View allAll Photos Tagged omicron
December 20, 2021 - New York City - Governor Kathy Hochul, joined by Jackie Bray, Acting Commissioner of New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, and Director of State Operations Kathryn Garcia updates New Yorkers on the Covid-19 spread in New York State, particularly on the Omicron variant, during a press briefing Monday December 20, 2021 in New York City. (Kevin P. Coughlin / Office of the Governor)
OMICRON KAPPA UPSILON, the top twelve percent of the graduating class who rank highest in scholastic, technical, clinical and professional achievements during the entire four year dental curriculum.
PRESENTER: DR. WEYANT
AWARDEES: KAITLYN BURGESS, EMILY CHOU, ZACHARY MILLS, DOUGLAS PORR, GREGORY SENCAK, NICHOLAS SHIREY, RICHARD VARGO, LOUIS WENGER, PEINI ZHU
Fotos para o TCC do curso anual da Omicron Centro de Fotografia para o tema: O mundo lúdico da criança
Algumas imagens que fiz durante o curso de cinematografia digital que o núcleo de cinema do Omicron centro de fotografia organizou com o grande Carlos Ebert.
Hoje adorei ver o espaço com mais de 45 alunos divididos entre o workshop de moda com o Danilo Russo e aulas comigo, com o Leandro Taques e o Paulo Henrique no curso anual de fotografia. Amanhã tem aula prática...vamos lá!
Osvaldo Santos Lima
30/11/2021. London, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Boris Johnson-Covid-19 Press Conference. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a Covid-19 press conference at No9 Downing Street on the Omicron coronavirus variant with the health secretary Sajid Javid and Chief Executive of NHS England Amanda Pritchard. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
Repository: Duke University Archives. Durham, North Carolina, USA. library.duke.edu/uarchives
Trying to locate this photo at the Duke University Archives? You’ll find it in the University Archives Photographic Negative Collection, box 13.
Nesta quarta-feira às 19h abre a exposição com o tema "Família" com fotografias dos formando de nossas turmas do curso anual de 2009!
Anuncio aos quatro ventos pois ouço, diversas vezes, que poucos conhecem o Omicron Centro de Fotografia, que já ouviram falar de outras escolas mas não de nosso trabalho. Talvez nosso marketing seja às avessas pensando mais no aluno dentro de sala do que no mercado. Nossos alunos sabem disso, vivenciaram uma maneira de fazer e ensinar fotografia que funciona há 18 anos (colocando-nos como mais antiga instituição de ensino da fotografia em funcionamento deste estado), com a melhor infraestrutura ao ponto de termos um estúdio maior que muitas faculdades, com profissionais com formação rara num mercado onde poucos podem contar com professores com mestrado na área e nós temos vários. Salas confortáveis, espaço de exposições, uma localização num dos mais nobres bairros de Curitiba...é, pensando bem, temos tudo para continuarmos focados dentro da sala de aula onde esta a peça mais importante de marketing de uma empresa: o cliente.
Convido a todos para nesta quarta-feira conhecer nossos novos talentos,
saudações fotográficas,
Osvaldo Santos Lima
More than 750 athletes participated in the 2013 Hudson Valley Regional Special Olympics May 4 at West Point. Supporting the event were more than 1,000 cadets from 4th Regiment volunteering as sponsors and escorts as well as a dozen corps squad and competitive club cadet teams cheering on the athletes at Shea Stadium, Arvin Gymnasium and Gillis Field House. In its 29th year, the regional spring games were presented by Omicron Delta Kappa, the National Leadership Honor Society. Class of 2013 Cadet Matthew Walsh was the cadet in charge. U.S. Army photo by Mike Strasser/USMA PAO
www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/03/covid-omicron-va...
FDA will rigorously review vaccines for children under 5, surgeon general says
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy is seeking to reassure parents that the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for young children will be thoroughly reviewed, after the company’s submission to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency-use authorization this week.
“Please know that the FDA will not cut any corners in their review process. They know that they are the gold standard that all of us rely on,” Murthy said Wednesday during a White House news briefing.
The FDA requested that data from the two-dose trials be presented to initiate a “rolling submission” process in hopes of expediting the launch, according to a joint statement from Pfizer and BioNTech. The unusual approach has raised questions among some parents about whether they should rush to get their young children the shot as soon as it’s available. Only 22 percent of children ages 5 to 11 are vaccinated, according to Washington Post data.
The omicron wave in the United States has caused millions of families to struggle with unreliable child care, irregular school and day-care closures, quarantines and fears about their children getting infected. Regulators could approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s authorization request as early as the end of this month.
Here’s what to know
■ The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Thursday that starting in early spring, the 64 million people on Medicare will be able to get free over-the-counter coronavirus tests from certain pharmacies.
■ The U.S. Army said Wednesday that it would immediately begin removing soldiers who have refused a coronavirus vaccination, a move that Army Secretary Christine Wormuth justified as necessary for military readiness.
■ A tearful video posted on social media by a Belgian skeleton racer has drawn attention to coronavirus troubles within the Olympics community as the Beijing Winter Games open Friday.
L.A.’s mayor took a maskless photo with Magic Johnson, defying covid rules. His defense: ‘I’m holding my breath’
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Over the weekend, Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson took to Twitter to share several photos he’d taken as the L.A. Rams faced off against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC championship game.
“Hanging out at SoFi Stadium today!” Johnson tweeted, referencing the Rams’ home in Inglewood, Calif., along with four pictures that appeared to be taken from a luxury suite.
But the photos were quickly scrutinized by fans and social media users. Johnson was posing with several Democratic California politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who posted her own maskless selfie from the game.
None were wearing masks, which are required in Los Angeles County for all indoor public settings and outdoor “mega events.” Stadium policy also requires anyone not “actively eating or drinking” to wear face coverings.
Four of Boris Johnson’s top aides quit, while ‘Partygate’ scandal rocks Downing Street
LONDON — Four top aides to embattled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced their resignations on Thursday, as the British government continued to be rocked by a scandal dubbed “Partygate.”
During a chaotic night, commentators were attempting to figure out who jumped ship — and who was pushed.
Johnson’s office is under investigation for a string of gatherings over the past two years that are alleged to have violated the government’s own coronavirus restrictions. A report published this week by senior civil servant Sue Gray found that there were “failures of leadership and judgment” at 10 Downing Street. The London Metropolitan Police are looking into 12 of the most serious alleged breaches.
San Francisco allowing extra booster shot for Johnson & Johnson recipients
In a break with federal guidance, San Francisco health officials are allowing adult residents who received the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine to get a second booster shot.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a booster shot for recipients of J&J’s one-dose vaccine but has not endorsed a third dose. In an advisory updated last month, the San Francisco Department of Public Health described the allowance of an extra booster as an “accommodation” for those who request it. The department cited studies showing that three shots are necessary to maintain protection against the omicron coronavirus variant as immunity wanes over time.
“Although this research has so far focused on persons who received a primary series with non-J&J vaccines,” it said, “we believe that similar studies in persons whose primary series was a single J&J vaccine dose would yield similar results showing that 3 doses are needed for optimal protection.”
About 16 million people received Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose regimen in the United States. That number represents a tiny sliver of the nation’s fully vaccinated population of 212 million, and some who got J&J shots have complained of being overlooked in federal guidelines. In December, U.S. health officials recommended the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots over those made by J&J, citing the rare but potentially fatal risk of blood clots associated with the latter.
Under the San Francisco measure, clinics operated by the health department are accommodating “off-label” requests for a third dose from J&J vaccine recipients who are older than 18 and five months past their initial booster. Eligibility is limited to San Francisco residents, who must attest that they have consulted with a health-care provider about the additional dose.
San Francisco health authorities have acted ahead of federal officials at least once before, accommodating requests for an mRNA booster from some J&J recipients. The federal government later followed, recommending in October that those who got the one-dose vaccine should seek booster shots.
Key coronavirus updates from around the world
■ South Africa’s Afrigen Biologics has used the publicly available sequence of Moderna’s mRNA coronavirus vaccine to make its own version, which could be tested in humans before the end of the year, the company’s top executive said. Afrigen’s product would be the first made based on a widely used vaccine without the assistance and approval of the developer.
■ In Bangladesh, the government has extended school closures implemented last month amid a rise in cases due to the omicron variant. Teachers and students had returned to in-person classes briefly in September after 543 days of closure during the pandemic.
■ Sweden said it will lift pandemic restrictions next week, despite experiencing record levels of infections. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said at a news conference, “It is becoming time to open up Sweden again.”
■ Bali will welcome its first direct flight carrying foreign tourists in nearly two years on Thursday. The Indonesian resort island is hoping to boost tourism revenue but will still require vaccinated travelers to quarantine for five to seven days at hotels.
