New Coronavirus News from 28 Mar 2022

COVID Wave That Hits Kids Hardest Is Headed to the U.S. [The Daily Beast, 28 Mar 2022]

by David Axe

New Omicron subvariant BA.2 has been disproportionately affecting children as it surges across Europe. Its next stop is the U.S.

The United Kingdom is a month into its latest surge of SARS-CoV-2 infections. It’s not nearly as lethal as previous COVID-19 surges. But that doesn’t mean it’s no big deal.

The new wave of cases in the U.K., which is part of a wider wave across Europe and Asia that’s driven by the new BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, is disproportionately affecting children.

More pediatric cases. More hospitalizations. And possibly more long COVID, the poorly understood syndrome characterized by fatigue, brain fog, and other symptoms that can linger months or years after infection clears up.

Experts disagree on exactly how dangerous BA.2 is for kids. But they agree on the underlying factors that have driven increases in cases in younger people. Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, blamed the U.K.’s spike in pediatric COVID-19 on “low vaccination rates in children and full reopening of not only schools but the whole society from prior to Christmas.”

Under-5s are the only age group in the U.K. that isn’t authorized for the vaccines. This same age group is also uniquely vulnerable to viral transmission at home. “Since children are dependent on their caregivers, it is very difficult to isolate an infected household member effectively,” Carlos Oliveira, a Yale Medicine pediatrician, told The Daily Beast. “It is also challenging to have young children consistently wear masks or maintain social distancing.”

Those factors are hardly unique to the U.K. That means that other countries, including the United States, should expect a whole bunch of sick kids once the BA.2 wave crashes on their shores.

Scientists first detected BA.2 last fall during the initial Omicron surge. The subvariant is highly mutated–even more so than BA.1, the first major Omicron subvariant to become dominant.
Some experts described BA.1 as the most contagious respiratory virus they’d ever seen. BA.2 is even worse.

So it was inevitable that BA.2 would eventually outcompete other variants and subvariants and become dominant, with a commensurate surge in cases. Sure enough, BA.2 swept across Hong Kong and neighboring Shenzhen in China earlier this year. It then flooded into Europe, including the U.K.

The numbers tell the story. The U.K.’s BA.1 surge peaked in early January with a weekly average of 180,000 daily new cases then crashed, fast. By late February, the weekly average of daily new infections was just 40,000.

Then BA.2 arrived. Cases spiked again—to a recent peak of 125,000 daily new cases.
Thankfully, a combination of vaccinations and natural immunity from past infection blunted the worst impacts of both Omicron subvariants. Three-quarters of the U.K.’s 67 million residents are fully vaccinated and more than half are boosted.

So hospitalizations and deaths didn’t increase nearly as much as cases did during both the BA.1 and BA.2 waves. On the worst day of BA.1 on Feb. 2, 535 Britons died with COVID-19. Compare that to the worst day of the surge in cases attributed to the earlier Delta variant back in January 2021, when 1,820 U.K. residents died.

But it hasn’t been all good news. Among the thousands of BA.1 and BA.2 patients, U.K. health officials have noted a growing proportion of younger people. Between late December and mid-January, the number of kids 17 or younger admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 swelled threefold to an average of 120 per day.

“Further analysis by age group shows that the rise is most rapid among children under 5 years, and highest in infants aged under 1 year,” the U.K. Health Security Agency stated in a Jan. 14 briefing. Kids now account for a higher proportion of COVID-19 patients than ever before in some countries.

According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, 2-to-11-year-olds had the highest rate of infections of any age group in the country as of early March, with 4 percent testing positive during the week ending March 5.

That makes sense. While children generally have stronger immune systems than adults, they also come with unique lifestyle factors that can erase the benefits of a better immune response when it comes to COVID-19. They go to school—and schools have been wide open and largely unmasked in the U.K. and many other countries for months now. They also visit friends and extended family and travel with their parents.

“I do think that this increased rate of pediatric patients being hospitalized is due to more contact with people and to lower vaccination rates in this population,” Cindy Prins, a University of Florida epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast. “I think that it’s not just the reopening of schools that is causing more exposures among children, but also may be due to families participating in more activities, like travel and social activities.”

