the vaccine rumors came from, what the science really says about it and what having COVID-19 can do to your fertility.

In December 2020, a German scientist teamed up with a former Pfizer employee to share a hypothesis about the COVID-19 vaccine and infertility. It caught traction among vaccine skeptics and has persisted even though it has since been disproved by researchers.

The myth is based on an assumption that the vaccine could cause your body to attack syncytin-1, a protein in your placenta that shares a small piece of genetic code with the spike protein of the coronavirus.

Even though this misinformation was proved incorrect, the rumor still took on a life of its own, as it was shared and reshared throughout the internet.

Most of the data coming out agrees with initial information that vaccines do not affect fertility, Dr. Goje says. She shares some of the science debunking this myth and explains the COVID-19 vaccines safety for people who are pregnant and want to become pregnant.

A January 2022 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology looked at 2,000 couples trying to conceive without fertility treatment. Data shows no differences in the likelihood of conception between vaccinated and unvaccinated couples.

Researchers found no association between the COVID-19 vaccine and lower fertility rates, Dr. Goje says.

A fetus cant survive without the placenta, which connects to your uterus during pregnancy. If the vaccine actually attacked the placenta, Dr. Goje explains, wed be seeing a rise in miscarriages among vaccinated people which isnt the case.

The thought that the vaccine would attack the placenta has been debunked because there has been no increase in miscarriages among vaccinated women, she says.

Researchers havent found any evidence of the vaccine having a negative impact on sperm. Two studies in couples undergoing fertility treatment found no appreciable difference in semen volume, sperm concentration or motility measured before and after vaccination, Dr. Goje adds.

Getting the COVID-19 vaccine wont impact your fertility, but catching the virus could. Dr. Goje breaks down some of the science about the effect that COVID-19 infection can have on people who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant.

Though the myth says the vaccine could negatively impact the placenta, it seems that its the virus that actually does so. The vaccine has been shown to be safe for people who are pregnant, while studies show that pregnant people who contract COVID-19 have higher rates of:

This shows that the relationship to the placenta is actually a concern for pregnant people who get infected, not for pregnant people who get vaccinated, Dr. Goje says.

The January 2022 study found that in couples in trying to get pregnant, conception was down 18% in the three months after the male partner (or partner assigned male at birth [ABAB]) was infected with COVID-19.

Dr. Goje says doctors arent yet sure why this is, but researchers continue to study COVID-19s impact on the body, and studies have reported on a few possibilities:

Within a few months of having COVID-19, male fertility seems to go back to normal. But if youre trying to get pregnant, its important to know how your partners infection could temporarily impact your ability to conceive.

By now, we know that COVID-19 can trigger a variety of health concerns. Studies show that one of those concerns is subacute thyroiditis, an inflammation of the thyroid gland that can happen when your body is fighting off a virus. This leads to over- or under-production of thyroid hormone, which can, in turn, impact your ability to get pregnant.

Thyroid disorders affect menstrual cycles and fertility, so its possible that dysregulation of the thyroid due to COVID-19 can indirectly affect fertility, Dr. Goje explains.

Whether youre trying to get pregnant or just trying to stay healthy, all of the science points in the same direction: Getting your COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to fend off the viruss most severe impacts. If youre hoping to conceive, you can get vaccinated with confidence, knowing that its one of the best ways to protect your health and your fertility.

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How COVID-19 (and the Vaccine) Can Impact Your Fertility - Health Essentials from Cleveland Clinic

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) Its been nearly two years since the first deaths from COVID-19 took place in Chatham County.

A little over two years out when we took care of our first patients here at Memorial Health, said Dr. Stephen Thacker who is Memorials Associate Chief Medical Officer. Today, we had one patient in the hospital who has active COVID-19.

And so weve come a long way in two years, Thacker said. At the beginning of the pandemic there was so much unknown about how do would take care of people.

He said not only has the medical community learned how to treat patients, but that Americans have access to more reliable testing, including at-home kits.