■ In Venezuela, medical charity Doctors Without Borders is providing mental health care to covid patients, their families and medical workers in two public hospitals in the capital, to support the country’s run-down health system.
■ In China, President Xi Jinping said in a video message Thursday that “the world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready. We will do our best to deliver to the world a streamlined, safe and splendid Games.” The Beijing Olympics officially open Friday amid an outbreak of coronavirus infections.
O Omicron Centro de Fotografia está digitalizando, através de um super coolscan 5000 da Nikon, todo o acervo de fotografia analógica do Professor Osvaldo Santos Lima. São milhares de imagens que serão digitalizadas em alta resolução e com 16 bits de profundidade de cor. As imagens serão indexadas e arquivadas em hds externos de alta capacidade. Cada imagem ocupa o espaço de 128 Mb em média.
"Esta imagem, feita por volta de 15 anos atrás, me anima a ensinar aos meus alunos o respeito que se deve ter com as suas fotografias. A digitalização de todo o meu acervo pessoal, negativos e cromos, deve demorar anos mas trará a luz imagens desconhecidas do grande público." Relata o fotógrafo e fundador de nosso centro Prof. Osvaldo Santos Lima.
O Omicron Centro de Fotografia oferece o serviço de laboratório digital de "fineprint" e agora de digitalização de acervos em 35 mm.
Saudações fotográficas,
Equipe Omicron.
www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/14/world/omicron-covid-vacci...
Omicron pushes hospitals to the brink in two dozen U.S. states.
The extremely contagious Omicron variant is fueling an enormous coronavirus wave that is pushing hospitals close to their capacity limits in about two dozen states, according to data posted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
At least 80 percent of staffed hospital beds were occupied in 24 states on Thursday, including Georgia, Maryland and Massachusetts, the figures show.
[Dr Walensky testified that hospitals were telling her they had plenty of empty beds, just not enough staff to staff them. See news.yahoo.com/decoding-biden-health-officials-told-00083...]
More troubling, the data showed that in 18 states and Washington, D.C., at least 85 percent of beds in adult intensive care units were full, with the most acute scarcity of beds in Alabama, Missouri, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Texas.
The pressure on I.C.U. capacity comes as the Omicron variant has touched off a nearly vertical rise in infections and hospitalizations. The country as a whole and 26 states have reported more coronavirus cases in the past week than in any other seven-day period.
In that time, an average of more than 803,000 coronavirus cases have been reported each day in the United States, an increase of 133 percent from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database, and 25 states and territories have reported their highest weekly caseloads yet. Deaths are up 53 percent to an average of roughly 1,871 a day.
That has helped push the country’s average rate of hospitalizations above last winter’s peak. Hospitalizations of people testing positive for coronavirus over that week are up to more than 148,000 a day, a record. The numbers are rising fastest in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Times database.
(The hospitalization figures include people who test positive for the virus after being admitted for conditions unrelated to Covid-19, but there is no national data showing how many people are in that category.)
Since Thanksgiving, the White House has sent more than 350 military doctors, nurses, medics and other personnel to 24 states to help hospitals with staffing challenges, President Biden said this week, and plans to send an additional 1,000 service members to six hard-hit states. That is in addition to the more than 14,000 National Guard members deployed in 49 states to help staff hospitals and other medical facilities, he and other officials said.
On Wednesday, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said the state would spend $40 million in federal funds to hire more staff to help hospitals there for the next 60 days because “we know we’re going to continue to see a sharp rise in cases from the Omicron variant.” Minnesota’s hospitals have been struggling to keep up since the fall, when the National Guard was called in to help with a flood of patients infected by the deadlier Delta variant.
Also Wednesday, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said she was sending an additional 700 members of the state’s National Guard — bringing the total deployed to 1,200 members — to help hospitals deal with a rise in coronavirus patients. “Our hospitals are under extreme pressure,” she wrote on Twitter.
One day earlier Gov. Janet Mills of Maine said she was activating 169 members of the National Guard to help with capacity constraints at hospitals, joining more than 200 members already deployed in the state.
“I wish we did not have to take this step,” Ms. Mills said in a statement, “but the rise in hospitalizations — caused primarily by those who are not vaccinated — is stretching the capacity of our health care system thin, jeopardizing care for Maine people, and putting increased strain on our already exhausted health care workers.”
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/14/1072188527/f...
For the 36 countries with the lowest vaccination rates, supply isn't the only issue
In the United States and many other wealthy countries, you can get a free COVID vaccine at supermarkets, pharmacies and clinics.
In other countries, it's a very different story.
"The vaccine is not available in the North (of Yemen)," says Jasmin Lavoie with the Norwegian Refugee Council, who's based in the northern city of Sana'a. "If a person wanted to be vaccinated, that person would have to go to the south. So drive around 15 to 20 hours crossing front lines in the mountains." Even then, after such a treacherous journey through a war zone, it's not clear if doses would be available. Like many low-income countries, Yemen has struggled to get hold of vaccine.
"Yemen has been one of the places with the lowest vaccination rates in the world," says Lavoie. "And that's despite the fact that we've experienced three waves of COVID." Currently fewer than 2% of Yemenis are fully vaccinated.
Yemen is one of 36 countries that fall below the 10% immunization threshold, some with rates under 2%. Much of the mid-section of Africa is in that category, including powerful economic and political players like Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.
By contrast, many wealthy countries have fully vaccinated more than 80% of their citizens.
Why Africa lags so far behind
Maaza Seyoum with the African Alliance, a South Africa-based advocacy group, says there are many factors playing in to the low vaccination rates in many countries on the continent but the biggest issue is simply that African nations have struggled to get doses.
"Initially, 100 percent, I would say the problem was a lack of access (to vaccines) and a global system that did not prioritize African countries," Maaza says. Wealthy nations bought up far more pharmaceutical firms vaccine production than they could even use. The WHO-backed COVAX program faltered as it relied heavily on voluntary donations and on manufacturers in India who were blocked from exporting doses when COVID case numbers skyrocketed on the sub-continent. Some African countries managed to get supplies from China but Beijing often prioritized donations to wealthier trading partners.
That situation has changed, says Maaza. Recently vaccine deliveries to Africa have increased. But now there are new problems: the shipments are haphazard and sometimes consist of less popular brands that are about to expire.
"Now we're seeing the sort of drip, drip, drip of vaccines," she says. "People are waiting for vaccines to come. They come, then they stop."
This unpredictable supply chain, she says, makes it nearly impossible for African countries to plan nationwide vaccination drives. And in some of these places where hardly anyone has gotten the jab, rumors about the mysterious vaccine have flourished and augmented vaccine hesitancy.
"The truth is, there is vaccine hesitancy everywhere," Maaza says. "But as people are waiting, it leaves kind of a fertile ground for these rumors to circulate."
Which makes convincing people to come to a clinic and get immunized even more of a challenge.
What's behind those under 10% vaccination numbers
The World Health Organization set a goal of trying to push all countries to 40% vaccine coverage by the end of 2021. The 36 countries still under 10% obviously didn't even get close. Kate O'Brien, the director of immunization and vaccines for the World Health Organization, says this is a significant problem.
"For countries that are struggling to get even above 10%, what this means is that health-care workers are not fully vaccinated yet," she says. "It means older age populations, those who have underlying medical conditions, the people at highest risk are not fully protected yet."
She acknowledges vaccine supply inequity as a major part of why rates are so low in these three dozen countries but says there are other reasons too. Many of these countries had health systems that were struggling even before the pandemic to meet local medical needs. Some of them have needed to upgrade refrigeration systems to be able to store certain mRNA vaccines at extremely low temperatures. Others need syringes. All of this takes money that many low-income nations health ministries may not have.
"A COVID vaccine campaign does require funding," O'Brien says. Countries need money "to deploy new health workers and to assure that the clinics have the resources that they need."
And while there has been some international assistance to lower-income nations to help, that financing has also at times been haphazard and unpredictable.
Ongoing conflicts present another obstacle
Away from Africa, the other nations that haven't yet gotten above 10% COVID vaccine coverage are some of the most troubled in the world, including Yemen as well as Syria, Afghanistan and Haiti.
Currently the armed conflict has displaced 4 million of 30 million Yemenis from their homes. Various groups control different parts of the country. According to the U.N. more than 2/3rds of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance. Yet international aid agencies have struggled to meet those needs and keep their operations running in the country due to the ongoing insecurity and a lack of funding.
For most people in Yemen, life is incredibly difficult. COVID vaccinations are "not on the top of the list of priorities for many people in Yemen," Jasmin Lavoie with NRC says. He says most Yemenis spend their days trying to find food, shelter, decent toilets and worrying about whether they'll have to flee fighting once again. "These are reasons why people are not getting vaccinated too," he adds.