And kids have also been the last to get authorized for the vaccines, owing in part to the need to do additional trials focused on younger subjects. The U.K. authorized the vaccination for 12- to 17-year-olds last August, nine months after approving the leading vaccines for adults.
Authorization for 5- to 12-year-olds followed in February, but only vulnerable children in that age group have been offered vaccines so far. Under-5s still don’t have the green light.
Even among kids who are cleared to get the vaccines, vaccine uptake has been awful. In the U.K., just a quarter of 11- to 15-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

The fear isn’t necessarily that thousands of children are going to die from COVID-19 in the U.K. and other countries as BA.2 runs its course. All COVID-19 variants and subvariants tend to cause minor illness in younger people with their tougher immune systems and fewer comorbidities. “Pediatricians are not reporting Omicron to be a more serious or severe disease in children and young people in the U.K.,” the U.K. Health Security Agency said.

The main worry is long COVID. Even if it doesn’t kill them, SARS-CoV-2 could make a lot of kids very sick for a very long time.

As many as half of all adults who catch SARS-CoV-2 deal with some form of long COVID.

Long COVID in adults tends to manifest as lingering fatigue and confusion, and sometimes a cough. There’s also risk of long-term damage to the heart, lungs, and brain.

It’s not clear whether children are at the same risk. Up to one-third of kids who had COVID-19 could suffer long-term symptoms, according to the University of California-Davis pediatrician Dean Blumberg.

Emphasis on could. There haven’t been many high-quality studies on long COVID in children, ones that feature a good control group for comparison between kids with COVID-19 and those who are COVID-free. That lack of good scholarship makes Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, reluctant to draw firm conclusions about the danger long COVID poses to kids. “We need to figure this out better,” Offit told The Daily Beast.

Other experts are less reluctant. Oliveira cited a long list of long COVID symptoms he’s seen in children. The worst outcome for kids, post-COVID, is an inflammatory disease called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C.

“This inflammatory condition is rare, occurring in approximately one out of 3,000 infections, yet it is quite severe, often leading to injury in multiple organs like the heart, kidney, and liver,” Oliveira said. “Fortunately, most recover with aggressive immune therapy, though some children with MIS-C can have lingering cardiac and neurocognitive issues.”

It’s going to take more time and more study to clarify exactly how at-risk children in the U.K. and other countries are as BA.2 and other recent novel-coronavirus subvariants put more and more young people in the hospital.

Studying long COVID in under-5s is particularly difficult, Oliveira said. “Because pre-school children tend to be less verbal, it has been difficult to characterize the extent of symptoms post-infection.”

“I’m also concerned about the more long-term consequences of infection that may not show up for many years and may cause chronic health problems as these children age,” Prins chimed in.

While we wait for more data, the potential for disaster might only grow. “From a policy perspective, governments need to ensure that they can reintroduce mitigation and surveillance measures if and when a new variant of concern emerges,” Duncan Robertson, a policy analyst at the U.K.’s Loughborough University, told The Daily Beast. But there doesn’t appear to be any political will in the U.K. or other rich countries to close schools again. Mask mandates are becoming unpopular, too.

And there’s no rush to authorize vaccines for under-5s. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration appeared to be ready to authorize shots for the youngest kids back in February before abruptly changing course and calling for more data.

So it should come as no surprise if kids continue to account for a growing share of COVID-19 hospitalizations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They’re mostly unprotected by vaccines and are mixing it up at school and on vacation while the most contagious subvariant becomes dominant in more and more countries.

“Politicians and governments are trying to downplay this as they are desperate to keep economies open,” Michael said. “This generation might pay for these types of policies with their health later in life.”

UK COVID memorial wall anniversary: The pandemic still raging, the criminals still at large [WSWS, 28 Mar 2022]

by Thomas Scripps

Today’s day of reflection, marking the first anniversary of the National Covid Memorial Wall in London is one of the few genuine expressions of the popular response to the pandemic. It combines sorrow at the enormous and needless loss of life with a call for those responsible to be brought to justice.

The wall was begun when the first red heart was painted on the 500-metre wall facing the Houses of Parliament, across the River Thames. It is the project of campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK.

A silent procession along its length will take place at 3.30pm, with a petition calling for the wall to be made a permanent memorial to be handed into Downing Street at 4.30pm. It currently has over 100,000 signatures. A candlelit procession will take place at 8pm.

These vigils are held in the face of a government determined to erase the memorial wall in the heart of Westminster. Last May, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pointedly endorsed a different memorial tucked away in St Paul’s Cathedral, telling Parliament: “Like many across this Chamber I was deeply moved when I visited the COVID memorial wall opposite Parliament and I wholeheartedly support the plan for a memorial in St Paul’s cathedral which will provide a fitting place of reflection in the heart of our capital.”