Thacker also said new anti-viral medications have been able to help treat people as outpatients. And he said the game changer was the development of safe and effective vaccines that prevent people from contracting the virus.

I hope everyone understands that the reason we got here is through science and good sound decision making from our public policymakers as well as guidance from our research community on how to develop a safe and effective vaccine. And here we are, said Thacker.

He continues to urge all those who have not been vaccinated to consider getting the shots.

Because its the most safe and effective way to prevent yourself and your community from being harmed from the virus moving forward.

Sill, Thacker reminds the community that 850 people in Chatham County have died of COVID 19 and that statewide, more than 35,000 Georgians have died.

So, sobering statistics that changed what the face of our communities, Thacker said. So we need to make sure that we remember that and not just focus on the loss but make sure that we learn something in this process.

Thacker says that means sharing the right messages to stay healthy.

He also said two new variants are surfacing and while that is always a concern, he is hopeful we will not seek spikes similar to the Omicron variant. He does say the medical community is bracing for a possible uptick in cases and hospitalizations because of the large crowds that gathered over St. Patricks Day.

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2 years after we first heard of the coronavirus, what has been learned? - WSAV-TV

In March 2020, just as COVID-19 cases began to surge in Boston, Massachusetts, Esther Freeman noticed something peculiara deluge of people with discoloured toes requesting appointments. Freeman, director of global health dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, had seen these kinds of toes before. The itchy red and purple patches are a classic sign of chilblains, a skin condition that typically appears in cold weather. But usually, she would see one or two cases each winter. Suddenly, I was seeing 15, 20 patients a day, she says. Intriguingly, the surgeseen by physicians around the globeseemed to coincide with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, when physicians examined people with what the media began calling COVID toes, most didnt test positive for a coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infection. Scientists were stumped, and have been looking for answers ever since.

The latest study, published on 25 February, is an immunological deep dive, examining 21 people who developed chilblains during the early months of the pandemic in Connecticut. Although the results dont rule out a direct connection between COVID-19 and chilblains, the authors couldnt find any immunological evidence of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection in 19 of those people. The report adds to the argument by some researchers that COVID toe could have been caused by something unrelated to the virus. For instance, it might have arisen from people in lockdown being at home, not wearing shoes and socks, says Jeff Gehlhausen, a dermatologist and immunologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and first author of the study.

Still, the results raise some very interesting questions that deserve further study, says Freeman, who was not involved in the research. For instance, the study doesnt exclude the possibility that people exposed to the virus could have fought it off using an innate immune responsea first-line defence that would not prompt the body to produce detectable antibodies and T-cells against SARS-CoV-2. So for now, she adds, the mystery remains.

How chilblains arise isnt entirely clear. We think of it as a cold-weather-related injury, says Patrick McCleskey, a dermatologist and researcher at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. We always see some amount of chilblains in the winter, and then it goes down in the summer. Researchers think that the cold probably leads to a restriction in blood flow, causing some cells to die and kicking off an inflammatory process. The purple or red patches that appear on toes (and sometimes fingers, ears or noses) can be itchy, tender or, in some cases, downright painful.

Most of the people in the latest study developed COVID toes between April and May 2020, when COVID-19 cases surged in Connecticut. About one-third reported having some symptoms of COVID-19 before developing the condition, and one-third reported that they had been in contact with a person confirmed or suspected to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2.

The researchers used a variety of methods to look for antibodies and T-cells specific to the coronavirussigns of the body having whats called an adaptive immune response to a pathogen. These people were months past the onset of their chilblains, so their immune systems would have had plenty of time to respond to SARS-CoV-2 if they had been infected. But the team picked up signs of a past infection only in two people, one of whom had initially tested positive.

Many groups have tested people with chilblains for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, but nobody had looked really into this hypothesis about the T-cell response, Freeman says. The team did a fantastic, really extraordinary job. But she emphasizes that the study is smalland therefore not necessarily generalizableand that much larger epidemiological studieshave shown a connection between chilblains and SARS-CoV-2.

