New Coronavirus News from 1 Oct 2022

COVID in California: Emerging coronavirus subvariants gain ground in U.S. [San Francisco Chronicle, 1 Oct 2022]

by Aidin Vaziri

The newer BA.4.6 and BF.7 versions of the coronavirus are nibbling away at the dominance of omicron subvariant BA.5, according to the CDC.

UPDATE: Here are the latest updates on COVID in the Bay Area and California.

Three out of four Americans are now living in areas designated by the CDC as having “low” community levels of COVID-19. California COVID deaths have dropped 20% statewide, but the number of people still dying from coronavirus infections did not budge. Scientists at Scripps Research have developed a drug that turns the coronavirus against itself. And a group of doctors issued guidance for diagnosing and treating long COVID in children.

Latest updates:
BA.4.6 and BF.7 subvariants expand their reach in U.S.

The omicron BA.5 subvariant continues to lose ground to newer sublineages of the virus, according to data published Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
BA.5 made up an estimated 81% of sequenced cases last week, down from nearly 90% a month ago. Emerging subvariants are growing in proportion, including BA.4.6 at 12.8% (up from 11.9% last week) and BF.7 at 3.4% (up from 2.3%), while BA.2.75 holds at 1.4%. Public health experts believe those strains may have mutations that can help them evade immunity and could make some COVID-19 treatments ineffective. “We are monitoring variants and their impacts in the US and around the world,” said Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, the White House COVID-19 Data Director.

S.F. public pool cancels programs due to COVID outbreak
One of San Francisco’s public swimming pools has temporarily canceled several of its programs due to a COVID-19 outbreak among the staff. Swim lessons, lap swim and family swim session at the Martin Luther King Jr. Pool in the city’s Bayview district are suspended until at least Sunday due to staffing shortages, the Recreation and Park Department said in a bulletin.

Hospital data show unsafe wait times during surges
Emergency department patients during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic had to wait an average of 6.6 hours before getting a bed during virus surges — a substantially longer period than the four-hour boarding standard established by The Joint Commission, according to a research letter published Friday in JAMA Network Open. The long wait times, which required patients to remain in hallways or waiting rooms when hospital occupancy exceeded 85% to 90%, put individuals at risk and have been associated with excess mortality, according to the report, which parsed monthly hospital data from January 2020 to December 2021. “The harms associated with ED boarding and crowding, long-standing before the pandemic, may have been further entrenched,” researchers from Yale University and the University of Michigan wrote.

Older people hit hardest by rising European cases
COVID-19 cases among people aged 65 years and older across Europe rose by 9% compared with the previous week, driven by a recent uptick in infections in 14 countries, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in its weekly update. Increases in overall rates for all ages have been reported for two consecutive weeks for the first time since the most recent BA.5 wave abated. Of the 27 countries reporting hospitalization data, 14 observed an increase in patients compared to the previous week.

Half of U.S. adults know little or “nothing at all” about new boosters, survey finds
About half of adults have heard “little” or “nothing at all” about the the updated COVID-19 jabs, according to a survey published Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Awareness about the bivalent booster that targets both the newer omicron variants and the original strain of the virus is relatively modest, with another half of respondents saying they’ve heard “a lot” (17%) or “some” (33%) about the new shots. Older adults and Democrats are somewhat more likely than their counterparts to say they have heard at least “some” about the new boosters, but fewer than a quarter across these groups report hearing “a lot” about the new shots, the report said. Four in ten fully vaccinated adults say they are not sure if the CDC has recommended that people like them get the bivalent booster, including about half of fully vaccinated rural residents (54%), Hispanic adults (51%), and those without a college degree (49%) who say they are not sure. The CDC has recommended that all adults get a bivalent COVID-19 booster at least two months after they complete their primary vaccine series.
Rising cases in New York State “tip of the iceberg”

While most regions of the U.S. are showing improved COVID-19 community levels, cases continue to rise in New York State. Nine out of the state’s 62 counties moved into the “high” tier this week for the first time since the summer, according to updated data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Onondaga County, cases and hospitalizations rose to the highest in four months. “I think it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Mitchell Brodey, an infectious disease expert who runs the Family Care Medical Group, told Syracuse News. New York state ended its COVID state of emergency earlier this month and lifted the mask requirement on public transportation.

State’s COVID sick pay program extended through end of year
Among the many bills Gov. Gavin Newsom approved on Friday was AB 152, which extends California’s COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave program through Dec. 31. The law, which was originally enacted in February and applies only to businesses that employ 26 or more people, allows workers in the state who get infected with COVID to claim up to 80 hours of paid leave. It was set to expire on Friday. Read more about the bill and Newsom’s signing.

Sweden to stop recommending vaccines for teenagers
Sweden’s Public Health Agency said on Friday it will no longer recommend that children aged 12 to 17 get vaccinated against COVID-19, saying there is a “very low risk of serious illness and death” for children and adolescents. The general recommendation will go into effect on Oct. 31. “Overall, we see that the need for care as a result of COVID-19 has been low among children and young people during the pandemic, and has also decreased since the omicron virus variant began to spread,” Sören Andersson, head of the Public Health Agency’s vaccination department, said in the statement. “At this stage of the pandemic, we do not see a continued need for vaccination in this group.”

In February, Sweden halted wide-scale testing for COVID-19 even among people showing symptoms of an infection. For most of the pandemic, Sweden stood out among European nations for its comparatively hands-off response. It never went into lockdown or closed businesses, largely relying instead on individual responsibility to control infections. An independent commission that looked into Sweden’s handling of the pandemic in 2020 determined government failed to sufficiently protect the elderly in care homes from COVID-19 and is ultimately responsible for the pandemic’s effects on the country.