There are similar issues in other conflict zones. "In a place like Afghanistan, in a place like Syria, COVID is not their number one priority," says Paul Spiegel, who runs the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Spiegel returned to Baltimore from working in Afghanistan in mid-December. "[Vaccination] campaigns are happening," he says but adds that the immunization drives are constrained by the limited shipments of vaccine. "A fair bit of it is Johnson and Johnson, which makes a lot of sense in Afghanistan situation because it's just one dose," he notes.
But similar to Yemen, the social upheaval in Afghanistan, with the U.S. departing and the Taliban returning to power, has pushed COVID to the backburner. Vaccine drives are not a top priority for the Taliban, even though it has said it supports vaccination drives by COVAX and the U.N.
Nor is it a priority among Afghans. "Right now there's such a dire humanitarian situation there," he says. "[Afghans] are worried about getting food on the table, they're worried about feeding their kids. And so COVID is not a priority for the average person."
This is a Florida College or University fraternity or club. Found with other early photos from Florida.
30/11/2021. London, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Boris Johnson-Covid-19 Press Conference. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a Covid-19 press conference at No9 Downing Street on the Omicron coronavirus variant with the health secretary Sajid Javid and Chief Executive of NHS England Amanda Pritchard. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
This photo's title, which also names the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2) strain currently causing a global healthcare scare, would be better for a thriller-genre book or film about viral terrorism.
Cue the movie trailer: Six survivors. Keanu Reeves. Daniel Craig. Angelina Jolie. Regé-Jean Page. Kelly Marie Tran. And the esteemed Charlton Heston (appearing as a 3-D hologram). The Omicron Variant. The premise is so frightening that the screenwriters have each gotten three COVID-19 booster shots. You, too, will never think the same way about vaccines—and who gets them when supplies are lacking and the HAZMAT-suited stack body bags in front of your house. Oh, did we forget to mention that they’re empty and waiting to be filled—when your, ah, quarantine is over. The Omicron Variant. Who will survive viral armageddon?
As I write on Dec. 10, 2021, San Diego County health officials have identified two Omicron cases (e.g. infections)—and both individuals are considered to be fully vaccinated, meaning two shots and a booster. Make what you will about the vaccines’ effectiveness; I won’t offer opinion.
But I will say this: If, as Los Angeles Times reports, the variant was in California wastewater before the World Health Organization raised alarm, Omicron is everywhere. Everyone should be relieved that, while fairly infectious, the strain presents mild symptoms—unlike the fictitious film of the same name.
29/11/2021. London, United Kingdom. Health Secretary Sajid Javid holds a call with his counterparts from the G7 to discuss the outbreak of the Omicron Covid-19 virus at the Department of Health and Social Care. Picture by Lauren Hurley / DHSC
www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/01/covid-omicron-va...
No indication new version of omicron causes more severe illness, WHO says
World Health Organization officials said Tuesday that a new version of the omicron variant known as BA. 2 appears to be slightly more transmissible. But they said there is no evidence that it causes more-severe disease and cautioned that information is still limited.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference Tuesday that the global health organization is tracking four “sublineages” of the omicron variant, which has fueled a new wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. “This virus will continue to evolve,” Tedros said, adding that vaccines also may need to evolve.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on covid-19, said the agency is working with thousands of experts to track the coronavirus. There is “no indication that there’s a change in severity” with BA. 2, she said.
Officials said the WHO will share more information on BA. 2 as it is available.
WHO leaders also expressed concern about a recent rise in covid-19 deaths in most regions of the world, and Tedros said more cases have been reported in the past 10 weeks — since omicron was identified — than in all of 2020.
Asked about countries that have moved to lift coronavirus restrictions, Van Kerkhove said: “Many countries have not gone through the peak of omicron yet. … Now is not the time to lift everything all at once.” She urged countries to increase vaccination and to use mask-wearing and distancing to slow the virus’s spread, although she acknowledged that each country’s situation is different.
Tedros said the WHO’s goal to have 70 percent of the global population vaccinated by this summer remains attainable.
“Ending this pandemic is not a matter of chance,” he said. “It’s a matter of choice.” By meeting vaccination goals, he said, the world “can end the pandemic.”
Key coronavirus updates from around the world
Here’s what to know about the top coronavirus stories around the globe:
■ Portugal’s prime minister said Tuesday that he has tested positive for the coronavirus, two days after his landslide election victory and just as he starts forming his new government. António Costa said he will self-isolate for seven days, in accordance with his country’s pandemic rules.
■ Denmark on Tuesday became the first European Union country to lift all of its coronavirus restrictions, relying on vaccinations to tackle the omicron variant. The country said it will remove requirements for masks and covid passes and scrap limited opening hours for shops and restaurants. Neighboring Norway said it will scrap most of its remaining lockdown measures, effective immediately, as a spike in infections is unlikely to jeopardize health services.
■ Pakistan will begin a nationwide door-to-door vaccination drive starting Tuesday, its National Command and Operation Center said. About 55,000 mobile vaccination teams will provide the doses, including boosters, and aim to vaccinate more than 35 million people.
■ Rwanda reopened its border with Uganda to truckers this week, after nearly three years. Regular travelers will still be restricted to only essential trips, authorities said, a decision that disappointed traders hoping for a return to normal business.
■ As the Beijing Winter Olympics kick off later this week, officials in China said Tuesday that the Games’ coronavirus situation is within the “expected controllable range,” despite a number of positive cases being detected. About 200 cases have been reported since Jan. 23 among airport arrivals and those in the “closed loop” area of the Games.
Pregnant journalist says she’s returning to New Zealand after strict covid rules left her in Afghanistan
A pregnant journalist who said she chose to stay in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan because her native New Zealand did not allow her to return due to strict coronavirus restrictions said the government reversed course — and that she would be going home “at the beginning of March to give birth to our baby girl.”
Charlotte Bellis, 35, from Christchurch, said in a statement Tuesday that her emergency application to return despite New Zealand’s closed border was approved overnight after a public back-and-forth with the government.
Bellis attracted international attention when she said in a New Zealand Herald column on Friday that the Taliban offered her “safe haven” as a pregnant and unmarried woman — whereas her own government refused her application for an emergency medical exemption to the lottery system that assigns returning citizens a spot in “managed isolation and quarantine,” or MIQ.
New Zealand officials said Tuesday that Bellis was given a voucher for a spot in government-mandated quarantine because they assessed that she faced threats to her safety in Afghanistan, according to the Associated Press.
Bellis, who says she does not feel like she is in danger in Kabul, said in her statement the government should expand its criteria for medical exemptions, which currently rely on travel being time-critical.
Pandemic creates tons of medical waste, threatening environment and human health, WHO says
The coronavirus pandemic is estimated to have created tens of thousands of tons of extra medical waste around the world, threatening the environment and human health, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
The pandemic has put a “tremendous strain on health care waste management systems around the world,” the WHO said, calling for improvements.
In a report published Tuesday, the United Nations agency estimated that about 87,000 tons of personal protective equipment was procured between March 2020 and November 2021 and shipped to support countries’ responses through a joint U.N. emergency initiative.
“Most of this equipment is expected to have ended up as waste,” the report’s authors said.
They noted that their estimate is only an indication of the scale of the waste problem and doesn’t take into account equipment acquired by countries outside the U.N. initiative or waste generated by the public through the purchase of items such as disposable masks.
A previous study by a group of researchers based in China and the United States last year found that some 8 million metric tons of pandemic-related plastic waste had been created by 193 countries, with about 26,000 tons of that ending up in the world’s oceans, where it threatens to disrupt marine life and further pollute beaches.
According to the WHO report, more than 140 million test kits, with a potential to generate 2,600 tons of noninfectious waste, mostly plastic, and some 731,000 liters of chemical waste — enough to fill a third of an Olympic-size swimming pool — have been shipped by the U.N. Meanwhile, more than 8 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, producing 144,000 tons of waste in the form of syringes, needles and safety boxes.
“It is absolutely vital to provide health workers with the right PPE,” said Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program. “But it is also vital to ensure that it can be used safely without impacting on the surrounding environment.”
About 30 percent of health-care facilities — the majority of them in the least developed countries — are not equipped to handle pre-pandemic waste loads, let alone the coronavirus waste.
“This potentially exposes health workers to needle stick injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, while also impacting communities living near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites through contaminated air from burning waste, poor water quality or disease carrying pests,” the WHO said.
U.S. bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor tests positive for coronavirus at Beijing Olympics
BEIJING — Elana Meyers Taylor, the most decorated American female Olympic bobsledder in history, revealed in a social media post that she tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday within the “closed loop” here, jeopardizing her ability to compete — although bobsled’s late placement on the Beijing 2022 schedule offers a shred of hope.