Dermatologist Thierry Passeron, at Cte dAzur University in Nice, France, still thinks COVID toes are triggered by the virus. His team foundthat people who developed chilblains during the pandemic showed evidence of a strong innate immune response. The researchers posit that many people with pandemic chilblains clear the virus in this way, so very few develop antibodies, he says.

Previous studieshave examined whether people with chilblains had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by taking tissue biopsies and staining the samples with a dye that identifies parts of the virus. Gehlhausen and colleagues tried the stain and found that it stuck to some of their tissue samples. But they also tested the stain on random tissue samples collected before the pandemic, when the virus was not in circulation, and found that it also marked some of those. Our study suggests that there may be a lack of specificity in that staining, Gehlhausen says.

With the link between COVID-19 and chilblains still in question, some researchers point to the lockdown theorythat people spent more time at home barefoot early in the pandemic and got cold feet, literally. Or perhaps all the media coverage of COVID toes led to more people than usual seeking medical attention for the problem.

For Freeman, the case is not yet closed. On one hand, she has seen patients who developed chilblains, justifiably, after walking in flip flops during a snowstorm. On the other hand, she has seen people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then develop chilblains with no other obvious explanation.

The debate has become strangely polarizing, Gehlhausen says. But the hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Its possible that all these things are true, he says. I am not on any team.

Its also possible the problem might be fading. Were still seeing patients with new chilblains, but it seems to be kind of back to the old background rate, says Yale dermatologist William Damsky, an author on the paper.

In the end, the issue makes for an intriguing scientific debate, but the answer isnt likely to alter how dermatologists treat patients, McCleskey says. Irrespective of whether a person had COVID-19, chilblains generally go away on their own in two or three weeks.

Honestly, I think maybe we can chill out about chilblains, he says.

This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon March 162022.

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Are 'COVID Toes' Actually Caused by the Coronavirus? - Scientific American

President Biden participating in a virtual meeting with Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland in the Oval Office on Thursday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden canceled his face-to-face meetings with Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland on Thursday after the prime minister received a positive result on a coronavirus test during a gala event in Washington on Wednesday night that both men attended.

Daniel Mulhall, Irelands ambassador to the United States, confirmed the positive test early Thursday, complicating the prime ministers plans to spend the day with Mr. Biden for traditional St. Patricks Day celebrations.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Martin instead met virtually on Thursday morning, with Mr. Biden seated near a television monitor showing Mr. Martin, with a bowl of shamrock on a coffee table. The president said he was deeply sorry for the inconvenience for the virtual format.

White House officials said that Mr. Biden, who is 79 and has been vaccinated and boosted, was not in close contact with Mr. Martin during Wednesdays gala, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines as being within six feet of someone for at least 15 minutes. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Biden is tested weekly for the coronavirus, and that his last test was on Sunday.

We, of course, abide by what the recommendations and advice are of his medical doctor, she said at a press briefing on Thursday. And if that would be to do increased testing, we would certainly do that. But he does not feel that is necessary at this point in time based on these recent contacts.

The prime ministers test result came amid a burst of infections among public officials in Washington in recent days. At least nine Democratic members of Congress tested positive this week after a party retreat and late night voting last week. Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, also tested positive this week, as did former President Barack Obama.

White House officials have downplayed the recent spate of cases, noting that the overall rate in Washington is still extremely low. Ms. Psaki said on Thursday that that the new Omicron subvariant, known as BA.2, has been circulating around the country for some time, and the administration was monitoring cases in Europe and in China. New U.S. cases have plummeted from the height of the Omicron surge.

We expect some fluctuation, especially at this relatively low level, Ms. Psaki said, adding that the country is in a better position to manage the pandemic.

It is not gone, and it means we still need to continue to take steps we can to fight the virus, she said.

400% of last winters peak

Mr. Mulhall said on Twitter that he had accepted a leadership award for Mr. Martin on Wednesday at the gala for the Ireland Funds in Washington, an event that Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi also attended.

