New Coronavirus News from 21 Jan 2022

These Are the Latest COVID Treatments [Scientific American, 21 Jan 2022]

By Esther Landhuis

But shortages mean that new antivirals and other drugs may be hard to come by
Two years into the COVID pandemic, as the highly contagious Omicron variant pushes infections to record highs, U.S. physicians have a growing arsenal of therapies to keep mild disease from worsening. At the same time, limited availability and challenging logistics are complicating decisions about which patients receive them. Here is a rundown of what is on hand for hospitalized patients, as well as for people who are primarily recovering at home.

TREATMENTS FOR NONHOSPITALIZED PATIENTS
Monoclonal antibodies: For newly diagnosed patients at high risk for severe COVID-19, the recommended therapy has generally been monoclonal antibodies—lab-made proteins that bind to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, and keep it from grabbing onto and infecting cells. If administered within 10 days of diagnosis, either intravenously or as a series of shots under the skin, monoclonal antibodies can cut hospitalizations and deaths by more than 80 percent.

Several companies make these antibody treatments, which started to receive emergency-use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late 2020. Yet with most COVID cases in the U.S. currently caused by fast-spreading Omicron, a new coronavirus variant with mutations in the part of SARS-CoV-2 targeted by monoclonals, “there’s only one [antibody] that actually works,” says Michelle Barron, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and senior medical director of infection prevention and control at the nonprofit health system UCHealth.

That treatment—a monoclonal antibody called sotrovimab that is made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology—can only be administered intravenously. “So from a logistics standpoint, that’s a little different than giving you shots in your leg or arm,” Barron says. “You have to be there at least an hour for the infusion, and you have to be able to get to the location.” And on the provider end, she adds, “you have to figure out where to do it, because you obviously don’t want these individuals who have COVID walking through a very populated waiting room.”

Antiviral pills: Last month the FDA authorized emergency use of two antiviral treatments that can be taken at home as pills: Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics’ molnupiravir. In studies of high-risk adults who started these treatments within their first five days of COVID symptoms, Paxlovid cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89 percent, and molnupiravir cut these sufferings by 30 percent, compared with placebo pills.

One issue with Paxlovid is that it consists of the antiviral nirmatrelvir given in combination with ritonavir, “an old HIV drug that’s known to interact with everything,” Barron says. “A lot of our highest-risk patients will potentially have a medication that will interact.” A pharmacist has to review all of a patient’s other medications before writing a prescription.

Access: But the biggest challenge with most of these outpatient treatments is short supply. Last fall the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab was available directly through a wholesaler, making them easier for physicians and medical facilities to procure. But as monoclonal antibody use surged because of a rise in COVID cases caused by the Omicron variant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began overseeing distribution to states and territories. Each state receives a limited allocation in accordance with COVID rates and hospitalizations, and federal guidelines now expect states to prioritize giving antibodies to immunosuppressed or elderly individuals at highest risk for severe disease. And because sotrovimab is the only monoclonal found to work well against Omicron, it is particularly in demand.

Antiviral pills are also scarce and similarly prioritized for highest-risk outpatients. “Yesterday our health system just prescribed our first Paxlovid dose—for one person,” said David Boulware, an infectious disease physician-scientist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, when he was interviewed for Scientific American on January 7.

As of January 10 Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, which serves 100,000 patients each year and provides 20 percent of the city’s inpatient care, had received 20 courses of Paxlovid, says Monica Gandhi, an HIV and infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

New York City, with a population of more than eight million and more than 30,000 infections per day in early January, had received about 1,600 doses of Paxlovid as of the first full week of January, says Celine Gounder, a physician and infectious disease expert at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is allocating the pills per capita rather than based on infection rates, she says.

For every patient who manages to receive antiviral pills, many other immunocompromised, high-risk patients cannot get them, Boulware says. “‘Okay, they don’t have this; they don’t have that. What do you recommend?’ I’ve been called about that,” he adds. Plus, Paxlovid and sotrovimab are not authorized for children under 12 years of age, and the FDA limits molnupiravir to adults age 18 and up.

In these situations, Boulware suggests considering fluvoxamine or budesonide—widely available, low-cost drugs for other conditions that have published data suggesting benefits in nonhospitalized COVID patients.

Repurposed drugs: Fluvoxamine, an antidepressant pill that is approved in the U.S. for obsessive-compulsive disorder, can tame inflammatory responses, which typically arise in severe COVID-19. In a randomized trial of 1,497 high-risk COVID outpatients in Brazil, those who tolerated a 10-day course of fluvoxamine suffered about 90 percent fewer deaths, and their need for emergency care fell by 65 percent, compared with patients who were randomly assigned placebo pills.

Budesonide, an inhaled steroid that is used to prevent asthma symptoms, showed modest benefits in a large, open-label study in the U. K. that enrolled older, nonhospitalized patients with comorbidities such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Those who started to use the inhaler within two weeks of developing COVID symptoms saw an approximately three-day reduction in symptom duration. “So there’s a mild benefit, particularly during the second week of illness,” Boulware says.

TREATMENTS FOR HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS
For hospitalized COVID patients whose blood oxygen has dropped low enough to require monitoring, the National Institutes of Health recommends the widely available and relatively inexpensive steroid dexamethasone, which can be taken as oral tablets or intravenously.

Remdesivir, an intravenous antiviral, is also offered, often concurrently, to hospitalized patients who are in the severe inflammatory stage of COVID-19. “It’s better when given earlier,” Boulware says. “By the time you get in the ICU on a ventilator, there’s less benefit.”

To keep COVID from worsening to that stage, NIH guidelines updated this month are also recommending high doses of intravenous heparin, a drug used to prevent blood clots, in some patients. “What’s new is that therapeutic-dose heparin is now recommended for patients before they get to the ICU,” says Farid Jalali, a gastroenterologist in Laguna Hills, Calif., whose theories about COVID lung injury have been featured in the emergency medicine blog REBEL EM.

Several arthritis drugs, such as baricitinib or tocilizumab, can be given to dampen inflammation as disease progresses in hospitalized COVID patients two years of age or older. Baricitinib is a tablet taken by mouth, and tocilizumab is given through the vein as a drip infusion.
NEW HOPE FOR “OLD” COVID DRUGS
New research suggests remdesivir could also be helpful in COVID outpatients. In a randomized trial published in December in the New England Journal of Medicine, COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths were 87 percent lower in 279 symptomatic, nonhospitalized patients who received remdesivir, compared with 283 in the placebo group. “It looked really good, and supplies are not an issue,” Barron says. She notes, however, that “logistics are a little challenging because it’s three days of infusions.”

Similar logistical hurdles, as well as unclear findings from past research, have raised questions about the utility of the once eagerly studied convalescent plasma—collected from the blood of donors who have recovered from COVID-19. “It’s kind of falling out of favor right now,” Barron says.

Yet new research could be reviving interest in this treatment, especially given the limited supplies of outpatient therapies. The findings, posted on December 21 as a not-yet-peer reviewed preprint paper, revealed that, in a study of 1,181 patients, convalescent plasma cut hospitalizations by 54 percent when administered within the first 8 days of COVID symptoms.

“The one thing we’ve all learned is to be flexible,” Barron says. “What we do today may not be what we do tomorrow, and you just gotta be okay with that.”

Heterologous versus homologous COVID-19 booster vaccination in previous recipients of two doses of CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine in Brazil (RHH-001): a phase 4, non-inferiority, single blind, randomised study [The Lancet, 21 Jan 2022]

Authored by Sue Ann Costa Clemens, Lily Weckx, Ralf Clemens, Ana Verena Almeida Mendes, Alessandra Ramos Souza, Mariana B V Silveira, Suzete Nascimento Farias da Guarda,
Maristela Miyamoto de Nobrega, Maria Isabel de Moraes Pinto, Isabela G S Gonzalez, Natalia Salvador, Marilia Miranda Franco, Renata Navis de Avila Mendonça, Isabelle Silva Queiroz Oliveira, Bruno Solano de Freitas Souza, Mayara Fraga, Parvinder Aley, Sagida Bibi, Liberty Cantrell, Wanwisa Dejnirattisai, Xinxue Liu, Juthathip Mongkolsapaya, Piyada Supasa, Gavin R Screaton, Teresa Lambe, Merryn Voysey, Andrew J Pollard, FMedSci and the RHH-001 study team

Summary

Introduction
The inactivated whole-virion SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (CoronaVac, Sinovac) has been widely used in a two-dose schedule. We assessed whether a third dose of the homologous or a different vaccine could boost immune responses.

Methods
RHH-001 is a phase 4, participant masked, two centre, safety and immunogenicity study of Brazilian adults (18 years and older) in São Paulo or Salvador who had received two doses of CoronaVac 6 months previously. The third heterologous dose was of either a recombinant adenoviral vectored vaccine (Ad26.COV2-S, Janssen), an mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2, Pfizer–BioNTech), or a recombinant adenoviral-vectored ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222, AstraZeneca), compared with a third homologous dose of CoronaVac. Participants were randomly assigned (5:6:5:5) by a RedCAP computer randomisation system stratified by site, age group (18–60 years or 61 years and over), and day of randomisation, with a block size of 42. The primary outcome was non-inferiority of anti-spike IgG antibodies 28 days after the booster dose in the heterologous boost groups compared with homologous regimen, using a non-inferiority margin for the geometric mean ratio (heterologous vs homologous) of 0·67.
Secondary outcomes included neutralising antibody titres at day 28, local and systemic reactogenicity profiles, adverse events, and serious adverse events. This study was registered with Registro Brasileiro de Ensaios Clínicos, number RBR–9nn3scw.

Findings
Between Aug 16, and Sept 1, 2021, 1240 participants were randomly assigned to one of the four groups, of whom 1239 were vaccinated and 1205 were eligible for inclusion in the primary analysis. Antibody concentrations were low before administration of a booster dose with detectable neutralising antibodies of 20·4% (95% CI 12·8–30·1) in adults aged 18–60 years and 8·9% (4·2–16·2) in adults 61 years or older. From baseline to day 28 after the booster vaccine, all groups had a substantial rise in IgG antibody concentrations: the geometric fold-rise was 77 (95% CI 67–88) for Ad26.COV2-S, 152 (134–173) for BNT162b2, 90 (77–104) for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, and 12 (11–14) for CoronaVac. All heterologous regimens had anti-spike IgG responses at day 28 that were superior to homologous booster responses: geometric mean ratios (heterologous vs homologous) were 6·7 (95% CI 5·8–7·7) for Ad26.COV2-S, 13·4 (11·6–15·3) for BNT162b2, and 7·0 (6·1–8·1) for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. All heterologous boost regimens induced high concentrations of pseudovirus neutralising antibodies. At day 28, all groups except for the homologous boost in the older adults reached 100% seropositivity: geometric mean ratios (heterologous vs homologous) were 8·7 (95% CI 5·9–12·9) for Ad26.COV2-S vaccine, 21·5 (14·5–31·9) for BNT162b2, and 10·6 (7·2–15·6) for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Live virus neutralising antibodies were also boosted against delta (B.1.617.2) and omicron variants (B.1.1.529). There were five serious adverse events. Three of which were considered possibly related to the vaccine received: one in the BNT162b2 group and two in the Ad26.COV2-S group. All participants recovered and were discharged home.

Interpretation
Antibody concentrations were low at 6 months after previous immunisation with two doses of CoronaVac. However, all four vaccines administered as a third dose induced a significant increase in binding and neutralising antibodies, which could improve protection against infection. Heterologous boosting resulted in more robust immune responses than homologous boosting and might enhance protection.

Funding
Research in context
Evidence before this study
By Jan 17, 2022, 9·7 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been deployed worldwide to reduce severe disease and death caused by the SARS-CoV-2. The most widely used vaccines were mRNA, viral vector, and inactivated vaccines, with widespread two-dose priming undertaken in low-income and middle-income countries with the inactivated vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm. As a result of waning immunity after two doses of COVID-19 vaccines and some evidence of reduced effectiveness, many countries are now considering offering third or booster doses. We searched PubMed for studies in English from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2021 on booster doses of vaccines for individuals who had received two priming doses of the inactivated vaccine, CoronaVac. We found that heterologous boosting of CoronaVac with recombinant adenovirus type-5 COVID-19 vaccine produced greater neutralising antibody titres than did homologous boosting in a randomised trial in China. Similar findings are included in a preprint from Thailand comparing heterologous boosting with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca), BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech), or BBIBP-CorV (Sinopharm), 3–4 months after CoronaVac.

Added value of this study
We report a comprehensive analysis of the immunogenicity and safety of homologous and heterologous boosting of the inactivated vaccine CoronaVac. We show that there are low concentrations of antibody present at 6 months after two doses of CoronaVac and largely undetectable neutralising antibodies. A third dose of CoronaVac boosts these responses and boosts are stronger with two different viral vector vaccines tested; the highest antibody concentrations are observed after an mRNA boost. We also show that heterologous boosting increases live virus neutralisation titres against both delta and omicron variants.

Implications of all the available evidence
Heterologous boosting of the inactivated vaccine, CoronaVac, results in more robust immune responses than homologous boosting and could enhance protection.

COVID lockdowns, record heat won't stop German retiree Kuno Penner walking around the world [ABC News, 21 Jan 2022]

by Kelly Gudgeon and Amelia Searson

Jakob Penner, or Kuno as he is better known, has become a bit of a social media star.
Key points:
• Jakob Penner, better known as Kuno, has walked 41,000km across 25 different countries in five years
• The German retiree is spending time in WA's Pilbara, where he experienced last week's record-breaking temperatures
• Mr Penner says he has no plans to stop and expects to travel to New Zealand after walking around Australia

The German retiree left his home five years ago, armed with only a small cart of supplies and a goal to walk around the world.

"I think everybody would like to see the world and I just do it," he said.

"Most people when they are retired, and they think they are old and weak and cannot move and they are sitting at home, watching TV — I don't like it, I would like to see the world."
Mr Penner has crossed 25 countries covering 41,000 kilometres from Germany through much of Europe, the Middle East, India, and South-East Asia.

In February 2020, just before the world closed down due to the pandemic, Mr Penner planned to spend three months walking from Cairns to Sydney.

He found himself locked down in a friend's house in Brisbane, where he applied for an extension to his visa.

His next plan to walk to Melbourne and then fly to New Zealand was again impacted by lockdowns.

With another visa extension, he has walked all around the east coast, down to Tasmania and then across the Nullarbor into Western Australia.

Last week, Mr Penner found himself in the middle of the Pilbara's record-breaking heat.
"Never I have seen 50 degrees. I was on the road, just north of Carnarvon, near the Minilya Roadhouse," he said.

The sleepy beachside town of Onslow reached 50.7 degrees Celsius last week, while many other Pilbara towns sweltered through their own record-breaking temperatures.

Mr Penner said when it was hot, he had to take extra precautions.

"I have a long rest in the hottest hours of the day, between two and five o'clock was the hottest. I have a piece of plastic to make a shadow and I rest," he said.

Mr Penner said the people he had met during his travels around Australia had stood out to him the most.

"It is the kindness of the people, they ask me 'Do you need anything, can we help?'" he said.

"If I would see an old man with a grey beard going across maybe the Nullarbor, I would ask him if he's crazy, does he know what he's doing, if he has enough water, if he has enough food.

"If not, it can be very dangerous. I think we have a responsibility about other people."

Mr Penner is taking a short break in the Pilbara to get repairs done to his cart before he completes the journey across the top end of Australia, weather permitting.
He has six months to be back in Cairns before he finally makes it across to New Zealand.

COVID-19: Russia hits all-time high infections, blames omicron variant [Fox News, 21 Jan 2022]

Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova urged those who are vaccinated to get boosters

Daily new coronavirus infections in Russia reached an all-time high Friday and authorities blamed the highly contagious omicron variant, which they expect to soon dominate the country's outbreak.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova on Friday noted "intensive spread of the omicron variant" and said the authorities "expect it to become the dominating" variant driving the outbreak. The state coronavirus task force Golikova heads reported 49,513 new infections on Friday — the highest yet in the pandemic.

Record numbers of 15,987 new cases and 5,922 cases were reported respectively in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city. In light of the surge, health officials in St. Petersburg on Friday limited elective outpatient care.

Golikova on Friday urged Russians who received their vaccinations or recovered from the virus more than six months ago to "head to a vaccination point again in order to protect yourself from the virus" with a booster.

Also Friday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin ordered cabinet members to hold meetings online and have their staff work remotely "where possible."

Just about half of Russia's 146 million people have been fully vaccinated despite the fact that Russia was among the first in the world to approve and roll out a COVID-19 vaccine. In Russia, everyone who received their primary vaccination more than six months ago has been eligible for a booster shot since July.

Gogov.ru, an independent website that tracks vaccinations, estimates that 8.8 million people have also received a booster shot, out of approximately 21.8 million who qualify.

Daily new infections in Russia have been steadily climbing since Jan. 10, when just over 15,000 new cases were registered — a number that tripled on Friday, surpassing 49,000 in less than two weeks. Friday's daily tally was more than 10,000 higher than the previous day.

Russia’s state coronavirus task force has registered 324,752 deaths since the start of the pandemic — by far Europe’s worst death toll. Russia’s state statistics agency, which uses broader counting criteria, puts the pandemic death toll even higher, saying the overall number of virus-linked deaths between April 2020 and October 2021 was over 625,000.

Russia’s authorities admit that current surge could end up as the country’s biggest yet but so far haven’t announced any major restrictions to stem it.

A nationwide lockdown wasn't being discussed, officials said, and last week the government decided to indefinitely postpone introducing restrictions for unvaccinated people, which would have been extremely unpopular among vaccine-hesitant Russians.

Golikova earlier this week also announced a decision to cut the required isolation period for people infected with COVID-19 from 14 to seven days, although it still remained unclear when that will take effect.

The authorities say the soaring infections so far haven’t led to a spike in hospitalizations. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the current surge is putting more strain on outpatient facilities than on hospitals in the city of nearly 13 million. City officials have increased the number of physicians on duty in outpatient clinics.