Meyers Taylor, 37, said she tested positive on Saturday in China, two days after she and her family — husband Nic Taylor, a fellow bobsledder and alternate for Team USA, and their nearly 2-year-old son Nico — arrived in the country. Because she is asymptomatic, she is quarantining at an official Beijing 2022 isolation facility and is required to test negative twice on different days to be released and allowed to compete.
Although the Olympics begin this week and the Opening Ceremonies are Friday, the bobsled competition doesn’t start until Feb. 13, with training runs starting Feb. 10 at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre.
30/11/2021. London, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Boris Johnson-Covid-19 Press Conference. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a Covid-19 press conference at No9 Downing Street on the Omicron coronavirus variant with the health secretary Sajid Javid and Chief Executive of NHS England Amanda Pritchard. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
It's official, I'm a candidate for Alpha Sigma Kappa Sorority! These are the other girls in my class! We'll be going through member education in the upcoming weeks, leading up to Initiation Week (I Week) in March.
The Lambda Rho chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi greeting new members during the chapter's second ever Bid Day at TCU. For those of you who don't know what Bid Day is...and I didn't either...all the sororities assemble on the Campus Commons. Then the newbies are released one chapter at a time to run toward their new sisters. It's kinda like a cattle drive, but with a much happier ending.
I also rolled about 90 seconds of video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qnt0kMEWWQ&list=UUlJLPNVzTQB...
You can learn more about AOII here:
www.facebook.com/AOIILambdaRho
This album is part of the event coverage for the Fort Worth Portrait Project. The project tells the story of Fort Worth from 2014 - 2044 one captioned portrait at a time, but I also enjoy covering events like this one too.
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17 Ene 2022 . Secretaría de Transporte . Por Ómicron se refuerza la supervisión al transporte público .
The Lambda Rho chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi greeting new members during the chapter's second ever Bid Day at TCU. For those of you who don't know what Bid Day is...and I didn't either...all the sororities assemble on the Campus Commons. Then the newbies are released one chapter at a time to run toward their new sisters. It's kinda like a cattle drive, but with a much happier ending.
I also rolled about 90 seconds of video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qnt0kMEWWQ&list=UUlJLPNVzTQB...
You can learn more about AOII here:
www.facebook.com/AOIILambdaRho
This album is part of the event coverage for the Fort Worth Portrait Project. The project tells the story of Fort Worth from 2014 - 2044 one captioned portrait at a time, but I also enjoy covering events like this one too.
Please follow the Fort Worth Portrait Project:
www.redeemedexpressions.com/fort-worth-portrait-project/
www.facebook.com/fortworthportraitproject
www.twitter.com/FWPortraitProj
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Do you want to be featured in the project? Just head to the following site with a photo and a caption:
2-1-17 | SUN-e Picture of the Day: On Jan. 29, the Shenandoah University Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) Circle inducted 46 students and one staff member into its ranks. This is is a record number of inductees since Shenandoah reactivated the organization in 2008. ODK is a national leadership honor society that recognizes and encourages superior scholarship, leadership and exemplary character. Congratulations to all of the new members of ODK! Congratulations to all the new members of ODK, including student inductees (listed in alphabetical order) Emily Boero, Courtney Michelle Bridges, Brianna Brophy, Christopher Castanho, Jeffrey W. Chuang, Cory Claytor, Meghan C. Clouspy, Alaina Grace Combs, Karen Cornejo Guillen, Ashlyn Elizabeth Drake, Josue Israel Duran, Mary L. Dyke, Casey Edsall, Antonio Ford, Thanveer Reddy Gadwal, Annabelle Garcia, Jessica Gardiner, Gabrielle Haas, Kriti Hada, Brooke Ann Heltzel, Jacqueline Hemler, Anne Hess, Daniel G. Hillgren, Melinda Hockaday, Matthew Hwang, Terria Trana Jones, Benjamin William Judy, Desiree Kardashian, Michelle Lynn Krause, Peyton Leigh Krevonick, Danielle LaBar, Rachel Nicole Levy, Anna Lopynski, Dani Maloney, Sarah H. Mann, Joselyn E. Mendoza, Sapana Ojha, Elizabeth Pardo, Heather L. Pollak, Silvino Resendiz, Shelby Rose Shrader, Justin Struyk, Cassandra R. Tabarini, Manuel J. Vasquez, Corrie Wernle and Alex Wessel, as well as Director of Advising and College of Arts & Sciences Instructor of Kinesiology Sarah “Salli” Hamilton, M.S., A.B.D., who was inducted as a staff member. (PHOTO: Jimmy Smith)
10/02/2023 Florianópolis, SC. Novas Vacinas contra COVID-19. O estado de Santa Catarina recebeu novas doses das vacinas da Pfizer para diferentes faixa etárias além da bivalente que protege contra a variante Ômicron.
Para identificar os frascos :
A bivalente o frasco com tampa cinza, bebês e crianças entre 6 meses e 5 anos frasco tampa vermelha e crianças e adolescentes tampa laranja.
Foto Ricardo Wolffenbüttel /SECOM
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00215-2
Where did Omicron come from? Three key theories
The highly transmissible variant emerged with a host of unusual mutations. Now scientists are trying to work out how it evolved.
Little more than two months after it was first spotted in South Africa, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world faster than any previous versions. Scientists have tracked it in more than 120 countries, but remain puzzled by a key question: where did Omicron come from?
There’s no transparent path of transmission linking Omicron to its predecessors. Instead, the variant has an unusual array of mutations, which it evolved entirely outside the view of researchers. Omicron is so different from earlier variants, such as Alpha and Delta, that evolutionary virologists estimate its closest-known genetic ancestor probably dates back to more than a year ago, some time after mid-2020 (ref. 1). “It just came out of nowhere,” says Darren Martin, a computational biologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
The question of Omicron’s origins is of more than academic importance. Working out under what conditions this highly transmissible variant arose might help scientists to understand the risk of new variants emerging, and suggest steps to minimize it, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatoon, Canada. “It’s very difficult to try to mitigate a risk that you can’t even remotely wrap your head around,” she says.
The World Health Organization’s recently formed Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) met in January to discuss Omicron’s origins. The group is expected to release a report in early February, according to Marietjie Venter, a medical virologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, who chairs SAGO.
Ahead of that report, scientists are investigating three theories. Although researchers have sequenced millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, they might simply have missed a series of mutations that eventually led to Omicron. Alternatively, the variant might have evolved mutations in one person, as part of a long-term infection. Or it could have emerged unseen in other animal hosts, such as mice or rats.
For now, whichever idea a researcher favours “often comes down to gut feeling rather than any sort of principled argument”, says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “They are all fair game,” says Jinal Bhiman, a medical scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Everyone has their favourite hypothesis.”
Craziest genome
Researchers agree that Omicron is a recent arrival. It was first detected in South Africa and Botswana in early November 2021 (see ‘Omicron takeover’); retrospective testing has since found earlier samples from individuals in England on 1 and 3 November, and in South Africa, Nigeria and the United States on 2 November. An analysis of the mutation rate in hundreds of sequenced genomes, and of how quickly the virus had spread through populations by December, dates its emergence to not long before that — around the end of September or early October last year2. In southern Africa, Omicron probably spread from the dense urban province of Gauteng, between Johannesburg and Pretoria, to other provinces and to neighbouring Botswana.
But because Johannesburg is home to the largest airport on the African continent, the variant could have emerged anywhere in the world — merely being picked up in South Africa because of the country’s sophisticated genetic surveillance, says Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban and at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation, who has led South Africa’s efforts to track viral variants, including Omicron.
What stands out about Omicron is its remarkable number of mutations. Martin heard about it when he took a phone call from de Oliveira, who asked him to look at the craziest SARS-CoV-2 genome he had ever seen.
The variant has more than 50 mutations when compared with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus isolated in Wuhan, China (see go.nature.com/32utxva). Some 30 of these contribute to changes in amino acids in the spike protein1, which the coronavirus uses to attach to and fuse with cells. Previous variants of concern have had no more than ten such spike mutations. “That is a hell of a lot of changes,” says Neher (see ‘Most mutated’).
Researchers have seen many of these mutations before. Some were previously known to give the virus an increased ability to bind to the ACE2 receptor protein — which adorns host cells and is the docking point for SARS-CoV-2 — or to help it evade the body’s immune system. Omicron forms a stronger grip on ACE2 than do previously seen variants3. It is also better at evading the virus-blocking ‘neutralizing’ antibodies4 produced by people who have been vaccinated, or who have been infected with earlier variants. Other changes in the spike protein seem to have modified how Omicron enters cells: it appears to be less adept at fusing directly with the cell’s membrane, and instead tends to gain entry after being engulfed in an endosome (a lipid-surrounded bubble).
But more than a dozen of Omicron’s mutations are extremely rare: some have not been seen at all before, and others have popped up but disappeared again quickly, presumably because they gave the virus a disadvantage1.