Jane’s Addiction guitarist backs out of tour due to long COVID
Dave Navarro, a television personality and the guitarist for Jane’s Addiction, said on Friday he is pulling out of the band’s upcoming tour due to ongoing symptoms of long COVID. “I had hoped for a full recovery by October but I am still very fatigued and will not be able to join this leg,” Navarro said in an Instagram post. “I am personally gutted as our original bass player has returned, Eric Avery. We wanted to bring you the original lineup but that will have to wait until I am recovered. While the band is touring, I will be working on some new Jane’s material in the studio here in L.A.” Navarro was initially diagnosed with COVID-19 in December. He will be replaced on tour by Troy Van Leeuwen, who has played with bands such as Queens of the Stone Age and A Perfect Circle.

Experts warn of “a wake-up call” as cases rise by 14% in U.K.

The U.K. has registered its highest rise in new COVID-19 cases since the summer, with a 14% increase in the past week. The Office for National Statistics has also detected a rise in virus-related hospital infections. “The fact there are people getting so seriously ill they need to go into hospital is a wake-up call to us all that COVID is still here,” Dr Thomas Waite, deputy chief medical officer for England, told BBC News. He said that number of new subvariants of omicron were circulating at low levels, and could be behind the hospital figures. The U.K.
recorded 1.1 million new infections last week. UCSF’s Bob Wachter earlier this week warned that what happens abroad may be a “harbinger” of things to come for the U.S., which has traditionally followed the virus waves seen in the U.K.

COVID can infect fat cells. That may explain why some people get much sicker
The virus that causes COVID-19 can infect and replicate in fat cells, and cause inflammation in fat tissue, Stanford researchers found in a new study that could help explain why obese people are at higher risk for severe COVID. Since the early days of the pandemic, doctors and researchers have observed that people who are obese, across many ethnic groups, experience disproportionately bad COVID outcomes, including hospitalization, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation and death. But it wasn’t clear how or why. Read more about the study here.

Less than 4% of eligible Americans have gotten updated boosters
About 3.2 million Americans got bivalent COVID-19 vaccine shots last week, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 7.6 million people have received the new booster doses since they became available on Sept. 1, representing less than 4% of the eligible population. The CDC recommends that everyone over 12 years and older receive an updated Pfizer or Moderna booster at least two months after their last shot.

Omicron spreads faster at home than delta, study finds
The omicron COVID variant is substantially more transmissible among household members than the earlier delta, with an estimated secondary attack rate of 46% in people who received three doses of an mRNA vaccine, compared with 11% for delta, according to a study published Thursday in Nature Communications. Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health used contact tracing data to track the infection rates among 1,122 index patients infected with omicron or delta and 2,169 household contacts from December 2021 to January 2022 for this study but noted it had some limitations. “Household exposure is often prolonged and repeated compared to social contacts in society, and preferably a complete evaluation should consider all close contacts,” they wrote.

Three out of four Americans have “low” community levels
For the first time since April, more than three-quarters of Americans live in areas with “low” COVID-19 community levels, based on hospitalization and case rates, according to updated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That includes nearly all Californians. Most regions nationwide are showing improving trends with 77% of Americans living in a region classified as being in the “low” tier, 21% in “medium” and 2% in “high.” Based on a separate metric that tracks the rates of new cases and positive tests, about 70% of all counties remain in the “high” virus transmission category, which under the CDC’s revised rules for health care settings means universal masking is still required in nursing homes and hospitals.

Cases drop 20% statewide, but deaths plateau
COVID infections continue to slide in California. As of Thursday, the state was reporting on average about 3,500 cases a day, down 20% from the previous week, according to health department data. That means California is tracking about 9 daily cases per 100,000 residents, marking the first time the figure has dipped below 10 per 100,000 since early April. The statewide test positive rate is now down to 4.8%, although a near record low number of coronavirus tests were administered at sites that report results to the state. There are about 2,000 hospitalized patients with COVID, down from a summer peak of 4,654 in early August.

The only number not showing significant improvement is is the number of deaths, which remain at about 30 a day — the same figure as the previous week.

New drug takes “revenge on the virus”
California scientists have designed a new drug that causes COVID-19 to turn against itself. The drug, NMT5, coats SARS-CoV-2 with chemicals that can temporarily alter the human ACE2 receptor—the molecule the virus normally latches onto to infect cells. That means that when the virus is near, its path into human cells via the ACE2 receptor is blocked, according to the study by Scripps Research in La Jolla published on Thursday in described in Nature Chemical Biology. “What’s so neat about this drug is that we’re actually turning the virus against itself,” said senior author Stuart Lipton, a research professor. “We’re arming it with little molecular warheads that end up preventing it from infecting our cells; it’s our revenge on the virus.”

Qatar says World Cup fans must test before arrival
International fans attending the FIFA World Cup matches in Qatar this fall will be required to provide a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival in the country, regardless of vaccination status, event organizers announced Thursday. “Any visitor aged six and over is required to present an official negative COVID-19 PCR test result taken no more than 48 hours before departure time or an official negative Rapid Antigen Test result no more than 24 hours before departure time.

The test result will need to be submitted at the airport check-in counter,” the guidelines said.

Self-administered rapid tests are not valid. The organizers added that anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 while in Qatar will be required to isolate in accordance with Ministry of Public Health guidelines.