I filled in for the Taoiseach after he tested positive for #Covid19, he wrote, using the Irish word for the countrys leader. I wish the Taoiseach well for his recovery.

The speakers office confirmed that Ms. Pelosi, who is vaccinated and boosted, had tested negative on a P.C.R. test on Thursday morning, and would continue regular testing and to follow C.D.C. guidelines, though it was not clear which ones. It was unclear whether the Attending Physicians Office considered Ms. Pelosi, 81, to be a close contact.

Ms. Pelosi, who was photographed sitting next to Mr. Martin during the gala, appeared at her weekly news conference on Thursday, adding that she was tested nearly every day. Mr. Martin remained masked until food was served, she said, and was pulled aside during the appetizer course about his positive test.

Were very, very sad that on St. Patricks Day, the Taoiseach has this diagnosis, she said at her indoor news conference, where she removed her mask to speak and take questions. We wont be able to have the benefit of the honor of his presence.

A scheduled lunch The Friends of Ireland Luncheon on Capitol Hill proceeded on Thursday, without Mr. Martin present. Ms. Pelosi addressed the room, where lawmakers sat at round tables, while introducing Mr. Biden, who sat on a stool a few feet away. Neither wore a mask, and there were few face coverings in the room.

America has been blessed by Irish children, and one of those Irish children is now the president of the United States, Ms. Pelosi said, just before the shook hands and he took the lectern. Mr. Biden spoke, but did not stay for lunch.

Irish journalists traveling with Mr. Martins delegation reported that he had attended the early part of the gala, and photos from the event appeared to show him seated next to Ms. Pelosi.

A spokesperson for the Irish government said in a statement on Thursday that the prime minister had tested negative for the virus earlier on Wednesday and also on Sunday, before traveling to the United States.

His second test on Wednesday was administered after a member of the prime ministers delegation received a positive result on a test, the statement said.

Mr. Mulhall did not elaborate on whether Mr. Martin had symptoms.

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Covid News: 35 Companies Sign on to Produce Generic Versions of Pfizers Covid Pill - The New York Times

A coronavirus testing site this month, outside a Hong Kong residential building under lockdown.Credit...Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

Hong Kong said that more than one million people in the city of 7.5 million had tested positive for the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, a worrying milestone for a city being battered by an extraordinarily lethal Omicron wave.

Hong Kong health officials said in a news conference on Friday that they had recorded 20,082 daily new cases and 206 new deaths, bringing the cumulative totals to more than 1,010,000 cases and more than 5,000 deaths.

Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The daily average is calculated with data that was reported in the last seven days.

While other places in Asia like China, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam are experiencing similar case waves driven by Omicron, Hong Kongs death rate is high, far outstripping that of mainland China, which has reported a total of about 4,600 deaths in a population of over 1.4 billion. Almost 95 percent of the citys deaths have come in the past 30 days, government data show.

Hong Kong was once viewed as a world leader in controlling the coronavirus crisis. But despite limits on public gatherings, restrictions on nighttime dining and mask mandates, a wave of Omicron cases that began late last year has overwhelmed its health care system, leading to bodies of the dead being piled up in hospitals.

In the past two weeks, Hong Kong has recorded about 65 percent of cases that it has ever had, government data show. Experts have said that figure is most likely an undercount. Using models, researchers at the University of Hong Kong estimated this week that at least 3.6 million people had been infected. Up to 4.5 million people may get the virus before the current outbreak ends, they added.

The outbreak involves the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, which is more transmissible than Omicrons first version, BA.1, though not necessarily more virulent. Researchers in Britain and Denmark have found that BA.2 is no more likely to cause hospitalizations, but studies elsewhere are ongoing.

Other factors in Hong Kongs surge are also at play: The city is densely populated, and has a low vaccination rate among those 70 and older and residents of nursing homes. Its success in keeping the virus at bay until recently has also left many residents without any enhanced immunity.