Another curious feature of Omicron is that, from a genomic viewpoint, it consists of three distinct sublineages (called BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3) that all seem to have emerged at around the same time — two of which have taken off globally. That means Omicron had time to diversify before scientists noticed it. Any theory about its origins has to take this feature into account, as well as the number of mutations, notes Joel Wertheim, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego.
Silent spread
Researchers have explained the emergence of previous variants of concern through a simple process of gradual evolution. As SARS-CoV-2 replicates and transmits from person to person, random changes crop up in its RNA sequence, some of which persist. Scientists have observed that, in a given lineage, about one or two single-letter mutations a month make it into the general viral circulation — a mutation rate about half that of influenza. It is also possible for chunks of coronavirus genomes to shuffle and recombine wholesale, adds Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. And viruses can evolve faster when there is selection pressure, he says, because mutations are more likely to stick around if they give the virus an increased ability to propagate under certain environmental conditions.
Some scientists think that person-to-person spread would not be conducive to accumulating as many changes as Omicron has since mid-2020. “It does seem like a year and a half is a really short period of time for that many mutations to emerge and to apparently be selected for,” says Rasmussen.
But Bhiman argues that enough time has elapsed. She thinks the mutation process could have occurred unseen, in a region of the world that has limited genomic sequencing and among people who don’t typically get tested, perhaps because they didn’t have symptoms. At some point in the past few months, she says, something happened to help Omicron explode, maybe because the progress of other variants — such as Delta — was gradually impeded by the immunity built up from vaccination and previous infection, whereas Omicron was able to evade this barrier.
Although researchers have submitted almost 7.5 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences to the GISAID genome database, hundreds of millions of viral genomes from people with COVID-19 worldwide have not been sequenced. South Africa, with some 28,000 genomes, has sequenced less than 1% of its known COVID-19 cases, and many nearby countries, from Tanzania to Zimbabwe and Mozambique, have submitted fewer than 1,000 sequences to GISAID (see ‘Missing genomes’).
Martin says that researchers need to sequence SARS-CoV-2 genomes from these countries to get a better sense of the likelihood of unobserved evolution. It is possible that the three sublineages of Omicron each separately arrived in South Africa from a region with limited sequencing capacity, he says.
But de Oliveira says the scenario that Omicron evolved unseen through person-to-person transmission is “extremely implausible”. Intermediate steps in Omicron’s evolution should have been picked up in viral genomes from people travelling from countries that do little sequencing to those that do a lot.
“This is not the nineteenth century, where you take six months to go from point to point by sailboat,” says Sergei Pond, a computational evolutionary biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And Andersen adds that, because some of Omicron’s mutations haven’t been seen before, the variant might have evolved in an environment not involving person-to-person chains of transmission. Some of the changes in Omicron don’t match any seen even in the broader viral group of sarbecoviruses, which includes the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). For example, one particular site on the genomes of all known sarbecoviruses encodes a serine amino acid, but a mutation in Omicron means the variant has a lysine at that position1, which changes the biochemistry of that region, Andersen says.
However, says Jesse Bloom, a viral evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, SARS-CoV-2 has not yet explored all of its possibilities in people. “The virus is still expanding in the evolutionary space.”
Chronic infection
An alternative incubator for fast-paced evolution is a person with a chronic infection. There, the virus can multiply for weeks or months, and different types of mutation can emerge to dodge the body’s immune system. Chronic infections give the virus “the opportunity to play cat and mouse with the immune system”, says Pond, who thinks it is a plausible hypothesis for Omicron’s emergence.
Such chronic infections have been observed in people with compromised immune systems who cannot easily get rid of SARS-CoV-2. For example, a December 2020 case report described a 45-year-old man with a persistent infection5. During almost five months in its host, SARS-CoV-2 accumulated close to a dozen amino-acid changes in its spike protein. Some researchers suggest Alpha emerged in someone with a chronic infection, because, like Omicron, it seems to have accumulated changes at an accelerated rate (see go.nature.com/3yj6kmh).
“The virus has to change to stick around,” says Ben Murrell, an interdisciplinary virologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The receptor-binding domain, where many of Omicron’s mutations are concentrated, is an easy target for antibodies, and probably comes under pressure to change in a long-term infection.
But none of the viruses from individuals with chronic infections studied so far has had the scale of mutations observed in Omicron. Achieving that would require high rates of viral replication for a long time, which would presumably make that person very unwell, says Rasmussen. “It seems like a lot of mutations for just one person.”
Further complicating the picture, Omicron’s properties could stem from combinations of mutations working together. For example, two mutations found in Omicron — N501Y together with Q498R — increase a variant’s ability to bind to the ACE2 protein by almost 20 times, according to cell studies. Preliminary research by Martin and his colleagues suggests that the dozen or so rare mutations in Omicron form three separate clusters, in which they seem to work together to compensate for the negative effects of any single one1.
If this is the case, it means that the virus would have to replicate sufficiently in a person’s body to explore the effects of combinations of mutations — which would take longer to achieve than if it were sampling the space of possible mutations one by one.
One possibility is that multiple individuals with chronic infections were involved, or that Omicron’s ancestor came from someone with a long-term infection and then spent some time in the general population before being detected. “There are a lot of open questions,” says Rasmussen.
Proving this theory is close to impossible, because researchers would need to be lucky enough to find the particular person or group that could have sparked Omicron’s emergence. Still, more comprehensive studies of SARS-CoV-2’s evolution in chronic infections would help to map out the range of possibilities, says Neher.
Mouse or rat
Omicron might not have emerged in a person at all. SARS-CoV-2 is a promiscuous virus: it has spread to a wild leopard, to hyenas and hippopotamuses at zoos, and into pet ferrets and hamsters. It has caused havoc in mink farms across Europe, and has infiltrated populations of white-tailed deer throughout North America. And Omicron might be able to enter a broader selection of animals. Cell-based studies have found that, unlike earlier variants, Omicron’s spike protein can bind to the ACE2 protein of turkeys, chickens and mice.
One study found that the N501Y–Q498R combination of mutations allows variants to bind tightly to rat ACE2 (ref. 6). And Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, notes that several other mutations in Omicron have been seen in SARS-CoV-2 viruses adapting to rodents in laboratory experiments.
The types of single-nucleotide substitution observed in Omicron’s genome also seem to reflect those typically observed when coronaviruses evolve in mice, and do not match as well with the switches that are observed in coronaviruses adapting to people, according to a study of 45 mutations in Omicron8. The study noted that, in human hosts, G to U substitutions tend to occur in RNA viruses at a higher rate than C to A switches do, but that Omicron does not show this pattern.
It is possible, then, that SARS-CoV-2 could have acquired mutations that gave it access to rats — jumping from an ill person to a rat, possibly through contaminated sewage — and then spread and evolved into Omicron in that animal population. An infected rat could later have come into contact with a person, sparking the emergence of Omicron. The three sublineages of Omicron are sufficiently distinct that, according to this theory, each would represent a separate jump from animal to human.
A large population of animals with infections lasting longer than in humans could give SARS-CoV-2 room to explore a wide diversity of mutations and “build up a large ghost population of viruses that no one knows about”, says Martin, who says he finds this ‘reverse zoonosis’ theory convincing. Changes that make the virus better at spreading in its animal host won’t necessarily affect its ability to infect people, he says.
An animal reservoir could also explain why some of the mutations in Omicron have been rarely seen before in people, says Andersen.
In the dark
But others say that even a single viral jump from an animal to a person is a rare event — let alone three. Meanwhile, the virus has had plenty of opportunities to slip between people. And although some of Omicron’s mutations have been seen in rodents, that doesn’t mean they can’t happen or haven’t occurred in people, too, and have simply been missed.
Murrell also points out that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t immediately go through a period of accelerated evolution after jumping to people for the first time. When it spread to mink and deer, it did pick up changes, but not as many mutations as Omicron has accumulated, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK. This means that the evidence isn’t sufficient to suggest Omicron’s predecessor would have undergone rapid selection after finding a new home in the wild.
To confirm this theory, researchers would need to find close relatives of Omicron in another animal, but they haven’t been looking — “something that has been horribly neglected”, says Martin. Since the pandemic began, researchers have sequenced fewer than 2,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes isolated from other animals, mostly from mink, cats and deer.
Now that Omicron has taken off, how it evolves in people could offer more clues about its origins. It might, for instance, shed mutations that, in retrospect, are found to have helped it adapt to a different animal host, or in a person with a chronic infection. But it could also not change by much, leaving researchers in the dark.
The answer to Omicron’s emergence will probably be one or a combination of the three scenarios, says Bloom. But, he adds, researchers are far from explaining the processes that brought Omicron here, let alone predicting what the next variant will look like.