2 years after COVID first hit the US, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still falling ill [ABC News, 21 Jan 2022]

By Arielle Mitropoulos

Two years ago, the C.D.C. confirmed the first domestic case of coronavirus.

At the beginning of 2020, as the nation celebrated the start of a new year, many Americans were still unaware of the "mysterious pneumonia" that had sickened dozens of workers at a live animal market in Wuhan, China.

The illness, later identified as the "novel coronavirus", began spreading rapidly across the globe. Several studies have suggested that the virus had already been spreading in the United States, potentially as early as December 2019.

However, it was not until mid-January of 2020, when the virus would officially be recognized as present on U.S. soil.

Two years ago, on Jan. 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first domestic case of coronavirus. The positive patient was a 35-year-old man from Washington state, who had recently returned from Wuhan, China.

Now, two years later, the U.S. has confirmed more than 69 million COVID-19 cases, and 859,000 deaths, the highest in the total for any country, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And the nation, despite the wide availability of highly effective vaccines and novel treatments, is experiencing its most significant surge on record due to the highly transmissible omicron variant and tens of millions of eligible Americans remaining unvaccinated.

“These last two years have brought transformational advancements spanning vaccines, treatments and testing. Though these tools are having a clear impact on reducing poor outcomes, we are still seeing one of the worst surges to date,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

'Low' risk morphs into pandemic
Just days before the first case was confirmed two years ago, the CDC had implemented public health entry screening at several major airports including San Francisco International Airport, New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.
At the time, the CDC reported that while the virus was originally thought to be spreading from animal-to-person, there were "growing indications" that "limited person-to-person spread" was taking place.

"This is certainly not a moment for panic or high anxiety. It is a moment for vigilance," Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee said during a news conference that same day. "The risk is low to residents in Washington."

Less than a week after the first domestic case was confirmed, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, which is a division of the CDC, stressed that the “virus is not spreading in the community… For that reason, we continue to believe that the immediate health risk from the new virus to the general public is low at this time.”

In late February, Messonnier said she ultimately expected to see community spread in the U.S. At the time, health officials noted that the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption" in their lives.

In the months to come, Life Care Center of Kirkland, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in Seattle suburbs, would become the first epicenter of the virus' deadly journey across the country. The epicenter quickly then became New York City, which experienced hundreds of deaths a day at the peak of April 2020.

It would be another seven weeks until the World Health Organization would declare the global coronavirus a pandemic, subsequently forcing borders to close, and Americans to retreat to their homes for what some thought would be just a few weeks of "social distancing" and "stay-at-home" orders.

In the first months of pandemic, through April 2020, more than 1 million Americans were sickened and 65,000 died, when the virus was still largely mysterious, treatments and supplies were scarce and hospitals were overwhelmed in large urban areas like New York. Subsequent waves of the virus each had their own characteristics from the deadly winter surge of 2020 to 2021 and the delta variant surge, which upended the optimism that the pandemic would finally come to an end after mass vaccination.

In fact, in the last year alone, more than 450,000 Americans have been lost to the virus.

17 million cases in a month
Two years into the pandemic, federal data shows that hundreds of thousands of Americans are still testing positive for the virus every day, and more than 1,600 others are dying from COVID-19.

In the last month alone, there have been more than 17.1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, and 44,700 reported virus-related deaths. In addition, more than a year into the U.S. domestic vaccine rollout, 62 million eligible Americans who are over the age of 5, about 20% of that group, remain completely unvaccinated.

“After 24 months and unprecedented medical innovation, the last month has brought millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths. While many might declare victory on the pandemic, we are clearly very far from where want we want to be right now, especially with billions of people yet to be vaccinated,” Brownstein said, referring to the continued global crisis.

The U.S. is still averaging more than 750,000 new cases a day, about three times the surge from last winter in 2021. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that the latest omicron case surge may be beginning to recede in the parts of the country that were first struck by the variant.

Although preliminary global studies indicate that the omicron variant may cause less severe illness than prior variants, health officials say that the sheer numbers of infections caused by the new variant could still overwhelm the health care system.

Glimmers of hope
In New York, daily cases have dropped by 33% in the last week, and in New Jersey, new cases are down by 43.7%. In Massachusetts, wastewater samples indicate the state’s omicron surge is falling rapidly.

In the Southeast, daily cases in Florida are falling too – down by 30% in the last week, though the state is still averaging more than 45,000 new cases a day.

However, health officials caution that overall, the latest COVID-19 surge across much of the country has yet to peak, and hospitals could still be faced with difficult weeks ahead.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the omicron surge has not yet peaked nationally.

"This is a very difficult time during this surge. We are seeing high case numbers and hospitalization rates... we're also seeing strain in many of our hospitals around the country," Murthy said. "The next few weeks will be tough."

More than 160,000 virus-positive Americans are currently hospitalized across the country, a pandemic high. It was just over two weeks ago that we hit 100,000 COVID-19 positive Americans hospitalized.

MORE: One year of COVID-19 vaccines: Millions inoculated, but hundreds of thousands still lost
Half the country – 25 states and Puerto Rico – has seen their COVID-19 related hospital admission rates jump by at least 10% in the last week, and nationwide, an average of more than 21,000 virus-positive Americans are seeking care every day.

And nationally, 99% of U.S. counties are still reporting high transmission. Out of the 3,220 U.S. counties, just 16 counties are not reporting high transmission.

Earlier this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, said at the Davos Agenda, a virtual event held by the World Economic Forum, that it is an “open question” as to whether the omicron variant will lead the globe into a new phase of the pandemic.

“It's not going to be that you're going to eliminate this disease completely. We're not going to do that. But hopefully it will be at such a low level that it doesn't disrupt our normal, social, economic and other interactions with each other," Fauci said. “To me, that's what the new normal is. I hope the new normal also includes a real strong corporate memory of what pandemics can do.”

Two years since Covid was first confirmed in U.S., the pandemic is worse than anyone imagined [CNBC, 21 Jan 2022]

BY Spencer Kimball & Nate Rattner

A 35-year-old man returned to the U.S. from Wuhan, China on Jan. 15, 2020 and fell ill with a cough and fever.

He had read an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan and sought treatment at an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington four days later.

On Jan. 21, the CDC publicly confirmed he had the first known case of coronavirus in the U.S., although the agency would later find the virus had arrived on the West Coast as early as December after testing blood samples for antibodies.

The man said he had not spent time at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, where a cluster of early cases were identified in December. He was admitted to isolation unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash. for observation.

After confirming the Washington state case, the CDC told the public it believed the risk "remains low at this time." There was growing evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus, the CDC said, but "it's unclear how easily this virus is spreading between people."

Then President Donald Trump told CNBC the U.S. had it "totally under control."

"It's one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It's going to be just fine," Trump told "Squawk Box" co-host Joe Kernen in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

However, Dr. Anthony Fauci would confirm the public's worst fears on Jan. 31: People could carry and spread the virus without showing any symptoms. Dr. Helen Chu's research team at the Seattle Flu Study started examining genomic data from Wuhan. It became clear early on that person-to-person transmission was happening, Chu said. By using the flu study's databank of nasal swab samples, the team was able to identify another Covid case in a 15-year-old who hadn't recently traveled, indicating it was spreading throughout the community.

In late February, a senior CDC official, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, warned that containing the virus at the nation's borders was no longer feasible. Community spread would happen in the U.S., she said, and the central was question was "how many people in this country will have severe illness."
In the two years since that first confirmed case, the virus has torn through the U.S. with a ferocity and duration few anticipated. The human toll is staggering, with more than 860,000 people dead and more than 69 million total infections. Hospitals around the nation have been pushed to the breaking point with more than 4 million admissions of confirmed Covid patients since August 2020, when the CDC started tracking hospitalizations. The hospital admissions are an undercount because they do not include the wave of cases that first hit the U.S. in the spring 2020 when hospitals were caught flat footed and testing was inadequate.

Though the U.S. now has effective vaccines and therapeutics to fight Covid, the future course of the pandemic remains uncertain as the virus mutates into new variants that are more transmissible and can evade vaccine protection. The highly contagious omicron variant has pushed infections and hospitalizations to record highs across the globe this month, a shock to a weary public that wants a return to normal life after two years of lockdowns, event cancellations, working from home and mask and vaccine mandates.

The rapid evolution of the virus and the dramatic waves of infection that would follow, from alpha to delta and omicron, came as a surprise to many elected leaders, public health officials and scientists. Dr. Michael Osterholm, a top epidemiologist, said the Covid mutations are the big unknown that will determine the future course of the pandemic.

"We don't yet understand how these variants emerge and what they are capable of doing," Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minnesota, told CNBC. "Look at how omicron caught us as a global community surprised by the rapid transmission, the immune evasion. Look at delta and all the impact it had on disease severity," he said.

As new infections started to decline in the spring of 2021 and the vaccines became widely available, the U.S. began to let its guard down. The CDC said the fully vaccinated no longer need to wear masks indoors. President Joe Biden proclaimed on July 4th the U.S. was closer than ever to declaring independence from the virus.

However, the delta variant was taking hold in the U.S. at the time and would soon cause a new wave of infection, hospitalization and death as vaccination rates slowed. Public health leaders have struggled for months to convince skeptics to get the shots.

More than a year after the first vaccine was administered in the U.S., about 67% of Americans older than 5 are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. Tens of millions of Americans still have not gotten their shots, despite the fact that data has proven them to be safe and effective at preventing severe illness and death.

"We had no sense in January of 2020, the divisive politics and community reaction to this that were going to occur," Osterholm said. "Who would have imagined the kind of vaccine hesitancy and hostility that's occurred."

Delta was more than twice as transmissible as previous variants and research indicated it caused more severe disease in unvaccinated people. The CDC would reverse its loosened mask guidance and encourage everyone, regardless of vaccination status, to wear masks indoors in public in areas of substantial transmission as delta spread.

The vaccines took a hit when omicron emerged in November. Though they still protect against severe illness and death, they are less effective at preventing infection from omicron. Chu said the U.S. relied primarily on vaccines to prevent transmission of the virus without equally emphasizing widespread masking and testing, which are crucial to controlling a variant like omicron that can evade immunity.

"We now know that, proportionately, you can be repeatedly infected, you can have vaccine breakthroughs, and that this virus will just continue to mutate and continue to evade us for a long time," Chu said.

Katriona Shea co-leads a team of researchers who bring together models to forecast the trajectory of the pandemic. In their latest update, the omicron wave of cases and hospitalizations will likely peak before the end of the month. However, their most optimistic projection shows anywhere from 16,000 to up to 98,000 additional deaths from the omicron wave by April 2.

Currently, the U.S. is reporting an average of more than 736,000 new infections per day, according to a seven-day average of Johns Hopkins data analyzed by CNBC. While that is still far higher than previous waves, average daily infections are down 8% from the previous week. The U.S. is reporting more than 1,800 deaths per day as a seven-day average.

"It's really, really frustrating and tragic to see people dying from a vaccine preventable disease," Chu said.

The implications of omicron for the future course of the pandemic are unclear. In in the classic view, viruses evolve to become more transmissible and less severe, making it easier to find new hosts.

"There are lots of reasons to believe that might not be true because the jump to omicron was so massive, it suggests that there's lots of space for it to change quite dramatically," said Shea, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University. Omicron has more than 30 mutations on the spike protein that binds to human cells. The shots target the spike protein, and the mutations make it more difficult for vaccine-induced antibodies to block infection.

Doctors and infectious disease experts in South Africa, where omicron was first identified, said the variant peaked and started to declined rapidly, demonstrating a significantly different trajectory than past strains. The researchers also said ICU admissions and deaths were lower at Steve Biko Academic Hospital, indicating decreased severity.

"If this pattern continues and is repeated globally, we are likely to see a complete decoupling of case and death rates, suggesting that Omicron may be a harbinger of the end of the epidemic phase of the Covid pandemic, ushering in its endemic phase," the researchers wrote.

Over time, the virus could become less disruptive to society as mutations slow and it becomes mild as greater immunity in the population limits severe disease, according to Jennie Lavine, a computational investigational biologist at the biotech company Karius.

However, the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, cautioned earlier this week that the pandemic is "nowhere near over," warning that new variants are likely to emerge as omicron rapidly spread across the world.

"Everybody wants to get to this thing called endemic. I still don't know what the hell that means," Osterholm said, noting that he has 46 years of experience as an epidemiologist. "With variants, we can go for a period of time with relatively low activity, like we've seen in many places in the world, and then a new variant could change all that overnight. We don't really understand our future yet."

Japan's post-Covid regional dilemma [Bangkok Post, 21 Jan 2022]

By THITINAN PONGSUDHIRAK

Among the major powers that are moving forward with an eye on the post-pandemic era, when Covid-19 will eventually become an endemic with flu-like manageability, Japan is second to none. The visit last week by its minister of economy, trade, and industry (METI), Koichi Hagiuda, made front-page news in Bangkok, following similarly notable media coverage in Jakarta and Singapore. But while it has played a critical role in Asean's economic development and regional security, Japan's Indo-Pacific geostrategic environment has become adverse with more downside risks.

Addressing these risks will require strategic planners in Tokyo to bite the bullet and emerge fully into the 21st century by coming to terms with what kind of great power they want Japan to be.

Japan offers more geostrategic weight than, say, Australia, which carries itself as a self-respecting, solid and straightforward middle power that is willing to put up an ongoing fight on tariffs and trade against China in order not to be bullied. This means Australia has been spending more on defence, bolstering its military hardware and capabilities, and aligning itself closer with the United States based on their bilateral alliance.

South Korea is another emerging middle power, less muscular than Australia but no less ambitious in projecting its soft power and positioning itself as a force to be reckoned with in the region, spearheading a "new southern policy" to leverage economic ties with Southeast Asia vis-à-vis structural security risks on the Korean Peninsula. Given North Korea's nuclear threat, Seoul has no choice but to rely on the US treaty alliance and nuclear umbrella for deterrence and security.

Further afield, India is an upper middle power with nuclear weapons. It does not have the kind of resources and largesse to project soft power compared with Japan and South Korea, but its military reach and hardware are not to be trifled with. Indonesia, on the other hand, is an aspiring middle power that bases its status on its moral authority and power of persuasion. With a history deeply rooted in non-alignment, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country, the third-largest democracy in the world, and the lynchpin of Asean, practising moderate Islam within a secular state.

Thailand does not fit any of these moulds of middle powers, as its international reputation has been undermined by repeated military coups, dismal governance, and meagre growth prospects. But at its peak, perhaps in the late 1980s and early 2000s, there was the potential for Thailand to be a middle power of sorts, leveraging its unique geography and history combined with ambitious growth strategies and regional centrality. Now Thailand ranks more as an also-ran.

Japan ranks among none of these categories. It is more than a middle power but nowhere near being a superpower like the United States or China. If economic size and power were the only benchmarks, Japan would outrank and outstrip most other major powers, as it harbours the third-largest economy in the world. But the key measurement is the calculation of global power and its distribution of military might. This is a category that has hobbled Japan's global standing since 1945.

That being said, Japan is gradually catching up. Its "defence agency" was upgraded into a fully fledged ministry of defence in 2006, although its armed forces are still referred to as "self-defence forces". While its defence budget has been on the rise, Japan over the past few years has converted two helicopter destroyers into aircraft carriers capable of launching jump jets with vertical take-off capability. But while its strategic planners may have interpreted Article 9 of Japan's constitution more loosely, the country's renunciation of war as a sovereign right remains in place after 77 years.

Unlike other countries, Japan is constitutionally unable to settle international disputes by the threat or use of force. This means it has to rely on the US treaty alliance and nuclear protection much like South Korea but with a different set of geostrategic challenges. Japan, for example, has had to confront China's aggressiveness in the East China Sea, while America's reliability was called into question under the administration of former president Donald Trump.
Tokyo has addressed these dilemmas related to its power status by bolstering joint efforts with like-minded allies and partners, such as Australia. It has also taken part in the Quad, which originated from former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe's vision and 2007 speech of the "confluence" of the Pacific and India oceans, with Australia, India, and the United States. There is even talk of Japan's ability to go "nuclear" at short notice if push comes to shove, and without any viable alternatives.

But Japan's secret weapon thus far is not its military. Its geoeconomic heft underpins what Japan does geopolitically. METI Minister Hagiuda's choice of Asean countries on his regional tour -- Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand -- was telling. These are places -- Southeast Asia's maritime fulcrum, mainland hub, and island vortex of commerce and finance -- where Japan has staked its economic future and plotted its trajectory with Asean for the next decades.
As China is unable and unwilling to reopen its borders while the United States and major European countries are increasingly able to live with the pandemic, the geostrategic environment will likely heat up. China may be forced to rely on its huge internal market, stoking nationalist sentiment at home and possibly lashing out at others outside. The United States may react in kind given its own domestic stress and strain.

While it has Asean as a ready bunch of allies and partners to maintain peace and stability in the region, Japan may soon have no choice but to chart its own geostrategic path. In the post-pandemic "new normal", Tokyo's desperate need to normalise the way it defends its national interests and security maintenance will become imperative.

New Coronavirus News from 13 Jan 2022

Covid: ‘Stealth Omicron’ variant spreading in UK and Scandinavia [Evening Standard, 13 Jan 2022]

More than 400 cases of the new BA.2 variant nicknamed “stealth Omicron” have been identified in the UK, according to latest figures.

Some 426 cases of the BA.2 variant have been confirmed in the UK to date, with the earliest dated December 6.

The largest number of confirmed cases was in London, with 146 positive BA.2 infections followed by the south-east region with 97.

More than 8,000 cases of BA.2 have been identified in 40 countries worldwide.
Denmark has seen 6,411 confirmed cases of “stealth Omicron”.

India has seen 530, Sweden 181 and Singapore 127 positive infections from BA.2.

At this point it is not possible to determine where the sublineage may have originated, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

Dr Meera Chand, Covid-19 Incident Director at UKHSA, said: “It is the nature of viruses to evolve and mutate, so it’s to be expected that we will continue to see new variants emerge as the pandemic goes on.

“So far, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether BA.2 causes more severe illness than Omicron BA.1, but data is limited and UKHSA continues to investigate.”