Johnson et al fear and despise the memorial wall as a testament to the crimes they have committed and now continue, and of the overwhelming popular hostility to his government.

Each individually drawn heart represents one of the more than 188,000 lives lost to the pandemic. This appalling death toll is the direct result of government policy, summed up by Johnson’s infamous outburst, “No more fucking lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” A day after this statement became public, Johnson scurried to the memorial at night so he could claim to have visited without having to encounter the people whose loved ones his government murdered.

A deadly and highly infectious novel virus has been allowed to run rampant through the population for the last two years. Its spread was only briefly interrupted by lockdowns forced on the Conservatives by an angry public and implemented to prevent a revolt in the working class prompted by the collapse of the National Health Service.

With every reopening of the economy, the government moved closer to its objective of “learning to live with the virus”.

The consequences are staggering. As well as the terrible loss of life, three quarters of a million have at some stage been hospitalised with the virus. As of January 31, 1.5 million people were suffering with Long COVID—685,000 of them had been ill for more than a year.

In remembering the dead, the memorial wall is an indictment of those responsible. It also draws attention to the ongoing dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which the government is doing its best to hide.

Having ended all public health measures to combat the spread of the virus, reporting of cases is being steadily scaled back and funding to key surveillance studies cut.Testing will no longer be universally free from next month.

But for all these efforts, the reality of “living with COVID” is becoming ever clearer. According to the weekly Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, nearly 3.5 million people were infected with COVID in the week ending March 19, a one million increase on the week before.
England’s infection rate of one in 16 people is close to its historic high of one in 15 and Scotland’s rate of one in 11 is the highest ever.

Government claims that the vaccination programme has rendered these numbers irrelevant are lies. Vaccination is a vital instrument in controlling the virus, but is undermined by a vaccine-only strategy which allows it to both continue circulating and mutating.

Imperial College London Professor of Immunology Danny Altmann published yesterday, “Why the UK can’t rely on boosters to get through each new wave of Covid”. He writes, “The vaccines rapidly induce hugely high levels of protective, neutralising antibodies in most people, but these levels wane within months of each sequential dose…

“[N]ew evidence from the past two years suggests that encounters with different variants of Covid or different vaccine types can alter the effectiveness of later jabs in surprising ways—an effect called immune imprinting. This raises the possibility that booster performance could be even less predictable and effective in the future.”

As of January 31, nearly 600,000 of the then 14.8 million total recorded infections in the UK were re-infections. Many people have been fallen ill three times with different variants.

Moreover, there are indications that the government’s relentless propaganda to declare the pandemic “over” is sabotaging the vaccine rollout. Less than half of the 560,000 severely immuno-suppressed people in the UK have received a fourth vaccination shot, on offer since September.

Claims that the emergence of the Omicron variant means that COVID’s spread can be tolerated are proving disastrous. Driven by the rising wave of infections, hospitalisations have risen significantly, with the number of COVID patients increasing from 10,554 on February 26, to 17,440 last Thursday. For over-75s, the weekly rate of admission for COVID patients is at its highest level in a year. The number of people being treated primarily for COVID increased 50 percent in the two weeks to March 24.

Since Johnson announced his “Living with COVID” strategy on February 21, nearly 4,000 people have been killed by the virus at a rate of 110 a day, equivalent to roughly 40,000 a year. According to the latest survey Long COVID figures jumped by 200,000 in a month, with 35–49-year-olds in the most deprived areas the most likely to be affected.

Unable to simply sweep the pandemic and its response under the carpet, the government has sought to defuse public anger using the tried and tested method of a public inquiry. Like every other before it, this is a stage-managed affair, designed to spend as long as possible asking the wrong questions. The chairperson, retired judge Lady Hallett, was directly appointed by Johnson. Her terms of reference exclude bringing the guilty to justice.

Anyone who wants to know where this is heading should look at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, looking into 72 deaths in one tower fire on one night, now in its fifth year and with no end in sight. In that time, the corporations involved in the refurbishment of the tower, still raking in profits, have been granted immunity from prosecution.

Johnson can promise a “frank and candid” COVID inquiry because he knows his own protection is assured.

The Labour Party poses as a supporter of the memorial wall and the campaign to make it permanent. This is revolting cynicism. The Johnson government could not have got away with its crimes in the last two years if it had not been supported by Labour every step of the way—with the party and the trade unions signing up to every unsafe reopening of the economy and of schools that became the main vectors for the virus.