And many scientists say they might never find out where Omicron came from. “Omicron really shows us the need for humility in thinking about our ability to understand the processes that are shaping the evolution of viruses like SARS-CoV-2,” says Bloom.
Nature 602, 26-28 (2022)
*Omicron là chữ cái số 15 trong hệ ký tự Hy Lạp, gồm 2 chữ Oo được tổ chức y tế thế giới WHO đặt tên cho biến thể B1.1.529 virus Sars-cov-2 mới. nghe nói biến thể này lây gấp 500 lần biến thể Delta!!!
OMICRON TRANSPORTATION INC
(2018) IAI GULFSTREAM G280
PHL - July 03, 2019
*------------------------------------*
Copyright 2019
Paul Kanagie
The Lambda Rho chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi posed for portraits at TCU's Frog Fountain prior to attending a Victory event on September 26, 2014.. (I don't have the first clue what this event was, but I'm assuming it was a formal dance of some sort.) You can learn more about the chapter at the following sites:
www.facebook.com/AOIILambdaRho
This album is part of the event coverage for the Fort Worth Portrait Project. The project tells the story of Fort Worth from 2014 - 2044 one captioned portrait at a time, but I also enjoy covering events like this one too.
Please follow the Fort Worth Portrait Project:
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The Lambda Rho chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi greeting new members during the chapter's second ever Bid Day at TCU. For those of you who don't know what Bid Day is...and I didn't either...all the sororities assemble on the Campus Commons. Then the newbies are released one chapter at a time to run toward their new sisters. It's kinda like a cattle drive, but with a much happier ending.
I also rolled about 90 seconds of video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qnt0kMEWWQ&list=UUlJLPNVzTQB...
You can learn more about AOII here:
www.facebook.com/AOIILambdaRho
This album is part of the event coverage for the Fort Worth Portrait Project. The project tells the story of Fort Worth from 2014 - 2044 one captioned portrait at a time, but I also enjoy covering events like this one too.
Please follow the Fort Worth Portrait Project:
www.redeemedexpressions.com/fort-worth-portrait-project/
www.facebook.com/fortworthportraitproject
www.twitter.com/FWPortraitProj
www.instagram.com/fortworthportraitproject
Do you want to be featured in the project? Just head to the following site with a photo and a caption:
www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-fast-spreading-new-c...
The Fast-Spreading New COVID-19 Subvariant XBB Is Part of a ‘New Class’ of Omicron
For the past several months, Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have dominated COVID-19 cases in the U.S. But now, there’s a class of new COVID subvariants on the rise and one in particular is getting plenty of attention. It’s called XBB—or Gryphon—and there’s a chance it could overtake everything else out there.
XBB is getting a lot of buzz because it spreads fast—and seems to be able to evade immunity that people have built up from having a previous COVID-19 infection or getting the vaccine, says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Still, Dr. Schaffner says, “it’s early days and we have a lot to learn.”
Here’s what we know about XBB so far, and why doctors are keeping a close eye on it.
What is the XBB COVID variant?
XBB is one of the “new class” of Omicron variants that are spreading fast right now, says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. That includes BQ.1.1, BQ.1, BQ.1.3, BA.2.3.20, and XBB, he says.
“XBB is a hybrid version of two strains of the BA.2 form of Omicron,” explains Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It’s currently “spreading efficiently in Singapore,” he adds.
The variant was first detected in August 2022 in India, and has been detected in more than 17 countries since then, including Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, India, Japan and the U.S., per Singapore’s Ministry of Health.
XBB is thought to have the best ability to evade antibody protections of these newly emerged COVID variants, according to a pre-print study from researchers in China. That study said that the new strains of Omicron, and XBB in particular, “are the most antibody-evasive strain tested, far exceeding BA.5 and approaching SARS-CoV-1 level.” (SARS-CoV-1, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the strain of coronavirus that causes SARS, a respiratory virus that can cause severe illness.)
Meaning, the vaccine and having previously had COVID-19 are not thought to offer the same level of protection against XBB as they have with previous strains of COVID-19. Antibody drugs like Evusheld and bebtelovimab may also not be very effective against XBB, the pre-print study says.
“These variants are evolving to evade protection,” Dr. Russo says. The bivalent booster is “likely going to be protective against severe disease” with XBB, but will be “imperfect against preventing infection," Dr. Russo says.
Don’t panic, though. “When it comes to evasion of vaccine protection, it’s important to recognize that vaccine protection is not all or none,” Dr. Adalja says. “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most—severe disease—remains intact.”
XBB variant symptoms
So far, symptoms of XBB seem to be similar to what they’ve been with COVID-19 in general. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), those can include:
· Fever or chills
· Cough
· Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
· Fatigue
· Muscle or body aches
· Headache
· New loss of taste or smell
· Sore throat
· Congestion or runny nose
· Nausea or vomiting
· Diarrhea
How contagious is the XBB subvariant?
Like other strains of Omicron, XBB is thought to be very contagious. Singapore’s Ministry of Health notes that the variant now makes up 54% of COVID-19 cases in the country, up from 22% the week before.
Singapore’s Ministry of health says that XBB is “at least as transmissible as currently circulating variants” but adds that “there is no evidence that XBB causes more severe illness.”
When will the XBB subvariant peak?
There are a lot of unknowns about XBB right now. While it’s been detected in the U.S., BA.5 and BA.4.6 continue to be the dominant variants in this country, per CDC data.
Other variants are also started to spread at the same time, Dr. Adalja says, and it’s unclear which will displace BA.4.6 and BA.5 in the U.S., if they will at all. “It’s likely to spread to some degree in the U.S. but unclear if it—or some other related variant such as BQ.1.1—will become dominant,” he says.
Dr. Schaffner says there is "some concern" about XBB and fellow variants on the rise. “Watching what happens over the next several weeks is important,” he says.
This article is accurate as of press time. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly evolves and the scientific community’s understanding of the novel coronavirus develops, some of the information may have changed since it was last updated. While we aim to keep all of our stories up to date, please visit online resources provided by the CDC, WHO, and your local public health department to stay informed on the latest news. Always talk to your doctor for professional medical advice.
A permanent installation directed by Romain Tardy & Thomas Vaquié
Hala Stulecia, Wroclaw, Poland.
More details: www.antivj.com/O/
A Home Energy LLC solar installation for Omicron Biochemicals of South Bend, Indiana. This is a 4.46 kilowatt system with 19 Schott, 235 watt, solar panels.
www.cnn.com/world/live-news/omicron-variant-coronavirus-n...
■ The Omicron surge has driven Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations to record highs in the United States, with NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci warning it will “find just about everybody” at least exposed — but vaccinated people will still fare better.
■ Australia’s most populous state recorded over 92,000 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday after the state started including rapid antigen tests in official figures for the first time.
■ Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under growing pressure from lawmakers over a drinks party at Downing Street during the country's first lockdown.
Florida Department of Health extends shelf-life of about a million Covid-19 tests
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the expiration date of about a million Covid-19 rapid tests, that expired late last month, has been extended. During a news conference in Bonita Springs Wednesday morning, DeSantis said the tests will be distributed to testing centers and county health departments.
The expiration date has been pushed until March 2022, the Florida Department of Health said in a statement.
“The end of the summer they had expired. The FDA agreed to extend it for three months. But those three months were almost zero demand in Florida for testing because we had such low COVID,” the governor said.
DeSantis criticized the FDA for taking too long to extend the expiration dates.
Last week, the DeSantis administration acknowledged that the rapid tests, which were not take-home tests, had expired in a warehouse. The Florida Department of Emergency Management Director said that the stockpile sat idle during the fall when cases fell in Florida and demand was low.
CNN reached out to the FDA for comment and to find out how many months past the original expiration date the Covid-19 test can be extended and still produce accurate results but has not yet heard back.
Australia’s most populous state reports over 92,000 new Covid-19 cases
The Australian state of New South Wales recorded 92,264 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday after the state started including rapid antigen tests in official figures for the first time.
Starting Wednesday, residents of New South Wales were able to report the result of their rapid antigen tests by uploading information on an app.
Thursday's figures include 61,387 positive rapid antigen tests taken since Jan. 1, with 50,729 of those from the last seven days.
Cases detected through PCR tests were down, with 30,877 new cases on Thursday after 34,759 the day before.
New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, has now reported 628,100 total cases, according to the health ministry.
Cases have also spiked in Victoria state, where the health ministry reported 37,169 new cases on Thursday.
The Australian national cabinet is set to meet on Thursday to consider issues such as expanding the list of essential workers to address supply chain disruptions.
Australian deputy prime minister: Djokovic “has to abide by the laws”
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said tennis star Novak Djokovic “has to abide by the laws” in an interview with CNN affiliate Nine News.