Public health bosses announced they were investigating the new variant of Covid-19, nicknamed “stealth Omicron” earlier this month.

Earlier this month on January 10, the UKHSA regarded BA.2 as a “variant under investigation” which is one below a “variant of concern”.

Scientists have been speaking out on the topic.

Virologist Tom Peacock of Imperial College London tweeted: “Very early observations from India and Denmark suggest there is no dramatic difference in severity compared to BA.1. This data should become more solid (one way or another) in the coming weeks.”

Mr Peacock added: “There is likely to be minimal differences in vaccine effectiveness against BA.1 and BA.2. Personally, I’m not sure BA.2 is going to have a substantial impact on the current Omicron wave of the pandemic.

“Several countries are near, or even past the peak of BA.1 waves. I would be very surprised if BA.2 caused a second wave at this point. Even with slightly higher transmissibility this absolutely is not a Delta-Omicron change and instead is likely to be slower and more subtle.”

It comes as the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Europe director said the Covid-19 pandemic is heading towards its “endgame” in Europe due to the milder Omicron variant.

Hans Kluge said it was “plausible” the region is moving towards a “kind of pandemic endgame” and the Omicron variant could infect up to 60 per cent of Europeans by March.

But Dr David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy for Covid-19, urged caution.

He said on Monday: “The end is in sight, but how long is it going to take to get there? What sort of difficulties will we face on the way? Those are the questions that none of us can answer because this virus continues to give us challenges and surprises.”

He added: “It’s as though we’re just passing the halfway mark in a marathon and we can see that yes, there is an end and fast runners are getting through ahead of us.

“But we’ve still got a long, long way to trudge and it’s going to be tough.”

COVID-19: Top news stories about the pandemic on 13 January [World Economic Forum, 13 Jan 2022]

By Joe Myers

• This daily news round-up brings you a selection of the latest news and updates on the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, as well as tips and tools to help you stay informed and protected.
• Top stories: WHO - Omicron less severe than Delta but still poses danger for unvaccinated; COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths rising in the United States; Denmark set to offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine dose.

1. How COVID-19 is affecting the globe
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 317.1 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths has now passed 5.51 million. More than 9.53 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.

India has eased its COVID-19 rules on testing, quarantine and hospital admissions in a bid to free up resources for the neediest people.

It comes as India reports 247,417 new confirmed COVID-19 cases - the most since late May last year.
Australia has reported a record daily rise in COVID-19 cases, with more than 147,000 new cases reported so far on Thursday, as rising cases straining healthcare systems and supply chains.
The French senate has approved the government's latest measures to tackle the COVID-19 virus - including a vaccine pass.

Pfizer has announced that a late-stage study showed a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine can be administered along with its pneumonia vaccine and produced strong safety and immune responses in people aged 65 and above.

Denmark has announced plans to offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine dose to its most vulnerable citizens.

Sweden will cut the recommended time between second and third COVID-19 vaccine doses from six months to five.

Canada will allow unvaccinated Canadian truckers to cross in from the United States, reversing a decision requiring all truckers to be inoculated against COVID-19, Canada's border agency said yesterday.

AstraZeneca has announced the US government has agreed to purchase an additional 500,000 doses of its antibody cocktail, Evusheld, used to prevent COVID-19.

2. WHO: Omicron less severe than Delta but still poses danger for unvaccinated
The Omicron variant of COVID-19 causes less severe disease than the Delta variant, but it remains a 'dangerous virus' - particularly for those who are unvaccinated - the head of the World Health Organization said yesterday.

Speaking at a news briefing, Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 90 countries were yet to meet the target of vaccinating 40% of their populations and more than 85% of people in Africa were yet to receive a single dose.

"We mustn't allow this virus a free ride or wave the white flag, especially when so many people around the globe remain unvaccinated," he said.

Globally, confirmed cases increased by 55%, or 15 million, in the week to 9 January from a week earlier - by far the most cases reported in a single week.

"This huge spike in infections is being driven by the Omicron variant, which is rapidly replacing Delta in almost all countries," Tedros said.

3. COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths rising in the United States
COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States have increased by about 33% and deaths are up by about 40% from a week earlier, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday.

Rochelle Walensky said US COVID-19 cases, driven by Omicron, are expected to peak in the coming weeks.

"The magnitude of this increase is largely related to the Omicron variant, which now represents about 90% of the COVID-19 cases in the country," she told reporters.

The recent increase in COVID deaths is likely a lagging effect of the Delta variant, which was surging before Omicron took hold in the United States in December, Walensky said.

With Delta and other prior variants, deaths have lagged infection rates by a few weeks.

"We may see deaths from Omicron but I suspect that the deaths that we're seeing now are still from Delta," Walensky said, adding that it will take time to understand how Omicron impacts coronavirus death totals.

New Coronavirus News from 18 Jan 2022

Covid-19: CDC warns against travel to 22 countries including Australia and Israel [The Guardian, 18 Jan 2022]

by Maya Yang

Rising number of coronavirus cases prompts official US advice, which brings number of countries on ‘level four’ list to over 100

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday advised against travel to 22 nations and territories because of a rising number of Covid-19 cases including for Australia, Israel, Egypt, Albania, Argentina and Uruguay.

The nation’s health protection agency elevated its travel recommendation to “level four: very high”, telling Americans they should avoid travel to those destinations, which also include Panama, Qatar, the Bahamas, Bahrain and Bolivia. In total, there are now over 100 countries on the CDC’s level four list.

Other countries on the level four list include Canada, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

“Do not travel internationally until you are fully vaccinated,” the CDC says on its website.
“Getting vaccinated is still the best way to protect yourself from severe disease, slow the spread of Covid-19, and reduce the number of new variants. The CDC encourages you get a Covid-19 vaccine booster dose if you are eligible.”

The CDC also elevated an additional 20 countries to its “level three: high” list, which includes Uganda, Kuwait, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Cuba.

Last December, the CDC amended its October order titled “Requirement for Proof of Negative Covid-19 Test or Recovery from Covid-19 for All Air Passengers Arriving in the United States.”
The amendment now requires air passengers two years or older with a flight departing to the US from a foreign country to present a negative test result taken no more than one day before travel.

Alternatively, passengers have to show documentation of having recovered from Covid in the past 90 days before boarding their flight. “Air passengers will also be required to confirm in the form of an attestation that the information they present is true,” the CDC said.

The order applies to all travelers, including US citizens and lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, unless exempted, the CDC has said.

As new infections increased by 20% worldwide over the past week, with approximately 19m total cases reported during the seven-day period, the World Health Organization has warned that the Omicron variant will not be the last Covid variant.

“Don’t abandon the science. Don’t abandon the strategies that are working, that are keeping us and our loved ones safe,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid technical lead, on Tuesday.

“This won’t be the last variant of concern,” she added, calling on governments to invest more in surveillance systems to track the virus as it mutates and spreads.

France posts daily record 464,000 COVID cases [Medical Xpress, 18 Jan 2022]

France's daily reported new coronavirus cases broke a new record on Tuesday with an average of over 300,000 a day in the past week, with the headline figure approaching half a million.

The latest data issued by Public Health France showed that there were 464,769 new cases in the last 24-hour period as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 spread unabated.
A day earlier, 102,144 people had tested positive for the virus.
The average daily number of new cases over the past seven days has surpassed 300,000, the latest data showed.

French teachers' unions called Monday for a second major strike this week to protest the government's COVID testing and isolation protocols, which they say are severely disrupting classes.

The move follows a one-day walkout last week that saw half of the country's primary schools close, according to unions, who accuse authorities of failing to establish clear rules that would keep as many students in school as possible.

Teachers say class disruptions have become unmanageable with the spread of the highly contagious Omicron coronavirus variant, with many parents struggling to get vaccination appointments for their children and long lines for tests forming outside pharmacies.

In response the government promised to provide five million high-grade FFP2 facemasks for school staff and to hire over 3,000 substitute teachers to replace those forced to isolate after contracting COVID or coming into contact with an infected person.

New Coronavirus News from 8 Jan 2022

Covid: ‘Stealth Omicron’ variant spreading in UK and Scandinavia [Evening Standard, 8 Jan 2022]

By Elly Blake

More than 400 cases of the new BA.2 variant nicknamed “stealth Omicron” have been identified in the UK, according to latest figures.

Some 426 cases of the BA.2 variant have been confirmed in the UK to date, with the earliest dated December 6.

The largest number of confirmed cases was in London, with 146 positive BA.2 infections followed by the south-east region with 97.

More than 8,000 cases of BA.2 have been identified in 40 countries worldwide.

Denmark has seen 6,411 confirmed cases of “stealth Omicron”.

Meet the doctor empowering women to own their reproductive health
India has seen 530, Sweden 181 and Singapore 127 positive infections from BA.2.

At this point it is not possible to determine where the sublineage may have originated, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

Dr Meera Chand, Covid-19 Incident Director at UKHSA, said: “It is the nature of viruses to evolve and mutate, so it’s to be expected that we will continue to see new variants emerge as the pandemic goes on.

“So far, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether BA.2 causes more severe illness than Omicron BA.1, but data is limited and UKHSA continues to investigate.”

Public health bosses announced they were investigating the new variant of Covid-19, nicknamed “stealth Omicron” earlier this month.

Earlier this month on January 10, the UKHSA regarded BA.2 as a “variant under investigation” which is one below a “variant of concern”.

Scientists have been speaking out on the topic.

Virologist Tom Peacock of Imperial College London tweeted: “Very early observations from India and Denmark suggest there is no dramatic difference in severity compared to BA.1. This data should become more solid (one way or another) in the coming weeks.”

Mr Peacock added: “There is likely to be minimal differences in vaccine effectiveness against BA.1 and BA.2. Personally, I’m not sure BA.2 is going to have a substantial impact on the current Omicron wave of the pandemic.

“Several countries are near, or even past the peak of BA.1 waves. I would be very surprised if BA.2 caused a second wave at this point. Even with slightly higher transmissibility this absolutely is not a Delta-Omicron change and instead is likely to be slower and more subtle.”

It comes as the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Europe director said the Covid-19 pandemic is heading towards its “endgame” in Europe due to the milder Omicron variant.

Hans Kluge said it was “plausible” the region is moving towards a “kind of pandemic endgame” and the Omicron variant could infect up to 60 per cent of Europeans by March.

But Dr David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy for Covid-19, urged caution.

He said on Monday: “The end is in sight, but how long is it going to take to get there? What sort of difficulties will we face on the way? Those are the questions that none of us can answer because this virus continues to give us challenges and surprises.”

He added: “It’s as though we’re just passing the halfway mark in a marathon and we can see that yes, there is an end and fast runners are getting through ahead of us.

“But we’ve still got a long, long way to trudge and it’s going to be tough.”

These European countries have a higher prevalence of Covid than both the U.S. and the U.K. [CNBC, 8 Jan 2022]

by Chloe Taylor

The emergence of the highly transmissible omicron variant has seen cases of Covid-19 surge in countries all over the world.

Over the past 28 days, the U.S. and the U.K. have recorded the highest number of new cases of the virus in the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

However, there are a handful of countries with a higher prevalence of Covid-19 than the U.K. and the U.S., which recorded 2,664 and 1,810 cases per million people respectively for the week to Jan. 6, figures from Our World in Data show.

Among those countries are Ireland, Greece and Denmark.

Ireland
In the week ending Jan. 6, Ireland had a seven-day average of 4,020 cases of Covid-19 per million people, according to Our World in Data. There were 23,817 new cases confirmed in the country on Thursday, according to official government data, marking the highest daily figure to date.

In the week to Jan. 5, 40 deaths were caused by the virus in Ireland. Despite cases reaching record highs over the past week, Ireland's fatalities from the coronavirus are a far cry from the peak of 220 deaths in April 2020. However, hospitalizations and deaths are both on the rise as cases continue to surge.

Government figures show that 2.3 million booster doses had been administered by Thursday, meaning 55% of the eligible population has received three shots of a Covid vaccine.
Meanwhile, 77% of the population is fully vaccinated with the initial two doses.

Irish health officials announced on Thursday that the government would not be implementing further restrictions to mitigate rising case numbers. The country currently has a handful of measures in place, including mask mandates, restrictions on large indoor events and limiting in-home gatherings to no more than three households.

Back in December, Irish health officials revealed that the omicron strain was now the country's dominant variant of Covid-19.

The Irish government said in a statement on Wednesday that the epidemiological situation "continues to give rise to significant concern," but that the "rapid pace of the vaccination program has been central in offsetting the impact of the Omicron wave of the disease."

Greece
Greece also has a high prevalence of the virus, recording a rolling 7-day average of 3,468 cases per million people in the week ending Jan. 6.

On Tuesday, the country reported a record 50,126 new daily cases and 61 deaths, official figures show. By Thursday, that figure had declined slightly to 33,716, while daily deaths rose to 70.

In Greece, 66.3% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

In an interview with a local radio station on Friday, Greek Health Minister Thanos Plevris said provisional data showed no patients with confirmed omicron had been intubated in hospital so far.

He added that steps were being taken to ensure that Athens had enough hospital beds as the omicron variant increased pressure on hospitals in the Greek capital.

His comments came after officials announced in a press briefing on Wednesday that more than 90% of cases in Greece were now the new, highly transmissible omicron variant.

Although Plevris said on Friday that omicron provisionally seemed milder than previous variants, he cautioned: "When we say that omicron is milder than delta, it does not mean that it is mild."

Thursday's data showed that 593 Covid-19 patients had been admitted to Greek hospitals over the previous 24 hours.

Denmark
Elsewhere, Denmark recorded a 7-day average of 3,334 Covid cases per million people in the week to Jan. 6, Our World in Data's numbers showed.

On Friday, Denmark recorded a provisional 18,261 new positive test results for the past 24 hours. A total of 755 Covid-19 patients had been admitted to hospital, according to official data – one fewer admission from the day before.

Ten new deaths from the coronavirus were reported in Denmark on Friday.

Almost 80% of the Danish population has received two doses of a Covid vaccine, with more than half immunized with a booster dose.

On Friday, Danish authorities said omicron now accounted for 90% of Covid-19 cases in Denmark.

It came after Danish health official Tyra Grove Krause told local media this week that omicron could help the population return to normal life within months.

UK Covid: more than 178,000 cases reported amid 229 further deaths – as it happened [The Guardian, 8 Jan 2022]

By Andrew Sparrow

This live blog is now closed. For more coronavirus news from around the world head to our global blog
• UK reports 178,250 new Covid cases as weekly total tops 1.2m
• NHS England hit by highest Covid absences since vaccine rollout
• Relatives plead for care home isolation rules in England to be relaxed
• Military deployed at London hospitals due to Omicron staff shortages
• Coronavirus – latest global updates

From 8 Jan 2022

• UK records 178,250 new cases and 229 further deaths
• The UK has recorded 178,250 new coronavirus cases, and 229 more deaths, according to the daily update to the government’s Covid dashboard.
• The total number of new cases over the past week is still up on the total for the previous week, by 19.8%. But yesterday the equivalent figure was up 29.3%, and for the third day in a row now the figure for reported cases has gone down. That explains the tiny kink downwards in the graph, which could be early evidence of cases starting to plateau.

8 Jan 2022
Afternoon summary
• Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings has alleged there was a lockdown-breaking party in the Downing Street garden in May 2020 after an emailed invitation to “socially distanced drinks”.
• The NHS in England is experiencing the highest number of Covid absences since the vaccine rollout, with more than 40,000 staff unable to attend work on two days in the past week, prompting claims that hospitals are “simply not safe”.
• The UK has reported a further 178,250 Covid cases as the Omicron variant continues to fuel a wave of infections.
• Labour has challenged Lord Geidt, the PM’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, to explain why he thought it was acceptable for Boris Johnson to receive financial help from someone also lobbying him over policy. In an open letter to Geidt, Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said that even though Lord Brownlow may have had altruistic interests for trying to get the PM to back his “Great Exhibition” plan, there was still a conflict of interest.
She wrote:
Do you stand by your original conclusion that there could be “no reasonably perceived conflict” in the prime minister seeking the support of a donor who at the same time is lobbying him for government support of a project they are promoting?

It is irrelevant in this regard whether Lord Brownlow’s motives are altruistic; the issue is that a reasonable person could surely perceive that his financial relationship with the prime minister has provided him with privileged access to government, and that relationship was undeclared at the time.

This leads me to a more serious and general point. You appear to set the standard for a potential conflict of interest as being that in your personal judgement any third party was acting with altruistic motives. This is not the test that is set out by the ministerial code. It is also a far weaker one than is set, for example, by the House of Commons members’ code of conduct. This suggests that you will hold ministers to a lower standard of transparency than backbench MPs.

The full text of Rayner’s letter is here.
• The attorney general has said she is “carefully considering” whether to refer the Colston statue case to the court of appeal after a jury cleared four protesters of criminal damage over the toppling of the monument.
• The Labour MP Jack Dromey died suddenly in his flat this morning, his family has said.
• The attorney general has said she is “carefully considering” whether to refer the Colston statue case to the court of appeal after a jury cleared four protesters of criminal damage over the toppling of the monument.
• The Labour MP Jack Dromey died suddenly in his flat this morning, his family has said.
That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.

8 Jan 2022
Covid deaths in Northern Ireland pass 4,000
The number of deaths in Northern Ireland linked to Covid-19 has now topped 4,000, PA Media reports. Another 18 fatalities were recorded in the week December 25-31, according to data compiled by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra). They take the total number of coronavirus-linked deaths recorded by Nisra during the pandemic to 4,024.
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8 Jan 2022
NHS Grampian in Scotland has said it could declare a major incident next week as Covid case numbers continue to rise sharply. In a briefing to staff it said that due to “an exponential growth” of cases in the last fortnight, it could declare a “major incident” as early as next week. It said:
Based on our modelling data, we anticipate a continued and significant growth in the levels of the disease placing even more significant pressure on care homes, primary care teams, community teams and hospitals.

Our planned response will include a declaration of a major incident when a number of key trigger points are reached.

Looking at our local data, these triggers could be met as early as the end of next week.
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8 Jan 2022
A total of 18,454 people were in hospital in the UK with Covid-19 as of 6 January, PA Media reports. PA says:

This is up 40% week on week and is the highest number since 18 February 2021.