The World Socialist Web Site is conducting a Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, designed to expose criminal governments and their enablers through the testimony of workers and scientific experts around the world. Through the Inquest, the WSWS is building support for a scientific policy aimed at the globally coordinated elimination of COVID-19. We encourage those affected by the pandemic to contact us today.

Commentary: UK must live with COVID-19, not pretend it no longer exists [CNA, 28 Mar 2022]

by Anjana Ahuja

If we want lasting freedom from COVID-19, we must accept the need to continue mitigating its risks, says the Financial Times' Anjana Ahuja.

LONDON: COVID-19 is a capricious foe. Just as the United Kingdom government updated its “Living with COVID-19” strategy last month, case numbers began creeping up again.

According to the Office for National Statistics, just under 4.3 million people in the UK were infected in the week ending March 19, thanks to the more transmissible Omicron BA.2 sub-variant, waning boosters and the easing of restrictions.

No matter - from April, free universal testing for COVID-19 in the UK will end and many National Health Service (NHS) testing labs will close.

The legal requirement to isolate if positive has been downgraded to guidance with related financial support scrapped. Masks have been largely discarded. Surveillance studies, including the Zoe Covid app, are being defunded or scaled back.

The government that recommended handwashing to the tune of “Happy Birthday” sung twice, marked the second birthday of the pandemic by washing its hands of responsibility to go on managing it, aside from pledging fourth jabs and antivirals.

There is a world of difference between learning to live with a virus that is still circulating and pretending it no longer exists. If we really want the former, we should avoid doing the latter.

WE LIVE WITH OTHER DANGERS BUT DON'T IGNORE THE RISKS
There are many other areas of life in which risk and uncertainty are managed as a partnership between the state and the individual, with personal responsibility exercised within a framework set by government. We do not disregard the dangers of the road or the workplace but instead work to mitigate them.

Signs in the window of a Sainsbury's supermarket store, in London, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022. Face coverings are no longer required by law anywhere in England. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
There is a world of difference between learning to live with a virus that is still circulating and pretending it no longer exists. If we really want the former, we should avoid doing the latter.

WE LIVE WITH OTHER DANGERS BUT DON'T IGNORE THE RISKS
There are many other areas of life in which risk and uncertainty are managed as a partnership between the state and the individual, with personal responsibility exercised within a framework set by government. We do not disregard the dangers of the road or the workplace but instead work to mitigate them.

From getting behind the wheel right through to parking, my freedom to drive is circumscribed by the recognition of the rights and safety of others.

By law, I must possess a driving licence; my car must be taxed, insured and roadworthy. Seat belts, and child seats for young children, are mandatory. Speed limits, traffic lights and road signs further squeeze my freedom to cruise as I please, as do drink-driving laws, parking restrictions and a ban on mobile phone use. The worst driving offences carry the risk of a long prison sentence.

Drivers rarely rail against these measures as intolerable infringements on liberty. Rather, being able to drive at all is synonymous with freedom.

So, given those extensive restrictions, how deadly are the roads? An estimated 580 people were killed in UK road traffic accidents in the first six months of 2021 or about 22 people a week. By comparison, there were 820 deaths involving COVID-19 in the week ending March 11.

PREVENTING INFECTIONS STILL THE BETTER STRATEGY
The removal of all COVID-19 measures in England (Scotland has delayed) means infected individuals are now free to mix socially at work, in schools, public transport, shops and restaurants. The virus is spreading unchecked again.

There has been little thought, and even less empathy, spared for the clinically vulnerable, who have shielded for two years. They have been told they can continue to receive free tests (to enable early access to antivirals), but report struggling to get them.

Preventing infection in the first place, through public health measures such as masking in crowded settings, ventilation and testing is a better strategy for all of us, not just in the short term but to avoid "long COVID".

Dismantling our pandemic infrastructure is also a strategy for losing sight of new variants, wherever they may come from.

China, the sole bearer of the zero-COVID flag, is a country to watch, given that few citizens have immunity from natural infection and the country’s homegrown vaccines are not quite as protective as others. Take-up among the elderly, lulled by the zero-COVID strategy into thinking vaccines are unnecessary, has been low compared with in Europe.

Omicron is now on the rise in a global population of 1.4 billion people. If the record mortality rates in Hong Kong are a harbinger of what is to come, it will become even harder to pretend the virus no longer exists.