“The vast majority of Australians ... don’t like the idea that another individual, whether they’re a tennis player or the king of Spain or the queen of England, can come up here and have a different set of rules to what everybody else has to deal with,” Joyce said, adding that whether people agree with the rules or not, they believe rules should be followed.
“That was the issue with Novak Djokovic,” the deputy prime minister said, “I think that the rules that one person follows is the rules everybody should follow. [Djokovic] is still a child of God like the rest of us, isn’t he? So he has to abide by the laws.”
Australian opposition leader Anthony Albanese said the situation with Djokovic’s visa has been “diabolical” for Australia’s reputation.
“How is it that a ... visa was granted in the first place? This has been diabolical for Australia’s reputation, just in terms of our competence here and it is extraordinary that — as we are speaking — we still don’t know what the decision will be,” he said.
He added: “The decision should have been made before he was granted a visa. Either he was eligible or he wasn’t. Australia has a policy of not allowing unvaccinated people into Australia. It is beyond my comprehension how we have got to this point. … Why is it those checks and balances weren’t in place for ... someone so prominent?”
Serbian president says he’s "proud" to have helped Djokovic during Australian visa and vaccine dispute
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said he was “proud” to help tennis star Novak Djokovic as he faces a visa and vaccination dispute in Australia.
“Our job is to help the Serbian citizens. I am proud that through our effort we were able to help one of the best athletes of all times,” Vučić in an interview with public broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia.
“I think it is necessary that people are vaccinated," Vučić told RTS, “But I am not one of those who are going to start chasing those who aren't vaccinated, because I find it to be our fault – we have allowed the social networks to impose some nonsense topics that we were unable to deal with.”
Vučić also appeared to indirectly address Djokovic’s admission that he did not immediately isolate after testing positive for Covid-19 in December.
"If you know you are infected, you shouldn't be going out in public,” Vučić said.
Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is 94% effective against Covid-19 hospitalization in adolescents, data shows
The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine appears to be 94% effective against Covid-19 hospitalization among adolescents in the United States, according to a new study of real-world hospital data.
The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are consistent with clinical trial results that showed the vaccine's efficacy was 100% against Covid-19 illness among young people.
In the new study, "vaccination averted nearly all life-threatening Covid-19 illness in this age group," wrote the researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various hospitals and universities across the United States.
The study included data on adolescents ages 12 to 18 who had been admitted to 31 hospitals across 23 states between July 1 and Oct. 25. Within the data, there were 445 adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19 and 777 hospitalized without Covid-19.
The researchers, including CDC epidemiologist Samantha Olson, found that far more adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19 were unvaccinated compared with those who were hospitalized for other reasons. The data showed that among the hospitalized adolescents with Covid-19, 4% were fully vaccinated, less than 1% were partially vaccinated, and 96% were unvaccinated. In comparison, among the hospitalized adolescents who did not have Covid-19, 36% were fully vaccinated, 7% were partially vaccinated, and 57% were unvaccinated.
"Despite eligibility for Covid-19 vaccination, 96% of the patients who were hospitalized with Covid-19 and 99% of those who received life support had not been fully vaccinated. We found that vaccination with two doses of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization from Covid-19 by 94% among adolescents between 12 and 18 years of age in the United States," the researchers wrote, using the official name of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine, BNT162b2.
The study did not include information on which coronavirus variants caused the Covid-19 cases in the data, but the researchers noted that the research was conducted at a time when Delta was the dominant circulating coronavirus variant.
Dr. Kathryn Edwards of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville called the study's findings "impressive evidence" regarding the vaccine's effectiveness in adolescents.
"These extremely encouraging data indicate that nearly all hospitalizations and deaths in this population could have been prevented by vaccination," Edwards wrote in an editorial published alongside the new study.
"However, it is distressing that less than 39% of the adolescents in the control group had been immunized against Covid-19, despite uniform eligibility and widespread vaccine access," Edwards wrote. "Vigorous efforts must be expended to improve vaccination coverage among all children and especially among those at highest risk for severe Covid-19."
CDC data shows that currently, about 13.7 million of the about 25 million 12- to 17-year-olds in the United States are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, representing about 55% of adolescents.
Early signs that Omicron is peaking in some places offer hope
The Omicron surge has driven Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations to record highs in the United States. This week, however, officials have started to call out very early signs that the wave is peaking – or at least plateauing – in the Northeast. But rates are still higher in this region than any other and it will be weeks before any change can be declared a trend.
On Tuesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said that recent case trends are “a glimmer of hope.” She specifically noted an apparent plateau in average daily case rates in New York City.
The New York City health department’s data tracker indicates that while the test positivity rate is “stable,” case trends are “increasing,” as are hospitalizations and deaths. Also, data for the most recent 10 days is considered incomplete.
"We remain squarely within our Omicron wave in New York City, whether looking at cases, hospitalizations, or deaths due to COVID-19,” according to a statement from the city’s health department. “Although there are preliminary signs that the level of cases may be plateauing, we need to continue following the data closely in the coming days to discern the trend.”
In a briefing Tuesday, Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole said that judging from a collection of metrics, the city “may be at peak right now.” Data from the city shows that the test positivity rate dropped for the first time in months, from 45% positive in the last week of December to 36% in the first week of January.
But she noted that the trends remain in flux.
“The thing about watching things like this is you’re watching a graph, you’re doing your best to project, and there’s no certainty to any of this,” she said. “I think we’re going to see it wiggle over the next few days, and then it’s just a question of whether we can hold it together and manage not to expose ourselves.”
In New Jersey, average daily cases have dropped slightly in recent days, but weekly tallies are still up about 6% compared to a week ago, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“We’ve had two days of a slight downturn, so we’re looking at a silver lining,” New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said on Monday. “That’s why I keep telling everybody it’s a prediction. Omicron is a funny variant that shoots way up and then, for example in South Africa came down just as quickly. We can only hope that that occurs.”
New Jersey state epidemiologist Dr. Christina Tan said that the Northeast region may see cases peak before other parts of the US.
In addition to New Jersey, only four other states – Maryland, Ohio, Delaware and Georgia – as well as Washington, DC, have seen case rates hold relatively steady compared to last week, changing less than 10% in either direction, according to data from JHU. But only in DC has this plateau held for more than a week.
Some more context: Overall, the US is reporting an average of more than 747,000 Covid-19 cases each day, about triple the peak from last winter, according to JHU data. Cases are up 34% compared to a week earlier. A record number of people are hospitalized with Covid-19 – more than 151,000, which has about doubled in two weeks, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. And deaths are now starting to trend up, too, jumping 40% over the past week, according to JHU data.
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www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-01/second-omicro...
California’s new coronavirus wave is disrupting lives, even with less severe illness
A new surge of coronavirus cases is taking shape, as California slogs into a third pandemic summer with far fewer hospitalizations and deaths but still significant disruptions.
There are fewer cases of serious illness than occurred during other waves, underscoring the protection imparted by vaccinations, therapeutic drugs and, for some, partial natural immunity stemming from a previous infection.
Still, officials are deciding how best to respond now that cases are rapidly rising after plunging in the spring.
The extent of infection has prompted some schools, including UCLA, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Berkeley’s K-12 public schools, to reinstitute indoor mask mandates and has reignited concerns that hospitals may soon be asked to care for larger numbers of coronavirus-positive patients.
“If we continue on the current trajectory, we could find that cases and hospitalizations end up exerting stress on our healthcare system within just a few weeks,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said during a recent briefing.
Some observers say there’s no sign that California is nearing a peak, as the latest variant’s exceptional contagiousness is thought to be approaching that of measles. State modeling suggests that the spread of COVID-19 is likely still increasing in Southern California, and could be ticking up in the San Joaquin Valley and Greater Sacramento, as well.
Even if hospitals don’t become burdened, there’s concern that climbing rates of transmission could keep people at home for a week or more, ruining plans for graduations, weddings and vacations and making it difficult for businesses to maintain adequate staffing.
Other worry that unlike in previous waves, people tired of the pandemic will be less willing to wear masks or take other measures to reduce coronavirus spread, potentially threatening the health of vulnerable people at higher risk of severe complications and increasing the chance of people suffering from long COVID.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, some businesses and institutions are taking care to avoid greater spread, including the Golden State Warriors, whose coach, Steve Kerr, was briefly out with a coronavirus infection as the team marched through the NBA playoffs, and Apple, which reportedly postponed a three-day-a-week return-to-work plan.
Statewide, officials are reporting nearly 15,000 new coronavirus cases a day, a rate nearly as high as during last summer’s Delta surge. The latest wave was spawned by the highly infectious Omicron strains.
San Francisco has one of the state’s highest coronavirus case rates, reporting more than 400 a week for every 100,000 residents as of Thursday. Los Angeles County was reporting 308 cases a week for every 100,000 residents as of Tuesday. A rate of 100 or more is considered high.