During the second wave of coronavirus, the number peaked at 39,254 on 18 January 2021.

There were 2,434 Covid-19 hospital admissions on 3 January, the latest UK-wide figure available, up 26% week-on-week and slightly below the 2,590 admissions on 29 December.
Admissions during the second wave peaked at 4,583 on 12 January 2021.

8 Jan 2022
Keir Starmer has issued this tribute to Jack Dromey.

The proud son of Irish parents, Jack Dromey dedicated his life to standing up for working people through the Labour movement, becoming deputy general secretary of the UK’s largest trade union and then a Labour MP.

From supporting the strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory, when he met Harriet, through to being elected to represent Birmingham Erdington in 2010, Jack lived his commitment to social justice every day.

Jack was recognised for his determination to stand up for his constituents and he was highly respected and warmly regarded across parliament.

My thoughts and those of the whole Labour movement are with Harriet, their children and all those who knew and loved Jack.

8 Jan 2022
Labour MP Jack Dromey has died, family announce
The Labour MP Jack Dromey died suddenly today in his flat in his Birmingham Erdington constituency, his family has announced. He was 73.

Dromey was married to Harriet Harman, the party’s former deputy leader, and was shadow immigration minister. Before he became an MP in 2010 he was deputy general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union.

In their statement Dromey’s family said:
Jack Dromey MP died suddenly this morning aged 73 in his flat in Erdington.

He had been a dedicated Member of Parliament for Birmingham Erdington since 2010.
He was a much loved husband, father and grandfather, and he will be greatly missed.

8 Jan 2022

Severin Carrell
Opposition leaders have called for far more detailed data on the number of Scottish hospital patients with Omicron after criticising the size of a small sample involving two health boards published today by Public Health Scotland. (See 12.56pm.)

Alex Cole-Hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, said the PHS data covering only 126 Covid-positive patients in Grampian and Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) hospitals, taken over periods lasting six days and two days respectively, was inadequate. He said:
Opposition parties have been calling for clearer data on the impact of Omicron on hospital admissions for weeks. An analysis of two health boards doesn’t really satisfy that request.
Furthermore, we know that Delta still accounts for 10% of Covid infections in Scotland, but there is no breakdown on acute admissions by variant type. That information is crucial to understanding the impact of Omicron on our lives.
The first minister promised parliament that Friday would be the day we learned how many people were in hospital because of Omicron severity, but the data published today doesn’t answer that question.

Jackie Baillie, deputy leader of Scottish Labour, said:
The publication of this data is welcome as it allows us to understand how the Omicron variant is affecting the people of Scotland and the NHS. But the data remains incomplete for the whole of Scotland and only a wider study will provide the conclusive findings that we need.

8 Jan 2022
The UK Health Security Agency has published new figures for R, the reproduction number, and for the growth rate for coronavirus in England. These are the first estimates since 23 December.

The growth rate is now estimated to be between +3% and +6%. That means new infections growing at a rate of between 3% and 6% per day. The previous estimate was between 0 and +3%.

And R is estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.5. That means every 10 people will infect between 12 and 15 people. The previous estimate was between 1 and 1.2.

But although these figures have just been published, because of the time it takes to assess how the virus is spreading by these measures, these figures are a guide to what was happening with transmission two or three weeks ago, UKHSA says.

8 Jan 2022
UK records 178,250 new cases and 229 further deaths
The UK has recorded 178,250 new coronavirus cases, and 229 more deaths, according to the daily update to the government’s Covid dashboard.

The total number of new cases over the past week is still up on the total for the previous week, by 19.8%. But yesterday the equivalent figure was up 29.3%, and for the third day in a row now the figure for reported cases has gone down. That explains the tiny kink downwards in the graph, which could be early evidence of cases starting to plateau.

8 Jan 2022
North Yorkshire council workers asked to cover for absent social care staff
Council workers in North Yorkshire are being asked to volunteer for social care roles to cover for staff absent as a result of Omicron, PA Media reports. PA says:
North Yorkshire county council is asking staff in “non-critical services” such as highways, planning, and other office roles to help keep vulnerable people safe.

Volunteers will be asked to cook, clean, and help older people to eat, as well as assist them to speak to relatives on the phone or online.

The council said training will be given and it will match new duties with workers’ normal working patterns.

Richard Flinton, chair of the North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum, said: “These emergency plans will only be used if needed but will hopefully provide sufficient volunteers to get us through the Omicron wave, which may see as much as a 40% reduction in available care staff due to illness or self-isolation.

“Staff would be deployed in such circumstances on a range of different duties supporting care delivery in our elderly persons’ homes and extra care settings to free up care colleagues to deliver direct care.”

8 Jan 2022
A report in the Times (paywall) says that Sajid Javid, the health secretary, strongly opposed the government decision to abandon pre-departure tests for people flying into the UK, and compulsory PCR tests two days after arrival. In his story Steven Swinford says:
The Times can disclose that Javid, the health secretary, strongly opposed the move, telling the Covid-O committee of senior ministers that removing the requirement for PCR tests would limit the government’s ability to detect future mutant strains.

He argued that it increased the risk that a more deadly and transmissible strain of coronavirus could circulate in the UK undetected.

A government source said: “Sajid was very unhappy about the decision to remove the requirement for PCR tests. He argued they are instrumental in spotting new variants sooner.
He said that by scrapping them you increase the risk of having to shut down the entire economy. But he lost the argument.”

Javid did not really deny the story when he was asked about it on a visit to a hospital today. Asked if the report was true, he replied:

I want to see travel open up. I want to see it be made as easy as it possibly can be. And it should always be a balanced and proportionate approach.

I think that the approach that we’ve taken, where we require people still upon their return to take a lateral flow test, and if they are positive to take a confirmatory PCR test, I think this the right balanced and proportionate approach.

8 Jan 2022
A total of 231,856 booster and third doses of Covid-19 vaccine were reported across the UK on Thursday, PA Media reports. More than 35 million booster and third doses have now been delivered in the UK, with just over one million in the past seven days. Nearly 66% of all adults in the UK have now received a booster or third dose.

8 Jan 2022

Severin Carrell
The latest Scottish data continue to suggest the steep surge in Omicron-variant Covid cases has begun to level off, after the NHS reported 14,486 new cases and a test positivity rate of 21.7%.

After a sharp rise in patients hospitalised with Covid over the Christmas and New Year holidays, when Covid-positive patient numbers doubled in a week, the numbers admitted each day has markedly reduced.

There were 1,323 Covid-positive patients in Scottish hospitals today, a rise of 56 on yesterday. There are now 61 people now in intensive care with Covid, compared to 51 a week ago. The test positivity rate hit 35% earlier this month.

A separate study released by Public Health Scotland on Friday shows only 1% of Covid-positive people are being hospitalised, compared to 12% in January 2021.

Friday’s data bulletin also said the deaths of 15 more Covid-positive people in Scotland had been registered, taking the total under that measure to 9,905. However more than 3m Scots have now had their third or booster vaccination.

7 Jan 2022
PM has turned England into 'global outlier' by not acting in response to Omicron threat, says Drakeford
The Mark Drakeford press conference went on for more than an hour. Here are some of the other lines, following his warning at the start that Omicron cases may not peak in Wales for another fortnight. (See 12.34pm.)

• Drakeford, the Labour Welsh first minister, claimed that England was a “global outlier” in its handling of Covid policy. Referring to the UK government (which, for Covid health policy, is effectively the English government), he said it was out of step with other countries around the world. Asked why Wales was applying restrictions not in force in England, he replied:
I would put the question in exactly the opposite way. The outlier here is not Wales. Wales is taking action, as is Scotland, as is Northern Ireland, and as are countries right across Europe and right across the globe. The one country that stands out as not taking action to protect its population is England.

So the question is not why is Wales not following what is going on in England. The real question is why is England such a global outlier in the way in which governments elsewhere are attempting to protect their populations from coronavirus.

Drakeford then proceeded to answer his own question. He said in England the government was “politically paralysed with a prime minister unable to secure an agreement through his cabinet to take the actions that his advisers have been telling him ought to have been taken”.

Asked later in the press conference to justify calling England an outlier, Drakeford said other governments were imposing restrictions on gatherings, going beyond the rules in place in Wales. He went on:
Right across the world governments have been taking action, not to simply deal with the consequences of an Omicron wave, but to try to mitigate that wave and to protect their populations against it. The prime minister has chosen – in my view, because he has no viable alternative available to him – to ride it out, as he says, and that really does make that government an outlier.

Asked what evidence he had to show Wales had got it right, and England wrong, Drakeford said that the Sage advice was available to everyone and it showed action was necessary.

• Drakeford said he expected current restrictions in Wales to remain in place for at least a fortnight.
• He insisted Parkrun events were not banned in Wales. Parkrun has cancelled its runs in Wales, prompting Sajid Javid, the health secretary for England, to criticise the Welsh government restrictions that led to this. But, when asked about this, Drakeford said Parkrun runs were not banned. Up to 50 people could take part in a run under the rules, he said, and another 50 people could help with the organisation.
• He said no decision had yet been taken about whether the Six Nations rugby matches that Wales is meant to be hosting in February and March will be able to go ahead in the country. Currently large sporting events of that kind are banned in Wales. He said:
It’s always been the case that the risks in major events are less at the event itself, particularly when those events are well run, as certainly the autumn internationals were. It is how people travel to the stadium, it is how people gather around the stadium, it is how people behave – not at the game but around the game. So there are further measures that could be adopted that would help to mitigate those risks.

Of course, we would all far prefer to be in a position where the Six Nations could go ahead with people watching the game here in Wales. That is not a matter of dispute between any party. The issue that is under the microscope is whether we can do that safely.

Drakeford also said he had no problem with the decision of the Welsh RFU to explore hosting the matches outside of the country.
• He said the latest figures showed more than 2,300 Covid cases per 100,000 people across Wales and that cases were highest among 20 to 40-year-olds.
• He said 994 people were being treated with coronavirus in Welsh hospitals – a rise of 43% compared with last week and the highest number since last March.
• He said the latest figures suggested staff absences from illness and isolation across the NHS were 8.3% in Wales, as high as 16.5% in some NHS organisations.

New Coronavirus News from 19 Jan 2022

Removal of Covid rules in UK risks premature signal of victory [The Guardian, 19 Jan 2022]

by Ian Sample and Sally Weale

Analysis: Many scientists expect ‘exit wave’ of infections if behavioural guards drop too fast

Boris Johnson’s decision to remove all plan B measures in England – and to signal the end of the legal requirement to self-isolate – comes as the Omicron surge in the UK appears to have peaked.

The move means compulsory mask wearing in shops and on public transport, guidance to work from home and vaccine certificates will be scrapped in England next week, with the need to self-isolate lapsing on 24 March if not before.


Plan A: what are the new Covid rules in England?

What impact will this have on the epidemic? One question scientists have yet to nail is the extent to which different factors are driving infections down. High levels of immunity due to vaccines, boosters and runaway infections play a big role, but that protection is more effective against hospitalisation and death than against catching the virus.

Another major force that has shaped the Omicron wave is people’s behaviour, which extends far beyond plan B. Monitoring by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) showed this week that people reduced their contacts throughout the autumn and have kept them low in December and January, with adults reporting fewer than three contacts a day. There is plenty of room for socialising, and infections, to bound back.

Many epidemiologists expect infections will pick up again in England. Modelling from the University of Warwick suggests that such a rise could drive an “exit wave” of hospitalisations in April and May. Admissions are unlikely to reach the levels hit this winter, but one concern is that the rise in cases could coincide with waning booster immunity in older and more vulnerable people. Hospitalisations are not the only issue: there is still huge uncertainty around how much Omicron will increase the prevalence of long Covid.

Behaviour has helped Omicron peak in other ways, too. In the run-up to Christmas, routine lateral flow testing became widespread and a large proportion of reported cases were detected that way. If people interpret falling cases as the end of the crisis – and scrapping the legal requirement for self-isolation might encourage that view – they may pose a greater risk to others.

“I suspect this has been one of the most important contributors to the Omicron wave being smaller than predicted,” said Prof Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University. “This is particularly important for anyone planning a contact with a vulnerable person and will remain so for the foreseeable future, in my view.”

While cases are falling at the UK level, the picture is mixed nationally and regionally. It is unclear whether infections are falling in Northern Ireland, or in north-east and south-west England, for example.

Going into the spring, more fine-grained data is going to be crucial to reveal whether Omicron is holding on, or has begun to rise again, in particular areas. “We shouldn’t be looking at averages any more,” said Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at LSHTM and a member of the Independent Sage group. “There are still a hell of a lot of people not vaccinated in the UK. There are parts of the country where a lot of people are living in very difficult circumstances, with overcrowding and all the conditions where the virus spreads, and I am very worried about that.”

How Covid persists in different age groups will also be important to monitor. As of last week, infections were falling in all age groups in England except children aged two to 11 – the unvaccinated young – prompting concerns about Covid in schools. Boris Johnson’s announcement means that from Thursday staff and pupils in schools in England will not be required to wear masks in classrooms. They will continue to wear them in communal areas until next Thursday, and where there are significant outbreaks public health directors can recommend a return to face masks.

Face coverings have been a source of growing dispute in schools, as heads have struggled to enforce the latest government advice. Many school leaders will be glad to see them go but there is concern in the sector that the announcement is premature with cases still high in some areas.

“Removing measures such as masks in schools is crazy,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, a behavioural scientist at the University of St Andrews who advises Sage and Independent Sage. “This has much more to do with appeasing those who might otherwise be writing to the 1922 Committee [to try to oust the prime minister].”

Behavioural scientists have shown throughout the crisis, and in previous pandemics, that people act according to the risk they perceive. Telling people they will no longer have to self-isolate sends a message that “it’s all over”, said Reicher. “This will impact all behaviours including – critically – the need to get vaccinated and boosted. The government’s approach will undermine even the steps they still acknowledge are important.”

Removal of Covid rules in UK risks premature signal of victory [The Guardia, 19 Jan 2022]

by Ian Sample and Sally Weale

Analysis: Many scientists expect ‘exit wave’ of infections if behavioural guards drop too fast

Boris Johnson’s decision to remove all plan B measures in England – and to signal the end of the legal requirement to self-isolate – comes as the Omicron surge in the UK appears to have peaked.

The move means compulsory mask wearing in shops and on public transport, guidance to work from home and vaccine certificates will be scrapped in England next week, with the need to self-isolate lapsing on 24 March if not before.

Plan A: what are the new Covid rules in England?
What impact will this have on the epidemic? One question scientists have yet to nail is the extent to which different factors are driving infections down. High levels of immunity due to vaccines, boosters and runaway infections play a big role, but that protection is more effective against hospitalisation and death than against catching the virus.

Another major force that has shaped the Omicron wave is people’s behaviour, which extends far beyond plan B. Monitoring by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) showed this week that people reduced their contacts throughout the autumn and have kept them low in December and January, with adults reporting fewer than three contacts a day.

There is plenty of room for socialising, and infections, to bound back.

Many epidemiologists expect infections will pick up again in England. Modelling from the University of Warwick suggests that such a rise could drive an “exit wave” of hospitalisations in April and May. Admissions are unlikely to reach the levels hit this winter, but one concern is that the rise in cases could coincide with waning booster immunity in older and more vulnerable people. Hospitalisations are not the only issue: there is still huge uncertainty around how much Omicron will increase the prevalence of long Covid.

Behaviour has helped Omicron peak in other ways, too. In the run-up to Christmas, routine lateral flow testing became widespread and a large proportion of reported cases were detected that way. If people interpret falling cases as the end of the crisis – and scrapping the legal requirement for self-isolation might encourage that view – they may pose a greater risk to others.

“I suspect this has been one of the most important contributors to the Omicron wave being smaller than predicted,” said Prof Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University. “This is particularly important for anyone planning a contact with a vulnerable person and will remain so for the foreseeable future, in my view.”

While cases are falling at the UK level, the picture is mixed nationally and regionally. It is unclear whether infections are falling in Northern Ireland, or in north-east and south-west England, for example.

Going into the spring, more fine-grained data is going to be crucial to reveal whether Omicron is holding on, or has begun to rise again, in particular areas. “We shouldn’t be looking at averages any more,” said Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at LSHTM and a member of the Independent Sage group. “There are still a hell of a lot of people not vaccinated in the UK. There are parts of the country where a lot of people are living in very difficult circumstances, with overcrowding and all the conditions where the virus spreads, and I am very worried about that.”

How Covid persists in different age groups will also be important to monitor. As of last week, infections were falling in all age groups in England except children aged two to 11 – the unvaccinated young – prompting concerns about Covid in schools. Boris Johnson’s announcement means that from Thursday staff and pupils in schools in England will not be required to wear masks in classrooms. They will continue to wear them in communal areas until next Thursday, and where there are significant outbreaks public health directors can recommend a return to face masks.

Face coverings have been a source of growing dispute in schools, as heads have struggled to enforce the latest government advice. Many school leaders will be glad to see them go but there is concern in the sector that the announcement is premature with cases still high in some areas.
“Removing measures such as masks in schools is crazy,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, a behavioural scientist at the University of St Andrews who advises Sage and Independent Sage. “This has much more to do with appeasing those who might otherwise be writing to the 1922 Committee [to try to oust the prime minister].”

Behavioural scientists have shown throughout the crisis, and in previous pandemics, that people act according to the risk they perceive. Telling people they will no longer have to self-isolate sends a message that “it’s all over”, said Reicher. “This will impact all behaviours including – critically – the need to get vaccinated and boosted. The government’s approach will undermine even the steps they still acknowledge are important.”

No takers for Hong Kong hamster alarm at Shenzhen pet stores [South China Morning Post, 19 Jan 2022]

By Phoebe Zhangand Holly Chik

Coronavirus: no takers for Hong Kong hamster alarm at Shenzhen pet stores as WHO says risk of animals reinfecting humans low

• WHO says risk of animals giving Covid-19 back to humans is low, as Hong Kong orders a cull of some 2,000 imported hamsters over fears of such transmission
• Shenzhen pet shop employee says Hong Kong situation has had little impact across the border, as all hamsters sold there are locally bred

Despite alarm in Hong Kong over hamsters from a pet store testing positive for Covid-19, there has been little impact on the pet business in mainland China.