Hong Kongs government is caught between the surging cases and deaths, pressure from Beijing for mass testing and lockdowns, and pandemic fatigue among residents. On Thursday, Carrie Lam, the citys chief executive, said at a news conference that she would move up the review of its current measures planned for April 20 to as soon as next week and reconsider its flight bans, compulsory testing and mandatory quarantines for travelers. I have a very strong feeling that peoples tolerance is fading, she said.

Hong Kongs case data included results from rapid antigen tests, officials said, which the government has accepted in lieu of P.C.R. test results since last month to expand testing capacity. Residents who test positive with rapid antigen tests have not had to seek confirmation with P.C.R. tests. But the government has also asked them to self-report their infections, or face legal consequences. Those who receive a positive result from a rapid antigen test may be randomly requested to be administered a P.C.R. test, officials said.

At a news conference on Friday, Ms. Lam underscored the urgency of reporting home tests to health authorities. If there are people blatantly refusing to comply, then isnt it incumbent upon the law enforcement body to do something? she said.

Johns Hopkins Universitys Center for Systems Science and Engineering, which has supplied the raw numbers for Our World in Data and The New York Timess coronavirus world map, has reported fewer cases than the Hong Kong government.

Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The daily average is calculated with data that was reported in the last seven days.

The difference is because the center has not been including results from the citys rapid antigen tests in its total, but in an email on Friday, it said it intended to incorporate them in the future.

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Covid News: N.Y.C. Reports Spread of BA.2 Version of Omicron - The New York Times

WELLINGTON, New Zealand

Samoa will go into lockdown starting Saturday as it faces its first coronavirus outbreak, two years into the pandemic.

The move comes after a woman who was about to leave the Pacific island nation tested positive for the coronavirus. It is the first time Samoa has found any unexplained cases in the community and likely points to an undetected outbreak that has been going on for days or even weeks.

A government report leaked online indicates that the woman had visited church services, a hospital, stores, a library and a travel agency since first feeling ill Saturday.

Samoa and several neighboring island nations were among the last places on Earth to avoid virus outbreaks. But the more transmissible Omicron variant has changed the equation, and one by one the island nations have witnessed infections.

Since the start of the year, Kiribati, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands and American Samoa have all experienced their first big outbreaks.

John Fala, who runs a logistics company in Samoa, said it was inevitable that the coronavirus would eventually come to Samoa, a reality brought home for many when it began spreading in nearby American Samoa.

Weve had two years to prepare, Fala said. Now its finally here. Of course, there is going to be a bit of scrambling.

Starting Saturday, all schools will be closed, public gatherings will be banned, and all stores and other services will be shut down, except those considered essential. People are also required to wear masks.

There were reports Friday of panic-buying ahead of the lockdown.

Fala, who is vaccinated, said that his company is considered an essential service and that hes frantically trying to navigate the new rules to keep it operating.

The lockdown is initially scheduled to last through midnight Tuesday, but Fala expects it will be extended.

The father of three young children, Fala said his biggest concern is that unvaccinated children will catch the coronavirus. He said the nation of 200,000 had good rates of inoculation among adults but had only just begun vaccinating children ages 5 to 11 in the past week or so.

About 65% of all Samoans have had at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataafa told people about the positive case in a special announcement to the nation late Thursday. She said the infected woman was in isolation and that her movements and contacts with people were being traced.

Mataafa said officials wanted to do all they could to contain it from spreading rapidly.

Although our country continues to traverse through these difficult times, let us continue to trust in the Lord, Mataafa said in her announcement.

Samoa has had previous coronavirus scares and lockdowns after returning plane passengers tested positive while isolating, but had managed to avoid any community outbreaks until now.

Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Nauru are among the few remaining Pacific island nations to have avoided Omicron outbreaks.

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Facing its first coronavirus outbreak, Samoa to go into lockdown - Los Angeles Times

All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs despite decades of warnings from public-health experts. It has been as inevitable as the passing of day into night.

Even so, its not meant to happen this quickly. When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over. The U.S. funds pandemic preparedness like Minnesota snow, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2018. Theres a lot in January, but in July its all melted.

Or, as it happens, in March.