“It’s now a big-time surge,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, tweeted Monday. “No longer just cases … also major uptick in hospitalizations. … If you’re trying to stay well, time to up your game.”
While the daily census of coronavirus-positive patients in hospitals has risen lately, it has done so at a much slower pace than in previous surges. On the whole, the patient count remains far lower than in the past.
Statewide, 2,281 coronavirus-positive patients were hospitalized as of Tuesday — up 41% from two weeks ago. By comparison, daily hospitalizations surpassed 8,300 during the height of the Delta wave and topped 15,400 at the peak of the first Omicron surge.
Additionally, some hospital officials in recent weeks have noted that most of the coronavirus-positive patients are not being treated for COVID-19; they may have been admitted for other reasons and tested positive while in the hospital.
“We are not seeing COVID pneumonia. We’re seeing flu-like illnesses,” tweeted Dr. Brad Spellburg, chief medical officer of L.A. County-USC Medical Center, noting that patients are going home after being seen in the emergency room.
Of about 10 coronavirus-positive patients at his public hospital, only one was admitted primarily for COVID-19, Spellburg said.
However, Ferrer noted that coronavirus-positive patients take up hospital resources, in part to keep them isolated.
“The more cases you have — even if it’s just a small fraction of people who get infected and need to be hospitalized — the greater the strain will be on the healthcare system,” she said.
In L.A. County, there were 502 coronavirus-positive patients in public and private hospitals as of Tuesday. That’s up 38% from two weeks before. In San Francisco, there were 96 patients, up 26% over the same period.
“The rate of increase in hospital admissions are of concern,” said Ferrer, who characterized the increase as occurring at a “modest pace.”
Computer models posted to the state’s COVID-19 forecasting website indicate increasing hospitalizations in the weeks to come — with coronavirus-positive intensive care patients projected to almost quadruple from 242 to close to 950 by the end of June. That’s not as high as the winter Omicron peak of about 2,600 but would represent a significant increase from the post-winter low of 112.
State modeling also projects that the overall daily number of hospitalized coronavirus-positive patients could approach 5,000 by the end of June.
Nationwide, COVID-19 deaths have started to increase. The U.S. was reporting an average of 301 COVID-19 deaths a day for the seven days ending Monday, up 5% from the previous week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now forecasting that daily COVID-19 deaths will increase through at least mid-June, possibly doubling to more than 750 a day.
California is averaging 33 COVID-19 deaths a day, a level that has remained stable.
Some medical experts have recently pushed back against what they consider an overly optimistic sentiment that increases in coronavirus cases don’t really matter, because immunization rates have lowered the risk of hospitalization and death.
“There is no way to get around the reality that surges of COVID-19 are problematic — they result in people being sick enough to be out of work; others sick enough to be in the hospital; others sick enough to have longer term issues,” tweeted Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious-diseases expert at Stanford University. “Normalizing surges is bad public health.”
A coronavirus infection brings with it the risk of developing long COVID, in which symptoms like fatigue, difficulty breathing and brain fog can persist for years.
A report published last week in the journal Nature Medicine analyzed health records of veterans and found that vaccinated people who were infected with the coronavirus have some risk of experiencing long COVID. The study reviewed records prior to Dec. 1, before the Omicron wave accelerated in the U.S.
“The findings suggest that vaccination before infection confers only partial protection in the post-acute phase of the disease,” the study said. Reliance on vaccines alone and not using other strategies to reduce risk “may not optimally reduce long-term health consequences” from a coronavirus infection, the report said.
A separate report, published last week by the CDC, said roughly 1 in 5 adults who survived COVID-19 have a health condition that might be related to their infection, such as problems affecting the heart or lungs.
It’s “wishful thinking” to imagine that recurrent COVID-19 illnesses “aren’t a big deal,” Wachter tweeted. The truth, he said, is that risks of getting long COVID from “recurrent cases of COVID aren’t yet clear.”
www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Bay-Area-s-spring-COVI...
As Bay Area cases swell again, it’s ‘very hard right now to avoid getting COVID’
Coronavirus cases blew up across the Bay Area in May, as the region became entrenched in a sixth surge that is likely many times larger than what reported infections show and may even be approaching the magnitude of this past winter’s massive omicron wave, health experts say.
COVID hospitalizations are climbing in the Bay Area too — they’ve nearly doubled since the start of the month — though they remain at a relatively low and manageable level compared to prior surges, experts said. The number of patients with COVID needing intensive care in the region has more than doubled over the past month, but ICU capacity is not tapped out.
Deaths also remain far below the levels seen in earlier waves; the Bay Area has reported on average three deaths a day for almost all of May.
The mix of variants fueling this surge makes it tough to speculate when cases will level off, experts said — cases could have already peaked and will soon start dropping, or they may keep climbing for longer. Plus, subvariants that have yet to get a foothold in the region could further prolong this wave or a drive a new one later in the summer.
Regardless of where this current surge is headed, health experts said people who want to avoid becoming infected should be resuming aggressive COVID precautions by now, if they haven’t already, including wearing masks indoors and avoiding crowded spaces — from busy restaurants and movie theaters to graduation parties.
“My sense is that it’s very hard right now to avoid getting COVID. It is so prevalent,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert with UC Berkeley.
“That’s the bad news. But we really dodged the bullet with this surge in terms of the variants causing it,” he said. “It’s apparent they don’t cause as severe disease in people. It’s mostly upper respiratory stuff.”
As of the end of last week, the Bay Area was reporting between 4,000 and 4,500 new coronavirus cases a day — roughly double the daily reports from the start of the month. Health officials have said for many weeks that reported cases are lower than the actual number of infections, in large part due to increased reliance on home testing and a significant number of asymptomatic cases.
But some experts now believe infections are likely many times higher than the reported cases — one preprint study estimated as much as thirtyfold higher in New York City. At the peak of the omicron surge, the Bay Area was reporting roughly 20,000 cases a day — also an undercount, though probably not as much as now, since home tests were harder to find in the winter. It’s possible, some experts say, that cases now are much closer to the omicron peak than the official counts would seem to show.
“I think those numbers are probably not that far off from each other,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of medicine at UCSF. “Certainly I know more people with it now than in January.”
Wachter said he believes many people who were cautious earlier in the pandemic have been caught by this latest surge because they were lulled into complacency by the relatively slow-building case counts. And they may simply be tired, too — even, or perhaps especially, in the Bay Area, where residents generally adopted more protective measures than in other parts of the country.
“Because people seem to have psychologically moved on, it seems like they’re not treating the level of cases with the same respect that we might have previously,” said Wachter, noting that his wife became infected for the first time in this surge, after attending an in-person conference.
Wachter added that hospitalizations, though increasing in recent weeks, remain well below the height of the winter omicron surge. Nearly 600 people are currently hospitalized with COVID in the Bay Area, including 67 in intensive care as of Monday. At the omicron peak in late January, more than 2,000 people were hospitalized, with 366 in the ICU.
Wachter said the lower hospitalization numbers likely are “a reflection of vaccination, boosting and prior infection” providing protection, as well as improved access to Paxlovid, an antiviral given to prevent severe illness.
He said UCSF — as with other Bay Area hospitals — is not yet strained by the number of patients with COVID, but there’s some stress on capacity due to large numbers of health care providers being out sick. “It’s more about having enough doctors or nurses than having 40 or 45 patients in the hospital,” Wachter said.
Predicting where this surge is headed, and whether the Bay Area may be hit by yet another wave later this summer, is complicated for now because more than one variant is circulating, experts said. As of the end of last week, two omicron subvariants — known as BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 — were making up the bulk of cases in the southwestern part of the United States, including California, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
BA.2.12.1 was notable for driving a recent Northeast surge; it now makes up roughly half of cases in the Southwest, according to the CDC. It’s believed to be 20% to 30% more infectious than the original omicron.
Adding further complexity could be the arrival of the subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which have been detected in the Bay Area but are not yet widely circulating. Those subvariants drove recent surges in South Africa and parts of Europe, and Bay Area experts said there is some concern they could cause a new swell of illness here.
Early reports suggest those subvariants may be more infectious and better able to evade immunity than the currently circulating strains, but experts don’t anticipate they’ll cause much more damage.
“My guess is if BA.4 and BA.5 do come here, and start to take over, it’s just going to cause a prolonged problem of what we’re experiencing now, as opposed to something catastrophic,” Swartzberg said.
Dr. Lee Riley, also an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, agreed that emerging subvariants could extend this surge or trigger a new one. He’s more concerned about what this fall or winter will bring, though.
“At some point, we’re going to start seeing variants that are really not as susceptible to our immunity,” Riley said. “These surges could get even worse, maybe by this fall.”