This comes as the World Health Organization said the risk of animals reinfecting humans with Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind Covid-19, remained low.

“We understand there are a number of species that can be infected with Sars-CoV-2. There’s the possibility [of] a reverse zoonosis [that] goes from humans back to animals, and then it’s possible for the animals to reinfect humans. That risk remains low,” the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, told a virtual media briefing on Tuesday.

“But it is something that we are constantly looking at because, what we don’t want … [is that the virus] has the opportunity to infect people as well as animals,” Van Kerkhove said in response to a query about hamsters being culled over Covid-19 fears.

Better global surveillance was needed to understand which animals were susceptible and to track infections in animals over time, she added.

Hong Kong on Tuesday decided to cull thousands of hamsters over fears of the first animal-to-human coronavirus transmission in the city. Pet owners and shops have been asked to hand over some 2,000 hamsters imported in two batches since December 22. Officials said the animals would be tested before being put down.

The cull order came after 11 samples taken from hamsters in a pet store in the commercial district of Causeway Bay came back positive. A shopkeeper and a customer were infected with the Delta variant.

Hong Kong to kill 2,000 hamsters after Covid-19 found in rodents at pet shop
But across the border, it was business as usual. As of Wednesday, hamsters were still being sold at the Shenzhen-based Rabbit Mall shop, affiliated to Hong Kong-based franchise Pet-Link.

A member of staff said the situation in Hong Kong did not have much impact, because all hamsters being sold in the Shenzhen shop were locally bred. The infected hamsters at the Hong Kong pet store were imported.

“Those imported hamsters are quite expensive, and [are bought] only if you want to pursue those top-quality, famous breeds,” she said.

Shops on e-commerce platform Taobao, owned by the Post’s parent company Alibaba, also continued to sell hamsters.

The Post checked with at least 10 shops listed on the platform selling breeds including the popular Syrian hamster, all of which indicated that their hamsters were bred domestically and not imported.

One shop owner interviewed guaranteed that “all [our] hamsters are safe and healthy”.

Hong Kong hamster cull: owners start handing over pets to officials

Shenzhen’s local hamster forum on Baidu, a mainland Chinese search engine, had no posts discussing the mass cull of hamsters in Hong Kong.

The news also hardly made a splash on Twitter-like Weibo, with only a few mainland net users commenting on it. Some feared the finding might lead to a cull of cats and dogs, while others supported the hamster cull, saying human lives took precedence when it came to pandemic prevention.

China Customs and the Ministry of Agriculture did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, more than 25,000 people signed a petition calling on authorities to stop the cull, while a local animal welfare group said it had been flooded with calls asking for information about abandoning hamsters.

The WHO’s Van Kerkhove said that the global health body works with scientists and partner agencies specialising in animal health, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organisation for Animal Health, to study animals’ susceptibility to the virus “across a wide variety of species”.

“This is done looking at experimental infection as well as natural infection that’s detected in wildlife and domestic species,” she said.

Around 1,500 out of 7 million sequences of the Sars-CoV-2 virus shared by international scientists were from animals, which could help researchers understand the extent of infection in animals and its risks, Van Kerkhove added.

While this coronavirus spreads primarily between humans, animal-to-human transmission has been documented in the case of minks, according to the WHO.

However, it said minks and other animals such as dogs, domestic cats, lions, tigers and raccoon dogs had also tested positive for the virus after contact with infected humans.

Denmark in November 2020 ordered a mass cull of all its farmed mink – numbering at least 15 million – after a mutated version of the coronavirus was found in the animals. The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Sweden and the US also reported outbreaks at mink farms.

Coronavirus digest: Travel bans ineffective, WHO says [DW (English), 19 Jan 2022]

The World Health Organization said bans on international travel have proved ineffective.

Meanwhile, the English will lower their masks. Follow DW for the latest coronavirus news.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday said international travel bans "do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress" of countries.

In a statement issued after a WHO meeting, the UN health agency said travel restrictions that were introduced to curb the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus demonstrated "the ineffectiveness of such measures over time."

In late November, several countries suspended flights to and from southern African countries, citing concerns over omicron. Most governments have lifted this ban.

The WHO also urged countries not to require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 as the only way for travelers' entry, citing inequity in vaccine distribution.

Countries should consider adjusting some measures, including testing and quarantine requirements, "when appropriate," that put a financial burden on travelers, the WHO said.

Separately, the WHO said that coronavirus cases globally rose by 20% last week to more than 18 million.

Infections increased in every world region except for Africa, where cases fell by nearly a third, according to the WHO.

The number of deaths globally remained similar to the previous week, at about 45,000.
Here's a roundup of the latest developments on COVID-19 from around the world:
Africa

South African-born biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong opened a plant in Cape Town, South Africa, that will be the first on the continent to produce COVID-19 vaccines from start to finish.
The NantSA facility aims to produce a billion doses annually by 2025.

The plant is South Africa's third vaccine manufacturing facility, but it would make vaccines itself rather than producing them from semifinished batches.

Soon-Shiong, who is also a medical doctor, will transfer technology and materials from his California-based NantWorks to scientists in South Africa to produce second-generation vaccines "within the year." They will also work on vaccines targeting cancer, TB and HIV.

"Africa should no longer be last in line to access vaccines against pandemics," South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said at the opening of the plant.

Ramaphosa said Africa had secured 500 million vaccine doses through the African Union's vaccine acquisition task team, but the continent needs more.

"These doses represent only around half of what the continent needs to vaccinate 900 million people in order to achieve the 70% target set by the World Health Organization,'' said Ramaphosa.

Europe
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that people in England would no longer be required to wear face masks from next week.

He told Parliament on Wednesday that measures introduced to combat the omicron variant were no longer needed as scientists believe infections have peaked in the UK.

"Because of the extraordinary booster campaign, together with the way the public have responded to the Plan B measures, we can return to Plan A in England and allow Plan B regulations to expire as a result from the start of Thursday next week," Johnson said.

He intended to drop self-isolation rules for people with coronavirus in March.

The prime minister also announced an end to the vaccine certificates mandate but added that businesses could continue asking for COVID-19 passes if they wanted to.

Museums and concert halls in the Netherlands opened as beauty salons and gyms to protest the Dutch government's pandemic policies.

The cultural sector is protesting rules that they must remain closed while COVID-19 measures were lifted on shops and "contact professions" like barbers, nail salons and sex work.

During the protest, nail artists were giving manicures at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Barbers also gave haircuts on the stage of Amsterdam's historical concert hall, Concertgebouw.

Authorities handed out enforcement notices to a number of the 70-odd venues that took part in the day-long protest.

Germany recorded more than 100,000 daily COVID-19 cases for the first time. The new single-day record of 112,323 comes as Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said he believed there could be twice as many unreported cases as known ones.

Lauterbach told broadcaster RTL that Germany had not reached the peak and compulsory vaccination should be introduced by May.

In the east-central German state of Thuringia, some 1,200 demonstrators, protesting COVID measures, marched past the home of Gera's Mayor Julian Vornab, police said.

Asked if he felt threatened, Vonarb said: "The police were there, but not in proportion to the number of demonstrators."

Bodo Ramelow, the state leader of Thuringia, said marching up to politicians' homes was nothing other than intimidation.

Protests against Germany's pandemic policies have increased in recent weeks. Some 70,000 people joined anti-COVID measures protests across Germany earlier this week.

Austria recorded a record number of infections. "We have close to 30,000 infections. That is a frighteningly high figure," Chancellor Karl Nehammer said.

The previous record for new daily cases, 17,006, was set a week ago.

Sweden set a new daily record for COVID-19 cases, registering 37,886 on Tuesday, health agency data released on Wednesday showed. The country is in the middle of a fourth wave of the pandemic.

Kronoberg, one of Sweden's 25 health care regions, said it would pause all testing except for hospital and elderly care patients and staff.

In Slovenia and Croatia, laboratories can not process tests fast enough. The two countries recorded record-high new COVID-19 cases of 12,285 and 10,427, respectively.

The Tourism Ministry in Cyprus announced that the country will lift all entry requirements on March 1 for travelers who present proof of receiving a booster shot
The tourism-reliant island nation currently requires travelers to either show proof of a negative COVID test or to self-quarantine upon arrival.

Under the new rules, travelers who haven't received a booster shot can enter the country if it has been less than nine months since they received their last dose.
Americas
The United States plans to distribute 400 million N95 for adults free of charge from next week.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a White House official said the masks would be available at pharmacies and community health centers.

President Joe Biden's administration hopes that it will help curb the rapidly spread omicron variant.

Also in the US, Starbucks said it would no longer require its workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

The move to reverse the policy that Starbuck had announced earlier this month came after the US Supreme Court rejected a plan by the Biden administration to require vaccines or regular COVID testing at companies with more than 100 workers.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said coronavirus infections in the Americas are reaching new peaks, with 7.2 million new cases and more than 15,000 COVID-related deaths in the last week.

"The virus is spreading more actively than ever before," PAHO Director Carissa Etienne told a press briefing.

According to the PAHO, the Caribbean has had the steepest increase in infections since the beginning of the pandemic.

The regional agency recommended that countries prioritize rapid antigen tests for people experiencing symptoms and who are at risk of spreading the virus amid a shortage of testing.

Asia
India reported 282,970 new infections on Wednesday, the highest in eight months.
Authorities said omicron was causing fewer hospitalizations and deaths than the delta variant, which killed hundreds of thousands of people in India last year.

While infection rates have recently fallen in India's big cities, experts say cases nationally could peak by the middle of next month.

"We have to worry about hospitalization and deaths and that will come later," Tarun Bhatnagar, from the ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology, told the Reuters news agency.

Japan widened COVID-19 curbs to several towns and cities, including Tokyo, as it battles a record wave of omicron infections.

The country has resisted complete shutdowns, instead focusing on requiring restaurants and bars to close early and not serve alcohol.

It also urged the public to wear masks and practice social distancing.

A sharp rise in infections has begun to paralyze hospitals, schools and other sectors in some areas.

Oceania
New Zealand called off the national cricket team's tour of Australia before the scheduled first match because of strict COVID-19 quarantine requirements.

The Black Caps, as they are commonly known, would not have had to isolate on their return home when the tour was first announced.

The spread of the omicron variant in Australia has caused New Zealand's government to defer a plan to introduce quarantine-free travel between the countries.

Depression Rises in Germany Due to COVID-19 [Psychology Today, 19 Jan 2022]

By Mark Travers

Some measures of well-being are affected by COVID-19. Others aren't.

KEY POINTS
• Researchers found depressive symptoms to be flat between 2014 and 2017 but increased from 2017 to 2020 due to the pandemic.
• When looking at other indicators of psychological well-being, they found no evidence of a pandemic-induced decline.
• The authors hope their research will inspire others to examine which support structures can best help people adjust to pandemic situations.

A new article published in the academic journal Psychology and Aging reports that depressive symptoms increased in Germany as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unclear how much the pandemic has influenced psychological well-being as a whole.

“It is quite plausible that the onset of the pandemic had, or still has, an impact on individuals’ well-being because so many life circumstances were suddenly and profoundly altered when the pandemic set in,” says Markus Wettstein, a psychologist at Heidelberg University in Germany and lead author of the research. “This is why we investigated to what extent well-being changed after the onset of the pandemic in Germany.”

To do so, the researchers analyzed data from the German Aging Survey, a nationwide representative longitudinal and cross-sectional survey of the German population aged 40 and older. They measured the degree to which depressive symptoms rose in pre-pandemic times (from 2014 to 2017) and also how much depressive symptoms rose during the beginning of the pandemic (from 2017 to 2020). They found depressive symptoms to be basically flat between 2014 and 2017 but then increased from 2017 to 2020 as a result of the onset of the pandemic.

But that’s only part of the story.

The researchers also looked at other indicators of psychological well-being, such as general life satisfaction. On this measure, they found no evidence of a pandemic-induced decline.

“In our sample of [German] middle-aged and older persons, life satisfaction slightly increased both between 2014 and 2017, which was the ‘pre-pandemic’ time interval we included for comparative purposes, but also between 2017 and June/July 2020, which was when Germany was still facing the first COVID-19 infection wave,” comments Wettstein. “There was thus no general trend of lower life satisfaction due to the pandemic.”

In other words, it appears that depressive symptoms are more susceptible to a COVID-19 effect than other measures of psychological well-being. But the story is still evolving and the researchers point out that not everyone is immune from COVID-19-related declines in life satisfaction.

“At first glance, it is good news that we did not find a general decline in life satisfaction in German middle-aged and older adults during the pandemic,” says Wettstein. “However, we identified individuals who are at risk of COVID-19-related well-being declines, such as those who perceive themselves as less healthy and as highly threatened by the pandemic.”

Another at-risk group identified by the researchers is middle-aged women.

“Middle-aged women (but not older women) seem to be particularly challenged during the pandemic, which is probably also due to factors such as the temporary closure of schools and child care facilities, because particularly mothers were forced to take over additional child care responsibilities,” says Wettstein.

The authors hope their research inspires others to examine which support structures can best help people adjust to pandemic situations.

“The pandemic is not over, and maintaining well-being might be harder the longer the pandemic lasts as psychosocial resources might get increasingly depleted,” says Wettstein.
“We still need to learn more about strategies, resources, and characteristics that help to psychosocially adjust to this challenging situation as well as about risk factors for mental health problems during the pandemic so that we can develop strategies and interventions to prevent mental health problems due to COVID-19 for a substantial part of the population.”

Role of ministers in approving €1,500 payment for leaders and party HQ staff comes under scrutiny

Berlin prosecutors have launched an investigation into the leadership of Germany’s Green party, including the new vice-chancellor and foreign minister, over Covid bonus payments last winter.

Prosecutors and the party confirmed on Wednesday the investigation into a preliminary suspicion of breach of trust after a report by the weekly publication Der Spiegel.

A Greens spokesperson said the party’s six-member leadership, including Robert Habeck, the economy minister in Germany’s new coalition, and Annalena Baerbock, now foreign minister, were being investigated by the Berlin prosecutors.

“The board members concerned and the (party’s) main office are cooperating fully with the public prosecutor’s office to clarify the facts quickly and comprehensively,” the spokesperson said.

At issue is the role of the party leadership in approving the so-called corona bonus of €1,500 (£1,250) per person for employees of the party headquarters and leaders. The bonus was meant to compensate for the inconvenience caused by working from home and by renovation works at the building.

Habeck and Baerbock are stepping down from the party leadership this month, something the Greens expect of government ministers.

Internal party auditors have raised questions over the bonus payments to the leadership board, according to reports.

The Greens said its leadership was entitled to make the decision but had since paid the bonuses back. It said the leadership and party headquarters are cooperating with prosecutors to clear the matter up.

Prosecutors said there had been several criminal complaints from private individuals, which they were obliged to look into. The investigation was opened on 6 January.

German Green party leaders face inquiry into Covid bonuses [The Guardian, 19 Jan 2022]

Role of ministers in approving €1,500 payment for leaders and party HQ staff comes under scrutiny

Berlin prosecutors have launched an investigation into the leadership of Germany’s Green party, including the new vice-chancellor and foreign minister, over Covid bonus payments last winter.

Prosecutors and the party confirmed on Wednesday the investigation into a preliminary suspicion of breach of trust after a report by the weekly publication Der Spiegel.

A Greens spokesperson said the party’s six-member leadership, including Robert Habeck, the economy minister in Germany’s new coalition, and Annalena Baerbock, now foreign minister, were being investigated by the Berlin prosecutors.

“The board members concerned and the (party’s) main office are cooperating fully with the public prosecutor’s office to clarify the facts quickly and comprehensively,” the spokesperson said.

At issue is the role of the party leadership in approving the so-called corona bonus of €1,500 (£1,250) per person for employees of the party headquarters and leaders. The bonus was meant to compensate for the inconvenience caused by working from home and by renovation works at the building.

Habeck and Baerbock are stepping down from the party leadership this month, something the Greens expect of government ministers.

Internal party auditors have raised questions over the bonus payments to the leadership board, according to reports.

The Greens said its leadership was entitled to make the decision but had since paid the bonuses back. It said the leadership and party headquarters are cooperating with prosecutors to clear the matter up.

Prosecutors said there had been several criminal complaints from private individuals, which they were obliged to look into. The investigation was opened on 6 January.

Berlin turns into a COVID hot spot [DW (English), 19 Jan 2022]

Long waits at coronavirus testing centers, empty shops and soon reduced service on public transport — in the German capital, infection numbers are exploding and infrastructure challenges are piling up.

Four young people are sitting outside the registry office in Berlin's Charlottenburg district, wearing thick jackets, holding a bottle of champagne and a small wedding cake. Their loud laughter echoes through the air. Angela and Johannes just got married — under pandemic restrictions, which allow only seven people to attend the ceremony. "We had to submit the registration in writing, and for the wedding we had to be vaccinated, recovered or recently tested," the bride said. The ceremony lasted 10 to 15 minutes, she added.

"We were allowed to take off our masks and kiss each other when we said yes," she said. She does not want to let the steep increase in infections throughout Berlin spoil her mood.

But the mood is somber in the lively district of Kreuzberg. It's unusually quiet here in the streets with their many small shops, restaurants and cafes. Only a few passers-by are out and about.

"It's totally dead," a saleswoman said. She has never experienced such a slump before. But, with the high number of infections, few people are going out these days.

The number of infections in Berlin has skyrocketed. The seven-day incidence stands at almost 1,000 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. Omicron has long since replaced the Delta variant in such densely populated districts as Mitte and the southeastern areas of Neukölln, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg.

Long lines at testing centers
The high number of infections has led to a rush to the 12 state-owned test centers that offer free rapid antigen and PCR tests.

Long queues stretch along the streets. One young couple standing outside the test center in Wedding district on Saturday afternoon told DW they had already been in line for an hour and would certainly have to wait another hour. "We did two rapid tests that were negative each time," they say. "But we have had contact with someone who is infected. That's why we now want clarity through a PCR test."