This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it wont be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It cant buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, theyll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government wont have enough for everyone.

To be clear, these facets of the pandemic response were already insufficient. The U.S. has never tested sufficiently, never vaccinated enough people, never made enough treatments accessible to its most vulnerable, and never adequately worked to flatten global vaccine inequities. These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further. Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the countrys earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will. As I wrote last September, the U.S. was already barreling toward the next pandemic. Now it is sprinting there.

The virus is moving too. Cases are shooting up across Western Europe, auguring a similar rise in the U.S., as has happened in every past surge. (A third of the CDCs wastewater sites have detected upticks in coronavirus samples this month, although such data are noisy and hard to interpret when levels of virus are low.) Meanwhile, mask and vaccine mandates are being lifted. Contact tracing and quarantine policies are being discontinued. The CDCs new guidelines recast most of the country as low risk and left the most vulnerable individuals with the burden of protecting themselves. Some experts supported the guidelines on the grounds that testing, treatments, and other defensive tools were availableand, as promised in Bidens recently unveiled national plan, would be strengthened even further. But those promises were always contingent on congressional funding; without it, those residual layers of protection evaporate too. For half a year, Biden, administration officials, and several prominent public-health voices have encouraged optimism because we have the tools to fight the virus. The first half of that catchphrase now seems doubtful.

As The Washington Post and others have reported, the funding meltdown occurred because Republicans were skeptical about the need for further COVID funding. Their counteroffer was to repurpose unspent pots of money that had already been set aside for state-level pandemic responses; Democrats refused, and coronavirus aid was omitted from the bill entirely. It is reasonable to ask for accountability in spending, but this particular line of reasoning is familiar. In 2016, Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to fight Zika, but Republicans refused, arguing that such funds should be cannibalized from a pot that was set aside for the 2015 Ebola outbreak. In 2018, Donald Trump asked Congress to rescind $252 million that was leftover in that pot, which he billed as an example of irresponsible federal spending. In fact, those funds were an investment, left deliberately untouched so that the U.S. could more quickly respond to future outbreaks (such as the one that began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exactly as Trump issued his call). The U.S. clearly grasps the concept of preparedness during peacetime: It spends at least $700 billion a year on its military, more than any other country. But when thinking about infectious diseases, vital preparations for the future are routinely seen as unnecessary excesses of the presenteven in the middle of a pandemic.

One could argue that such thinking reflects pragmatism rather than complacency. Budgets arent infinite, and countries face a multitude of pressing problems. If one threat goes away, doesnt it make sense to divert resources to others? This argument fails for three major reasons. First, and most obvious, the threat didnt go away! Even when the coronavirus reaches endemicity (which it very much hasnt yet), an endemic threat isnt one that can be ignored but one that must be managedwhich requires regular investment of the kind that Congress saw fit to deny. Second, preventing epidemics is far more cost-effective than dealing with their consequences, and allocating funds only when a threat is knocking on our door is economic folly.

Third, many of the measures that would make a difference against COVIDbetter ventilation, paid sick leave, equitable health care, a stronger public-health infrastructurewould also protect people from other diseases and health problems. In this respect, even the $15 billion that the White House asked for (and now wont get) is insufficient. And to consider such money as COVID funding is part of the problema misguided approach of tackling health problems one by one, instead of fixing the inequities that underlie them all.

These dynamics might occur for many of the same reasons that I identified in a recent article about why much of the U.S. has normalized so many COVID deaths. The virus is invisible. The ruin it inflicts is hidden from public view. The pandemic has gone on for two long years, turning tragedy into routine and breeding fatalism from failure. Older, disabled, poor, Black, or brown Americans, whose excess deaths were tolerated long before COVID, have borne the brunt of the pandemic, while privileged people have had the swiftest access to medical interventionsand have been quickest to declare the crisis over. A country that so readily forgets its dead is surely prone to also forgetting the lessons of the all-too-recent past, setting itself up for further failure in an all-too-imminent future.

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The COVID Funding Collapse Is a Disaster - The Atlantic