Behind them are numerous people waiting, all with FFP2 masks and spaced out at large distances. The line is at least 300 meters long (nearly 1,000 feet). Rain is expected at the beginning of the week. Anyone who is not infected with COVID here will certainly catch at least a cold.

Antigen or PCR test?
The queues in front of the test centers belonging to the commercial provider Coronatest.de are not as long. The company operates 50 test centers nationwide, 20 of which are in Berlin. It offers antigen and PCR tests, which are evaluated in four of its own laboratories, explains managing director Benjamin Föckersberger in an interview with DW.

Here, PCR swabs cost €14.99-€120 ($17-$137), depending on how quickly you want an answer and what you need the test for.

Testing labs on the verge of collapse
In Berlin, only two laboratories have been commissioned to evaluate the tests from the public test centers. Because of the overload, it sometimes takes three or more days before the result is communicated.

Even the city's renowned Charite University Hospital is affected, because every patient who is admitted must first be isolated until the result of the PCR test arrives. Föckersberger's company has offered to step in and offer capacities, but the health administration has so far rejected this.

Sick leave threatens the economy
Benjamin Föckersberger hopes that the city's new top health official, Ulrike Gote, will solve the problem of the overcrowded test centers and that his company is also granted some support. At the moment, however, he has another problem: numerous employees have also called in sick in his test centers, so that he can only operate some centers at half capacity.

High infection numbers and high numbers of people out sick could soon lead to a loss of care for the population in Berlin. The shelves in the supermarkets are still well stocked. But infrastructure challenges keep coming — even the city's public transport companies have already announced that they will limit the number of buses on some lines this week.

This article was originally written in German.

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing, to stay on top of developments as Germany enters the post-Merkel era.

COVID-19 in Europe: Record case numbers in France and Germany [Euronews, 19 Jan 2022]

Several countries in Europe have registered a record number of COVID-19 infections — here is our summary of the situation across the continent.

The number of new coronavirus cases globally rose by 20 per cent last week to more than 18 million, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that the highly infectious Omicron variant “continues to sweep the world.”

“We are concerned about the impact Omicron is having on already exhausted health workers and overburdened health systems,” Tedros said.

Some countries have taken steps targeting the unvaccinated, while programmes are also being rolled out to vaccinate young children.

France, Germany and Italy
On Tuesday, Public Health France reported that there were a record 464,769 new cases in the last 24-hour period.

The number of COVID-related deaths also increased by 288 on Tuesday to 100,339, according to official figures.

Just one day earlier, the number of COVID-19 patients in French hospitals also rose by a record 888 to over 25,000 in total.

Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus cases in Italy jumped from 83,403 to 228,179 on Tuesday.

Germany also saw a new record number of confirmed cases on Wednesday, with 112,323 new infections in the past 24 hours.

It is the first time the country's disease control agency reported more than 100,000 daily cases. A further 239 COVID-related deaths were also registered on Wednesday.

But Germany's association for intensive care medicine (DIVI) said the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units was falling despite the increase in cases.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has warned that the country has not yet reached the peak of infections and has recommended that Germany introduce a nationwide vaccine mandate by May.

Almost 73 per cent of the German population have received a full course of vaccines against COVID-19, while nearly 48 per cent have had an additional booster shot.

German police say that are investigating thousands of forged vaccine certificates, according to the DPA news agency.

Those who supply or use fake certificates could face severe penalties, from fines and suspended prison sentences to losing their jobs.

United Kingdom
In the UK, authorities have relaxed measures after government scientists reported that the surge of infections “has now peaked nationally”.

Face masks will no longer be mandatory in public places and schools in England, while health passes will no longer be needed for large events.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told MPs on Wednesday that hospital admissions and patients in intensive care units in most of England were stabilising or falling.

The government will no longer advise people to work from home, while face masks will be scrapped in classrooms starting Thursday.

Johnson added that more than 90 per cent of those aged over 60 in the UK have now had their booster shot.

Moreover, the UK is debating whether to scrap the requirement for those infected to self-isolate for five full days.

Netherlands
Several Dutch theatres, museums, and cultural venues briefly reopened on Wednesday to protest against the latest anti-COVID measures.

The Netherlands has been in a tough lockdown since mid-December amid a surge in cases.

Last week, hairdressers, gyms, and nonessential stores were allowed to reopen under an easing of restrictions but bars, restaurants, and theatres have to remain closed.

But hundreds of Dutch bars and restaurants also opened their doors as a protest against the lockdown they say is crippling their businesses.

Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra performed on Wednesday while two hairdressers cut hair in the historic venue.

Meanwhile, a barber cut the hair of 10 visitors while 10 more people got a nail treatment at the Van Gogh Museum.

“I understand the cry for help and that artists want to show all the beautiful things they have to offer us, but the opening of society must go step by step," tweeted Culture Minister Gunay Uslu.

The Dutch government has said it will look at possible further easing on 25 January, as hospital admissions decline despite a rise in case numbers.

Hungary
The leader of the main opposition party in Hungary confirmed on Wednesday that he has tested positive for the virus amid a surge in cases nationwide.

Peter Marki-Zay -- who will represent a six-party coalition in April's parliamentary election -- said on Facebook that he had received a positive test after exhibiting mild symptoms.

His announcement came on the same day that Hungary reported the highest number of daily cases since the beginning of the pandemic.

According to the government's official coronavirus website, 14,890 new cases were detected on Wednesday -- nearly double the figure from last week and 2,000 higher than the previous record in November.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has relied on boosting vaccination rates to defend against the pandemic rather than reimposing measures.

More than 61% of Hungarians have received at least two vaccine doses, below the European Union average of 69.1%, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Slovakia
Slovakia has restricted access to public gatherings on Wednesday in the latest measures to tackle the spread of the Omicron variant.

Citizens will need to have received three doses of a vaccine, two doses plus a negative test, or have recently recovered from infection to attend many events.

The number of people at weddings, parties, and other venues will be limited, the government said on Wednesday. All bars and restaurants will also have to be closed between 10 pm and 5 am.

Slovak authorities have been expecting the Omicron variant to become dominant in January.

Belgium
The President of the European Council Charles Michel has had to miss the bloc's latest parliament session after a close contact tested positive for COVID-19.

Michel became the second top-level European Union official who was forced to pull out of Wednesday's session in Strasbourg, where French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the main challenges for the EU presidency.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had already canceled her attendance on Monday after her driver tested positive for the coronavirus.

Poland and the Czech Republic
On Wednesday, Poland’s health minister Adam Niedzielski stated that he was in favour of making COVID-19 certificates mandatory for employees.

Poland currently has some 31,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, and the current infection rate posed a “great risk to the efficiency of the health care system,” Niedzielski said.

The right-wing government of prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has also backed draft legislation that would force workers to show proof of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19 to their employers.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina is experiencing the harshest wave of the pandemic so far, with at least 70 per cent of cases due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant in the country with one of the lowest vaccination rates in Europe, stagnating at 22 per cent.

Determining the number of daily COVID-19 cases has also become a complicated task for the health authorities, with the various levels of government opting for a switch to rapid testing instead of PCRs or a combination of the two due to a lack of resources in some parts of the country.

The main laboratory in the capital Sarajevo has been processing samples with a backlog, and the figure of 2,992 positive cases on Wednesday (19 January) combines several days of PCR results in the reported total.

However, the official number has raised concerns among some experts that the actual infection rate is much higher, considering the low number of tests conducted overall (6,025 samples on the same day) while hospitals across the country are struggling to tend to incoming patients.

Bosnia is second on the continent in cumulative COVID-related deaths, with 4,255 casualties per one million citizens placing it just behind Bulgaria with 4,688.

Serbia
The number of COVID-19 cases in Serbia is still on the rise, with official numbers hitting a five-figure mark for several days in a row.

There were 17,318 cases were registered on Wednesday, while 2,619 new patients admitted to COVID wards across the country, official figures state.

The country’s health authorities believe that the Omicron variant is dominant at the moment, but that Delta is still circulating, blaming the latter for hospital capacities rapidly becoming overburdened.

Meanwhile, the Serbian government has introduced new quarantine measures on Wednesday, where those testing positive are now allowed to leave their homes after seven days with permission from their GP. The mandatory self-isolation for those who were in close contact with a person positive with COVID has also been reduced to a total of five days.

Germany hits record 100,000 daily COVID-19 cases [Medical Xpress, 19 Jan 2022]

Germany's daily toll of new COVID-19 cases topped 100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, according to data from the country's public health agency.

Europe's biggest economy recorded 112,323 new infections over the past 24 hours and 239 fatalities, the Robert Koch Institute said.

The weekly incidence rate reached 584.4 new infections per 100,000 people over the past seven days.

Germany has introduced some curbs to cut contamination, limiting access to bars and restaurants to people who have received their booster jabs or who are tested on top of being fully vaccinated or recovered.

Contact restrictions are also in place keeping private gatherings to 10 people, or two households if an unvaccinated person is present.

Germany's record rise in coronavirus cases comes as Omicron has become the dominant variant, accounting for more than 70 percent of new infections.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said the true number of infections could be up to two times higher than the official figures.

Numbers will likely continue to rise, peaking in around "mid-February", he told the RTL broadcaster.

Other European countries are also battling soaring Omicron rates, with neighbouring France recently averaging around 300,000 cases daily.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seeking to introduce compulsory vaccinations to ramp up the immunity of the 83-million-strong population, of which 60 million are fully vaccinated.

But resistance has been growing in the country where the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was first developed, with the business-friendly FDP party—junior partners in his coalition—casting doubt on the project.

Hundreds, at times thousands, of protesters have also been taking to the streets to rail against the government's COVID strategy and planned vaccine mandate.

Despite the dissent, Scholz insisted that vaccinations are necessary.

"I, for one, believe that it is necessary and will actively push for it," Scholz told parliament last week at his first question time as chancellor.

COVID: Germany logs more than 100,000 cases for first time [DW (English), 19 Jan 2022]

Germany's weekly incidence rate has also risen. It now stands at 584.4 new infections per 100,000 people over seven days. Case numbers have been rising consistently as the omicron variant starts to assert itself.

Germany reported 112,323 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the latest new 24-hour record and the first daily tally north of 100,000. The national disease control body, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), published the figures early in the morning.

The country's weekly incidence rate has now reached 584.4 new infections per 100,000 people over a seven-day period, the RKI reported.

The institute registered 239 deaths connected to COVID, a reduction from the 384 reported on the previous Wednesday.

The hospitalization rate rose, but only slightly, to 3.17 people per 100,000 per week, versus 3.13 one week ago.

Omicron takes hold
The omicron variant was comparatively slow to start spreading in Germany by European standards, but in recent weeks, the country has experienced an increase in case numbers similar to those seen in several nearby countries such as France, the Netherlands and the UK.

France, for instance, with roughly 15 million fewer inhabitants, reported more than 460,000 cases on Tuesday. Italy, with almost 60 million people to Germany's roughly 83 million, logged more than 228,000.

As of this week, omicron accounts for over 70% of new cases across Germany.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said on RTL television late on Tuesday that he expected the latest omicron-fueled wave to peak around the middle of February.

Germany has tightened restrictions in recent days to curb the spread of the virus, limiting access to bars and restaurants to those who have received their booster jabs or citizens who are tested, in addition to already being fully vaccinated or recovered.

On Monday night, tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Germany, as people vented their frustrations over the country's coronavirus measures.

Opinion | How France's Economy Is Surviving the Covid Pandemic [The New York Times, 19 Jan 2022]

By Elian Peltier

With Novak Djokovic back in his native Serbia, unable to compete in the Australian Open because he is not vaccinated against the coronavirus, a big question mark looms over what comes next for the world’s top male tennis player.

The French authorities said this week that players must be vaccinated to compete in the French Open — the next of the four Grand Slam tournaments, scheduled for May.

If Mr. Djokovic refuses to get vaccinated, he is likely to miss a second major tournament in a row, reflecting a major shift in how public officials approach Covid requirements and potential exemptions. As emblematic as Australia’s refusal to give Mr. Djokovic special treatment has been, it might just be the beginning.

The authorities in Spain, where Mr. Djokovic owns a house, have urged him to “lead by example” and get vaccinated. In Monte Carlo, where Mr. Djokovic also has a house, the organizers of a tournament that he has previously won said they were awaiting guidelines from the French government for the 2022 edition in April.

Mr. Djokovic might be able to compete in Wimbledon in June, but under current guidelines he could be barred from competing in the U.S. Open a few months later, since foreign travelers must be vaccinated to enter the United States, with very limited exceptions.

After France adopted a Covid pass law on Sunday requiring people to be vaccinated to enter restaurants, cinemas and sporting arenas, the country’s Sports Ministry said that no exemption would be made for athletes.

“Who would understand if we asked our citizens to make an effort and respect the rules if we authorize some to get out of them?” Stanislas Guerini, the leader of President Emmanuel Macron’s party, said on French radio this week. He called Mr. Djokovic’s behavior in remaining unvaccinated “irresponsible.”

The French Open is scheduled to begin on May 22, and Mr. Djokovic is chasing a record 21st Grand Slam title. He, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have each won 20.

Mr. Djokovic is one of only three top-100 men’s players to be unvaccinated, and some of his rivals welcomed the French decision.

“At least they’re saying, ‘OK, no unvaccinated players are allowed to play in the French Open,’” said Alexander Zverev, who is currently world No. 3 in men’s tennis. “We know that now in advance, and I can imagine there’s not going to be any exemptions, and that’s OK.”

WHO Says Pandemic 'Nowhere Near Over', France, Germany Post Record Cases [NDTV, 19 Jan 2022]

Europe is at the epicentre of alarming new outbreaks, with Germany's cases soaring past 100,000 and France reporting nearly half a million cases on Tuesday.

Geneva:
The World Health Organization has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over, as France, Germany and Brazil posted new records of infections in the past 24 hours.

The highly transmissible Omicron strain has spread unabated around the world, pushing some governments to impose fresh measures while speeding up the rollout of vaccine booster shots.
"This pandemic is nowhere near over," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Tuesday from the agency's headquarters in Geneva.

Europe is at the epicentre of alarming new outbreaks, with Germany's cases soaring past 100,000 and France reporting nearly half a million cases on Tuesday.

The UN health chief warned against dismissing Omicron as mild, as the dominant Covid strain continues to flare new outbreaks from Latin America to East Asia after it was first detected in southern Africa in November.

"Omicron may be less severe, on average, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading," he said.

European surge
Five millions cases were reported in Europe last week and the WHO has predicted Omicron could infect half of all Europeans by March, filling hospitals across the continent.

Germany on Tuesday recorded 112,323 coronavirus cases and 239 deaths, officials said, with Omicron found in more than 70 percent of the infections.

The surge has pushed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to seek compulsory vaccinations to ramp up the immunity of the population in Europe's biggest economy.

Other European countries are also battling soaring Omicron rates, with neighbouring France recently averaging around 300,000 cases daily.

The latest data issued by Public Health France showed that there were 464,769 new cases in the last 24-hour period, a record number.

The record cases come days after the two-year anniversary of the announcement of the first person dying of a virus in China only later identified as Covid.

Since January 11, 2020, known fatalities in the pandemic have soared to more than 5.5 million.
Hopes for Europe's tourism recovery remain bleak with the World Tourism Organization saying Tuesday that foreign arrivals will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest, despite a rise of 19 percent last year compared to 2020.

'Quasi-emergency'
Elsewhere in the world, Brazil registered a new record number of daily cases of more than 137,000 on Tuesday.

The country suffered a devastating second wave last year with deaths topping 4,000 a day, pushing its death toll to the second highest in the world behind the United States.

President Jair Bolsonaro, an avowed vaccine sceptic who has downplayed Omicron, is increasingly under fire for his handling of the pandemic, and he is on course to lose the country's October presidential election, according to polls.

In Asia, Japan was set to tighten restrictions across the country, including Tokyo, as it battles record infections fuelled by Omicron while China partially relaxed transport restrictions in the megacity of Xi'an where millions have been confined to their homes for weeks.

Japanese experts on Wednesday backed placing 13 regions "under quasi-emergency measures from January 21 to February 13" Daishiro Yamagiwa, minister in charge of coronavirus affairs, told reporters.

China's resumption of some inter-city train routes in Xi'an from Tuesday comes just before the Lunar New Year holiday later this month, traditionally a period of mass travel.

It also comes as Beijing battles multiple clusters that are testing its enforcement of a strict "zero-Covid" approach ahead of next month's Winter Olympics.

Hamsters and big cats
Focus is increasingly turning to animals and how the virus interacts with them, after at least two countries reported Covid-19 cases in creatures big and small potentially passed between them and humans.

A study published Tuesday in South Africa said big cats caged in zoos are at risk from catching Covid from their keepers.

Researchers found clues pointing to the infection of three lions and two pumas by their handlers at a zoo in Johannesburg, some of whom were asymptomatic.

In Hong Kong, hamsters were bearing the brunt of the semi-autonomous Chinese city's similarly strict approach to Covid, with officials appearing to blame them for two human cases.

The financial hub's government faced growing outrage Wednesday over its decision to cull 2,000 small animals in pet shops after several hamsters in a store allegedly tested positive for Covid-19.

"Internationally, there is no evidence yet to show pets can transmit the coronavirus to humans," Health Secretary Sophia Chan told a press conference.

"But... we will take precautionary measures against any vector of transmission."

COVID-19 in Europe: Record case numbers in France and Germany [Euronews, 19 Jan 2022]

Several countries in Europe have registered a record number of COVID-19 infections — here is our summary of the situation across the continent.

The number of new coronavirus cases globally rose by 20 per cent last week to more than 18 million, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that the highly infectious Omicron variant “continues to sweep the world.”

“We are concerned about the impact Omicron is having on already exhausted health workers and overburdened health systems,” Tedros said.

Some countries have taken steps targeting the unvaccinated, while programmes are also being rolled out to vaccinate young children.

France, Germany and Italy
On Tuesday, Public Health France reported that there were a record 464,769 new cases in the last 24-hour period.

The number of COVID-related deaths also increased by 288 on Tuesday to 100,339, according to official figures.

Just one day earlier, the number of COVID-19 patients in French hospitals also rose by a record 888 to over 25,000 in total.

Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus cases in Italy jumped from 83,403 to 228,179 on Tuesday.

Germany also saw a new record number of confirmed cases on Wednesday, with 112,323 new infections in the past 24 hours.

It is the first time the country's disease control agency reported more than 100,000 daily cases. A further 239 COVID-related deaths were also registered on Wednesday.

But Germany's association for intensive care medicine (DIVI) said the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units was falling despite the increase in cases.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has warned that the country has not yet reached the peak of infections and has recommended that Germany introduce a nationwide vaccine mandate by May.

Almost 73 per cent of the German population have received a full course of vaccines against COVID-19, while nearly 48 per cent have had an additional booster shot.

German police say that are investigating thousands of forged vaccine certificates, according to the DPA news agency.

Those who supply or use fake certificates could face severe penalties, from fines and suspended prison sentences to losing their jobs.

United Kingdom
In the UK, authorities have relaxed measures after government scientists reported that the surge of infections “has now peaked nationally”.

Face masks will no longer be mandatory in public places and schools in England, while health passes will no longer be needed for large events.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told MPs on Wednesday that hospital admissions and patients in intensive care units in most of England were stabilising or falling.

The government will no longer advise people to work from home, while face masks will be scrapped in classrooms starting Thursday.

Johnson added that more than 90 per cent of those aged over 60 in the UK have now had their booster shot.

Moreover, the UK is debating whether to scrap the requirement for those infected to self-isolate for five full days.

Netherlands
Several Dutch theatres, museums, and cultural venues briefly reopened on Wednesday to protest against the latest anti-COVID measures.

The Netherlands has been in a tough lockdown since mid-December amid a surge in cases.

Last week, hairdressers, gyms, and nonessential stores were allowed to reopen under an easing of restrictions but bars, restaurants, and theatres have to remain closed.

But hundreds of Dutch bars and restaurants also opened their doors as a protest against the lockdown they say is crippling their businesses.

Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra performed on Wednesday while two hairdressers cut hair in the historic venue.

Meanwhile, a barber cut the hair of 10 visitors while 10 more people got a nail treatment at the Van Gogh Museum.

“I understand the cry for help and that artists want to show all the beautiful things they have to offer us, but the opening of society must go step by step," tweeted Culture Minister Gunay Uslu.

The Dutch government has said it will look at possible further easing on 25 January, as hospital admissions decline despite a rise in case numbers.

Hungary
The leader of the main opposition party in Hungary confirmed on Wednesday that he has tested positive for the virus amid a surge in cases nationwide.

Peter Marki-Zay -- who will represent a six-party coalition in April's parliamentary election -- said on Facebook that he had received a positive test after exhibiting mild symptoms.

His announcement came on the same day that Hungary reported the highest number of daily cases since the beginning of the pandemic.

According to the government's official coronavirus website, 14,890 new cases were detected on Wednesday -- nearly double the figure from last week and 2,000 higher than the previous record in November.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has relied on boosting vaccination rates to defend against the pandemic rather than reimposing measures.

More than 61% of Hungarians have received at least two vaccine doses, below the European Union average of 69.1%, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Slovakia
Slovakia has restricted access to public gatherings on Wednesday in the latest measures to tackle the spread of the Omicron variant.

Citizens will need to have received three doses of a vaccine, two doses plus a negative test, or have recently recovered from infection to attend many events.

The number of people at weddings, parties, and other venues will be limited, the government said on Wednesday. All bars and restaurants will also have to be closed between 10 pm and 5 am.

Slovak authorities have been expecting the Omicron variant to become dominant in January.

Belgium

The President of the European Council Charles Michel has had to miss the bloc's latest parliament session after a close contact tested positive for COVID-19.

Michel became the second top-level European Union official who was forced to pull out of Wednesday's session in Strasbourg, where French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the main challenges for the EU presidency.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had already canceled her attendance on Monday after her driver tested positive for the coronavirus.

Poland and the Czech Republic
On Wednesday, Poland’s health minister Adam Niedzielski stated that he was in favour of making COVID-19 certificates mandatory for employees.

Poland currently has some 31,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, and the current infection rate posed a “great risk to the efficiency of the health care system,” Niedzielski said.

The right-wing government of prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has also backed draft legislation that would force workers to show proof of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19 to their employers.

But across the border in the Czech Republic, the government has dropped proposals for a vaccine mandate.

An order released in December by former prime minister Andrej Babiš would force citizens aged over 60 — as well as medical workers, police officers, and firefighters — to be vaccinated.
However, the new coalition government under Petr Fiala has said that the order was unnecessary.

“We’ve agreed that vaccination against COVID-19 won’t be mandatory,” Fiala said while stressing that his government still considers the vaccines “the best tool to fight COVID-19.”
Despite the record case numbers, the number of COVID-19 patients in Czech hospitals dropped to 1,635 on Tuesday.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina is experiencing the harshest wave of the pandemic so far, with at least 70 per cent of cases due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant in the country with one of the lowest vaccination rates in Europe, stagnating at 22 per cent.

Determining the number of daily COVID-19 cases has also become a complicated task for the health authorities, with the various levels of government opting for a switch to rapid testing instead of PCRs or a combination of the two due to a lack of resources in some parts of the country.

The main laboratory in the capital Sarajevo has been processing samples with a backlog, and the figure of 2,992 positive cases on Wednesday (19 January) combines several days of PCR results in the reported total.

However, the official number has raised concerns among some experts that the actual infection rate is much higher, considering the low number of tests conducted overall (6,025 samples on the same day) while hospitals across the country are struggling to tend to incoming patients.

Bosnia is second on the continent in cumulative COVID-related deaths, with 4,255 casualties per one million citizens placing it just behind Bulgaria with 4,688.

Serbia
The number of COVID-19 cases in Serbia is still on the rise, with official numbers hitting a five-figure mark for several days in a row.

There were 17,318 cases were registered on Wednesday, while 2,619 new patients admitted to COVID wards across the country, official figures state.

The country’s health authorities believe that the Omicron variant is dominant at the moment, but that Delta is still circulating, blaming the latter for hospital capacities rapidly becoming overburdened.

Meanwhile, the Serbian government has introduced new quarantine measures on Wednesday, where those testing positive are now allowed to leave their homes after seven days with permission from their GP. The mandatory self-isolation for those who were in close contact with a person positive with COVID has also been reduced to a total of five days.

U.S. government beefs up COVID response with N95 masks and tests, as embattled prime minister eases U.K. restrictions [MarketWatch, 19 Jan 2022]

By Ciara Linnane

Boris Johnson, under pressure for Downing Street parties held during lockdowns, scraps face masks in schools

The U.S. government stepped up its effort to address a surge of COVID-19 cases driven by the highly contagious omicron variant on Wednesday, while the U.K. moved in the opposite direction, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson announcing an easing of coronavirus restrictions.

Johnson, who is under pressure to resign after a series of parties at his Downing Street residence during the U.K.’s lockdowns, announced that the use of mandatory certification that shows either vaccination or a recent negative test at major venues will end in England, as will the mandate that required the wearing of face masks in classrooms.

The U.K. also is no longer recommending employees work at home, Johnson said.

Self-isolation rules are still mandatory, though the waiting period will be reduced to five days after two negative tests.

The announcement drew criticism, coming at a time when the U.K. is still struggling with a high number of cases and thousands of schoolkids out because of infection or exposure.

The administration of President Joe Biden is expected to announce plans to make 400 million N95 masks available free at U.S. pharmacies and community health centers across the country, a White House official reportedly told the Wall Street Journal. The move will be the biggest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history, according to reports.

Some scientists and doctors have said popular single-layer cloth masks may not be sufficient to protect against omicron and called on the administration to expand access to high-filtration masks such as N95s. The masks will be available from next week at pharmacies and community centers and will be distributed free of charge. The full program is expected to be up and running by early February.

On Tuesday, the administration began taking orders through a new website — at COVIDtests.gov—for at-home rapid tests that will be distributed to Americans for free, one day ahead of the planned launch on Wednesday.

The U.S. is still counting almost 800,000 new COVID cases a day, according to a New York Times tracker, and hospitalizations are at a record level above 150,000 a day.

Deaths, which lag cases and hospitalizations, are on the rise, too, at 1,889 a day, up 43% from two weeks ago.

There are rising hopes that omicron may soon peak, as it seems to be doing in states in the Northeast, including New York, but other states are suffering extreme surges in new cases, with Alaska, Oregon and Utah all seeing them up about 400% in a two-week span.

Hospitals in many areas are being hit hard by staffing shortages, as workers have fallen ill or have left their jobs.

Other COVID-19 news you should know:
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday warned Americans not to travel to another 22 countries and territories because of their high numbers of COVID-19 cases, including Israel, Australia and Argentina. The agency raised its travel recommendation to “Level Four: Very High,” increasing the number of places in that category to a total of more than 100. The CDC is warning unvaccinated Americans to avoid nonessential travel to another 20 countries it rates at “Level 3: High.”
• The government of Japan said it would place 13 prefectures, including Tokyo, under restrictions from Friday through Feb. 13 as it works to battle a surge in omicron cases, the New York Times reported. The restrictions will vary by prefecture, and may include shortening business hours and halting the sale of alcohol. The decision comes amid a sharp rise in infections linked to the omicron variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, hitting a record 32,197 cases nationwide on Tuesday to beat the prior record of nearly 26,000 cases set in August.
• The Chinese city of Xi’an has partially resumed public transport after confining its 13 million residents to their homes in mid-December because of an outbreak of COVID cases, AFP reported, citing official announcements. Chinese officials have pursued a strict “zero-COVID” approach to containing the virus, with tight border restrictions and targeted lockdowns, a strategy that has come under pressure as multiple clusters have flared across the country ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics.
• U.S. biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong opened a plant in Cape Town that will be the first in Africa to produce COVID-19 vaccines from start to finish, AFP reported separately. The factory should churn out its first vials of second-generation coronavirus vaccine “within the year” and produce a billion doses annually by 2025, said Soon-Shiong.
From the archives (June 2018): Tronc sale of L.A. Times to local billionaire set to close Monday: report
• Global health charities the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust each pledged $150 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to fund its COVID-19 pandemic response and help put it on better footing for future major health crises, Reuters reported. CEPI has a five-year plan to compress vaccine-development timelines to 100 days, or about a third of the time it took to develop COVID vaccines.

Here’s what the numbers say
The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose above 335.4 million, and the death toll is now more than 5.55 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 67.8 million cases and 854,950 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine tracker is showing that about 209 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equal to 63% of the total population.
Some 81 million have received a booster, equal to 38.7% of the fully vaccinated.

Covid denier fined for filming in Gloucester hospital [The Guardian, 19 Jan 2022]

By Steven Morris

Debbie Hicks said she was acting as ‘guerrilla journalist’ to prove lockdown measures disproportionate

A woman acting as a “guerrilla journalist” when she filmed inside a hospital in an attempt to prove her belief that lockdown measures were disproportionate has been convicted of a public order offence.

Debbie Hicks, 47, a former teacher and psychologist, filmed twice at the Gloucestershire Royal hospital in Gloucester in December 2020 and told staff who challenged her she could do what she wanted as she paid her taxes.

Hicks, from Stroud, argued that she was exercising her right to freedom of expression and trying to expose what she believed was a false government narrative that hospitals were full of patients with Covid.

But finding her guilty of using threatening words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, the district judge Nicholas Wattam said staff had the right to work without being molested.

Richard Posner, prosecuting, told Cheltenham magistrates court that Hicks, who had no previous convictions, went to the hospital on 27 December 2020 because she felt restrictions were over the top.

Live-streaming her visit, she could be heard saying: “It is absolutely dead, it’s a ghost town, I’ve never seen it so quiet. Where are all the people dying from the second wave?

“This is the proof we’ve needed in Gloucestershire, we’ve been locked down into tier 3 for this? An empty hospital, this is a disgrace. All our people in our country desperately waiting for treatment … This is making me so angry walking around here. Look at the truth.”

On the second visit the following day, she was challenged by two staff. Posner said: “Ms Hicks’ response was confrontational, derogatory and aggressive.”

Katie Williams, an occupational therapist who challenged Hicks, said she had been working under extreme pressure for almost a year and had found the incident distressing.

Sophie Brown, a senior physiotherapist, said when she asked Hicks not to film, Hicks replied that she paid her taxes “so I can do what I want”.

Hicks’ lawyer Merry Van Woodenberg told the court that Hicks was acting as a guerrilla journalist and she had a right to freedom of expression under article 10 of the European convention on human rights.

The barrister said her client had lost her chance of employment because of her political views and told the court her fees had been paid by others who had similar concerns to Hicks.

But finding her guilty, the judge said: “Miss Williams and Miss Brown had the misfortune to encounter Mrs Hicks in their place of work. They do not deserve to be molested by Mrs Hicks when at work and should be protected by the law.”

Hicks told the court she was unemployed and struggling with debt. She was fined £120 and told to pay prosecution costs of £775 and a victim surcharge – which is used to fund services for victims – of £34, a total of £929.

Covid-19 UK: Common blood thinner can spare virus patients from severe lung damage, study claims [Daily Mail, 19 Jan 2022]

By JOE DAVIES

A £15 blood-thinning drug could help Covid patients and prevent lung damage, a study suggested today.

Researchers based in the UK and Australia found heparin improved oxygen levels of hospitalised patients by 70 per cent.

The drug is unique because of its combination of anti-viral, anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant effects, experts said.

Heparin — which is found in drugs such as Lovenox — is already used in hospitals to treat infected Brits suffering clots. It is usually injected but doctors found it was safe and effective for Covid patients when inhaled.

Experts believe the drug works by preventing the virus multiplying in the lungs, while its anti-inflammatory properties stop the immune system overreacting.

Covid can be deadly because it has the potential to damage the lungs, which blocks the flow of oxygen around the body to major organs. Severely ill patients have also been found to suffer blood clots in the lungs.

Doctors said the drug could be used in poorer countries where fewer people have been vaccinated so are more at risk of being hospitalised.

Professor Frank van Haren, study author from the Australian National University, said: 'This drug is already available in hospitals all over the world.

'It is a very inexpensive drug. If it is as effective as our early results suggest, it could have a major impact in our fight against Covid.'

Covid can also cause the body's immune system to overreact in a process known as inflammation, which can scar the lungs and even trigger blood clots.

Around 20 per cent of people infected with the virus develop hypoxaemia — a drop in oxygen saturation in the blood.

This is the main cause of hospitalisation, according to the ANU and King's College London researchers.

And some of those in hospital experience respiratory failure, with up to a quarter requiring mechanical ventilation in intensive care.

Co-author Professor Clive Page, from King’s, said: 'Inhaled heparin has antiviral properties which work by binding to the spike proteins the coronavirus uses to enter the cells of the body.

'Inhaled heparin effectively stops the virus infecting cells in the lungs and could also stop people from getting the virus from others.

'It also works as an anti-inflammatory drug — the medicine has the ability to calm everything down when the body is mounting an exaggerated response to the virus.

'We already know heparin can reduce lung damage caused by this inflammation and the immune response overdrive that we see in other lung diseases which could provide benefit to patients hospitalised with Covid.'

He added: 'There is no other drug that has these three different effects - anti-viral, anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant.'

Britain currently has two antiviral treatments specifically for Covid approved — Merck's molnupiravir and Pfizer's Paxlovid — but the researchers will continue to collect evidence on heparin's use in fighting off the virus.

Other treatments for seriously ill patients including monoclonal antibodies and dexamethasone.
The study, published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, analysed 98 Covid patients in hospital with the virus who were given heparin in the US and Argentina between April 2020 and January 2021.

Most patients would not have been vaccinated because of the time frame.

They were split over two hospitals in the US — Frederick Health Hospital in Maryland, and Coney Island Hospital in New York — and the San Camilo Clinic in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The patients in the study had an average age of 66. The majority were not hooked up to ventilators.

Nearly two thirds were already on remdesivir, an antiviral licensed for emergency use in Covid patients in the UK.

No comparison group not taking heparin was used, so it is impossible to tell whether the drug was truly behind the improvements in patients.

Researchers measured their level of blood oxygen levels before and after being given the drug — which was administered in three different dosages.

The drug costs the NHS just £16.50 per dose when administering 5,000 International Units per dose — the second most common dosage used in the study (32 per cent).

They found it increased in all groups after taking the drug, with the biggest jump seen in patients given the highest dosage of 25,000 IU per dose, which was given to 62 per cent of patients.

A total of 69 patients (70 per cent) survived the virus with 29 (30 per cent) dying. Improving oxygen levels helped the survivors avoid needing to be put on a ventilator.

The researchers also measured their bleeding to determine how safe the drug was.

Despite two patients already on ventilators suffering major bleeding, they concluded the drug was generally unlikely to cause problems.

The drug has an excellent safety record in patients with other respiratory diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

The authors said their study showed promising signs for heparin's use in treating Covid, adding they are continuing further studies into its effects.

COVID-19: UK in 'very strong position' on COVID - but world in 'pretty dire situation', expert warns [Sky News, 19 Jan 2022]

By Tom Clarke


Sir Jeremy Farrar told Sky News it was reasonable for the government to start looking at lifting restrictions, but not all of them.

The rapid spread of the Omicron variant, combined with the roll-out of up to 20 billion doses of vaccine, means the COVID-19 pandemic could be over this year, according to one of the world's leading public health experts.

But Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and former SAGE adviser told Sky News that more transparency, particularly around the origins of the COVID will be needed to prevent future pandemics.

"The UK in particular and some other countries are in a very, very strong position now. They have fantastic rollout of vaccines and there's a high degree of natural immunity," he said.

It was reasonable for the government to start looking at lifting restrictions, he said, with Boris Johnson expected to significantly ease Plan B rules, but not all of them.

"I wouldn't lift everything at the end of January," said Sir Jeremy, "when the NHS is still under pressure, and we're still in the middle, of course, of winter."

Right now, the rest of the world remains in a "pretty dire situation", according to Sir Jeremy, due to low vaccination rates and the incredibly rapid spread of the Omicron variant.

While that is causing surges in mortality, the emerging data, even from countries with low vaccination coverage, is that the Omicron wave is less deadly than previous ones.

The more infectious variant will have increased levels of COVID-19 immunity globally. And that is soon to be improved by rapidly increasing global vaccine rollout.

Vaccine dose availability increasing exponentially
Availability of vaccine doses is increasing exponentially, boosting reserves of COVAX, the global vaccine sharing initiative. Last week, COVAX delivered its billionth dose. And there are hopes that another 20 billion doses of vaccines will become available globally this year.

"If you think there are seven billion people or so in the world, we should now in the first half of 2022, be able to get vaccines to everybody that wants it in every country in the world, and that has got to be our target," said Sir Jeremy.

The Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation have pledged a combined $300m (£221m) for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations which has helped make COVID vaccines available to poorer countries and continues to work on "variant-proof" vaccines, reducing the risk of future coronavirus pandemics.

But until vaccines are distributed, poorer countries remain at risk, and given the continued possibility of new variants emerging, so, by extension, do the rest of us.

"When we were in the middle of Delta, we thought Delta was the end. It was difficult to imagine we could have a virus that was so much more transmissible than Delta that it would kick Delta off the scene," said Sir Jeremy.

International cooperation needed to prevent future outbreaks
But he cautioned that the prospects for international cooperation to prevent future pandemics were in a worse state now than before this one.

He said a "blame game" that started with the origins of COVID-19 in China but now extends to the emergence of new variants and international travel bans has undermined trust. Trust that will be needed if scientists and governments can work together to spot newly emerging pandemic threats and take action against them.

Emails recently emerged from the start of the pandemic in 2020, in which Sir Jeremy himself thought it was "50:50" that SARS-CoV-2 had escaped from a state virology lab in Wuhan.

However, he told Sky News that he soon became persuaded that what initially looked "odd" could just as easily be explained as a natural event.

But more openness about COVID's origins will be needed to help restore that trust, according to Sir Jeremy. "It's now almost impossible, geopolitically, to see this being solved.

"I would call on everybody, particularly, the Chinese government, to be transparent about the origins

"I think we're very vulnerable at the moment because much of that scientific cooperation with China, but more broadly, has stopped."

England is about to drop virtually all anti-COVID restrictions [CBS News, 19 Jan 2022]

BY HALEY OTT

London — Most legal restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in England will be dropped next week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the British Parliament on Wednesday. From Monday, face masks will no longer be mandatory anywhere in England.

"Our scientists believe it is likely that the Omicron wave has now peaked nationally," Johnson said, attributing the end of the most recent COVID-19 surge to "the extraordinary [vaccine] booster campaign, together with the way the public have responded" to the restrictions brought in when Omicron hit.

The restrictions being lifted on Monday in England were some of the least stringent imposed across Europe to counter the Omicron wave. They include a requirement for face masks to be worn in crowded indoor spaces, mandatory COVID-19 passes — which show vaccination status or a recent negative test — to enter large venues, and guidance to work from home where possible.

The premier said his government hoped to lift the only remaining legal requirement, for anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least five days, before it lapses automatically in March.

"To make that possible," he said, "we must all remain cautious during these last weeks of winter.. The pandemic is not over."

Despite case numbers remaining high in the U.K., the number of new daily infections has decreased by 38.9% over the last week. The number of hospital admissions related to COVID-19 has also started to drop.

"Many nations across Europe have endured further winter lockdowns," Johnson said, "but this government took a different path."

The aim of the measures was to slow transmission of the virus to buy time for the government to provide vaccine boosters to as much of the British public as possible.

With about two-thirds of eligible Britons now boosted, Johnson said it was time to drop the restrictions.

As COVID-19 becomes endemic in the U.K. rather than an epidemic, Johnson said the rules would be replaced with guidance or advice.

New Coronavirus News from 20 Jan 2022

Covid-19 in Europe: France, Germany battered; new curbs in Austria, Italy [Hindustan Times, 20 Jan 2022]

by Amit Chaturvedi

The Omicron variant has led to a surge in the number of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases across Europe. Due to this, some countries have brought in strict curbs, but others - where the infection rate is slowing - have devised plans to live with the disease.

The emergence of the Omicron variant of coronavirus has made the situation worse in Europe, which is battered by rising infections and hospitalisations. The healthcare infrastructure in Europe has been stretched to the limit, prompting many governments to re-impose strict curbs.

The situation in the United Kingdom, however, is improving compared to other countries in Europe. The number of daily cases has been falling after reaching a peak earlier this month.

Official government data shows that Covid-19 cases have been rising in Portugal, Germany, Austria, Sweden and the Czech Republic. The numbers appear to be high in Italy and Spain too, though the peak has subsided.

Here's a look at what the situation is in other European countries and the measures undertaken by them to tackle it:

France: The French government is introducing new vaccine passport rules for visitors to cafes and restaurants from next week. The announcement was made by French Prime Minister Jean Castex in a television address.

Till now, a negative Covid-19 test was sufficient for people in France to enter cafes, restaurants or other places. "The vaccination pass will come into effect next Monday," said Castex.

France hit a daily record on Tuesday when 464,769 cases of Covid-19 were recorded. On Thursday, the number stood at 425,183, according to French Public Health Agency.

Germany: The country's seven-day Covid-19 incidence rate exceeded 600 for the first time as 638.8 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants were recorded, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases said on Thursday.

Due to the more contagious Omicron variant that is spreading across Europe, daily infections in Germany also climbed to a new record as 133,536 cases were registered within 24 hours, around 52,000 more than a week ago.

Austria: The Austrian Parliament has passed a law to make coronavirus vaccination mandatory from February. The Compulsory Vaccination Law apply to all persons aged 18 and over who are registered in Austria. The unvaccinated people have been asked to take a vaccine shot till March 15. The authorities will send a notification by mail.

The exceptions are persons under 18 years of age, pregnant women, persons for whom vaccination may be associated with health risks.

United Kingdom: In the United Kingdom, mask-wearing in public places and Covid-19 passports will be dropped on January 26, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday saying that the latest wave had “peaked nationally.”

The requirement for infected people to isolate for five full days remains in place, but Johnson said he will seek to scrap it in coming weeks if the virus data continues to improve. Official statistics put at 95% the share of the British population that has developed antibodies against Covid-19 either from infection or vaccination.

Ireland: The Ireland’s government will end the 8pm curfew for bars and restaurants by the end of next week, allowing them to stay open until midnight, the Irish Independent reported, without saying where it got the information.

Other restrictions on the hospitality sector, live events and order to work from home advise will be relaxed in coming weeks, the newspaper said. Cases numbers in Ireland are dropping, and hospitalisations have remained relatively low in the latest wave.

Italy: The government in Italy is extending its vaccination mandate to all citizens age 50 or older and imposing fines of up to 1,500 euros for unvaccinated people who show up at work.
Italians are also required to be fully vaccinated to access public transportation, planes, gyms, hotels and trade fairs.

US 'exhausted'; France, Germany break case records as Covid threat persists across nations | Top developments [India Today, 20 Jan 2022]

The Omicron variant-drive Covid wave continues to stress the healthcare infrastructure of nations across the globe. Here are the latest developments.

As Covid, driven by the Omicron variant of coronavirus, continues to ravage nations across the world, US President Joe Biden on Wednesday acknowledged that the pandemic has left Americans exhausted and demoralised.

Australia, too, is dealing with rising Covid cases and subsequent deaths.

In India, an expert panel of India's central drug authority granted regular market approval to Covid vaccines Covishield and Covaxin.

Here’s how the Covid situation is developing around the world:
1. In a major move, Britain, which was dealing with a severe coronavirus wave, has decided to lift all the additional restrictions imposed to contain the spread of the Omicron, including mandatory wearing of face masks anywhere, from next Thursday after analysis showed that cases of the Omicron variant has now most likely peaked in the country.
2. Following Britain, Northern Ireland has decided to reduce the number of days of self-isolation from seven to five.
3. Brazil on Wednesday reported 204,854 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, breaking the country’s previous record for the second consecutive day.
4. New Zealand could reimpose restrictions if there is a community transmission of Omicron, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
5. The new government of Czech Republic has scrapped the mandatory vaccination order to avoid “deep fissures in society”. The central European nation has one of the worst cases per capita rate in the world.
ALSO READ | Over 50% Indians in 15-18 age group given first dose of Covid-19 vaccine: Health Minister
6. As Omicron continues to wreak havoc in Europe, Germany reported a record 1,12,323 Covid cases. France, too, is still stressed by the disease as over 4,00,000 new cases emerged for the second day in a row.
7. The Joe Biden administration in the US will make 400m non-surgical N95 masks free to the public from next week, amid a rise in Covid numbers.
8. Malaysia will start vaccination of children aged 5-11 from February.
9. With a record high of 38,759 new Covid patients, Denmark on Wednesday reported a 37% jump on the 28,283 cases recorded two weeks ago.
10. Russia reported 33,899 fresh Covid infections and 698 deaths on Wednesday.

It's Time for a Japan-US Pandemic Partnership [The Diplomat, 20 Jan 2022]

By James Gannon

Beyond their moral responsibility, Japan and the United States have compelling interests in doing more together to battle COVID-19 internationally.

Omicron is ripping through both the United States and Japan, and has delayed the first in-person meeting between Japan’s new prime minister, Kishida Fumio, and U.S. President Joe Biden. As a stopgap measure, the two leaders will meet for a “virtual summit” on January 21.
They would be wise to use this to prepare the ground to launch a formal U.S.-Japan Pandemic Partnership to help bring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic around the world.

Last April, Biden and then-Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide announced that they would partner to help the Indo-Pacific region recover from COVID-19. That was smart strategically and befitting of their responsibilities as the world’s first and third largest economies. But since then there has been little visible cooperation outside of some coordination of support for the COVAX vaccine initiative and the announcement of the Quad Vaccine Partnership to provide 1 billion vaccine doses to the Indo-Pacific region by the end of 2022.

This limited collaboration comes as the global response to the pandemic continues to flounder. While more than 70 percent of the population of high-income countries have been fully vaccinated, less than 5 percent of people in low-income countries have, and the world’s poorest countries are still short of the PPE, basic diagnostics, oxygen, and other therapeutics that are commonplace elsewhere.

In fact, the international community has failed to meet every major target put forward in the battle against COVID-19. The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator coalition of groups central to the global response estimated that $38 billion in pledges were needed for immunizations, diagnostics, and treatment in the world’s poorest countries in the 2020/2021 period, yet donor countries came up with barely half of that amount. The world’s leading countries endorsed the WHO target of vaccinating at least 40 percent of the population in every country by the end of 2021. However, by year-end, just seven of the 54 countries in Africa had passed that milestone, with less than 10 percent of the continent’s population fully vaccinated.

The United States was largely AWOL on the world stage for the first year of the pandemic, but it stepped up in 2021 to help drive the global response, quietly appropriating more international funding than any other country — a total of $19 billion according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A number of EU countries have also been notably generous with development assistance, but the richest Asian countries, including Japan, have lagged far behind in supporting the global pandemic response.

Unlike the United States, the Japanese government was an early funder of the international COVID-19 response, befitting the country’s stature as a global health leader. Despite this quick start, Japan has ended up committing barely one-tenth that of the United States — under $2 billion — directly for testing, treatment, and vaccines for COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries, while pledging roughly $2 billion more in loans and grants for economic stabilization and other broader support for countries hurt by the pandemic.

Going beyond their moral responsibility as two of the world’s richest countries, Japan and the United States have compelling interests in doing more together to battle COVID-19 internationally. China’s vaccine diplomacy has made it clear there are geostrategic implications to demonstrating that leading democracies can be trusted to help in a time of intense need. And the rise of Delta and Omicron underscore the risk that the longer the pandemic is allowed to spread in the poorest countries, the more likely that a new and more dangerous variant will arise to threaten citizens in Ohio, Osaka, and everywhere else around the world.

That is why launching a new U.S.-Japan Pandemic Partnership is so important. Ideally, it would include five components.

First and foremost is coordinating to provide more funding for the global response. The United States has run through most of the funding it had available, but the Biden administration is weighing going back to Congress to refill the coffers. In the eyes of the global health community, Biden took ownership over the international response with his September 2021 Global COVID-19 Summit and the pledge that the United States would serve as the world’s arsenal of vaccines. He will convene the second COVID-19 Summit in the spring, presumably in mid- to late-March, and that would be a perfect setting for Kishida to match the United States in pledging new funding — ideally $1 to $1.5 billion more — for the multilateral organizations at the core of the global response. Greater Japanese generosity, coordinated with new U.S. commitments, would go a long way in telegraphing genuine bilateral commitment to the fight.
Second, the United States and Japan should work more intensively to expand vaccine manufacturing at home and globally. Both countries conducted a massive mobilization of domestic industries to wage war on one another some 80 years ago, and it is baffling that they have not channeled the same level of energy into the COVID-19 battle to save lives. The Japanese government is hoping to revive its domestic vaccine industry, so this effort can help in more self-interested ways, too.

Third, it would be wise for Japan to join the United States in helping launch a new pandemic preparedness fund. A wide range of global health leaders have concluded that one of the most pressing post-COVID reforms should be the creation of a mechanism to channel resources to strengthen pandemic surveillance efforts and preparedness capacity around the world, and a high-level G-20 panel endorsed plans to create a new funding facility with an annual budget of $10 billion. The U.S. Congress has already appropriated $250 million for this fund, and Biden has promised to seek even more support. It would help advance global health — and be a canny show of unity — for Japan to get in on the ground floor to help co-lead the effort to turn this proposal into reality.

Fourth, Japan has a wealth of experience in advancing universal health coverage (UHC), both at home and abroad. It has a strong track record of helping low and middle-income countries emulate its path to UHC, and it would be smart for USAID to better coordinate with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and support its long-term work to strengthen health systems in order to make societies more resilient to threats like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fifth and finally, the pandemic has underscored how important it is for the United States and Japan to invest in people-to-people exchanges and dialogues. There are a surprising number of Japan-U.S. fellowships and collaborations in the fields of science and medicine that have equipped researchers to share COVID-19 findings quickly, and it is important to reaffirm the joint commitments to the governmental and nongovernmental organizations that host these. At the same time, though, there is a clear need to deepen dialogues and exchanges on the policy side, for instance between experts and policymakers focusing on global health, development, and regulatory issues in each country. Investing in these areas will build up the human infrastructure for future collaboration.

Every major Japan-U.S. communique over the past two years has pledged cooperation on the COVID-19 pandemic. Launching a U.S.-Japan Pandemic Partnership and dedicating real resources to these five priorities will allow Biden and Kishida to go beyond lip service and demonstrate that they are serious about harnessing the potential of their alliance.

US forces in Japan were a 'Trojan tank' for Covid [Asia Times, 20 Jan 2022]

By JAKE ADELSTEIN

As Omicron spreads, anger mounts over lax measures taken by US troops – especially on flashpoint Okinawa

TOKYO – As the number of daily Covid-19 infections across Japan soars from less than 100 per day at the end of last year to more than 30,000 per day at present, increasing anger is being aimed at … the US military.

While Japan and the United States may be linked at the hip when it comes to big-picture defense issues, lax measures taken at US military bases in Japan are being blamed for contributing to Japan’s sixth Covid wave.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has bragged that Japan has “the most stringent border controls in the G7” – but those controls have not managed to keep Omicron out of the country. And the US military presence in the country – approximately 55,000 strong – has not helped.

US troops have acted as a “Trojan Tank” for the virus due to their command’s failure to observe the same quarantine guidelines enforced in the rest of Japan – or even the protocols that US troops agreed to in nearby South Korea.

Given the heavy reliance Japan places upon its alliance with the United States, the situation is politically ticklish for Kishida. Making it doubly so, the epicenter of the outbreak is Okinawa.

The southern island – the scene of a murderous and destructive battle between Imperial Japanese and US forces at the end of World War II – is where a lopsided large number of the US troops in Japan are based.

Anti-US base sentiment constantly simmers on the island, where a movement protests against issues ranging from the environmental degradation caused by bases to the noise pollution caused by US aircraft to violent crimes committed by resident GIs.

One of the most prominent members of that movement is the island’s governor Denny Tamaki. Tamaki has been warning Tokyo against the lax Covid protocols on the bases since December – to no avail.

Omicron storms Okinawa
The ongoing wave of the novel coronavirus, notably the highly transmissible Omicron variant, has hit a record high with the number of daily infections Japan-wide reaching 32,197 on January 18 – exceeding the 30,000 mark for the first time.

The previous record had been 25,992 daily caseloads, set on August 20, 2021.

From Friday, January 21, the Japanese government will implement quasi-emergency measures, designed to restrict social and business activities, across Tokyo and much of the country.

These measures are a long way from a total lockdown. But for a Covid-weary population, and for related businesses, the measures will prove onerous.

In quasi-emergency situations, prefectural governors may order restaurants and bars to shorten business hours and stop serving alcohol in specific areas. Noncompliant businesses can be fined up to ¥200,000 (US$1,750). Residents in these areas are also asked not to travel across prefectural borders.

On November 29, Kishida, who advocates “crisis management that always assumes the worst,” announced a general suspension of new arrivals from all over the world as part of his efforts to strengthen measures.

He boasted: “I am prepared to bear the criticism that ‘Kishida is too cautious” – though it also sparked allegations of xenophobia.

The next day, despite the border controls, the first Omicron case was reported in Japan. By January 13, it was reported in all prefectures nationwide.

Given the tight – some say harsh – frontier controls emplaced to keep the disease out, fingers are being pointed at those who slip under Japan’s border controls. Those people are its key allies.

The Lax Yankees
The first major outbreak of Omicron took place in Okinawa – the island which houses 70% of the US military bases in Japan.

Infection numbers started soaring in the prefecture after a large cluster was reported in the US Marine Corps’ Camp Hansen in mid-December. The next loci of infection were in areas around military bases.

Consequently, the first round of quasi-emergency measures to prevent the spread of the disease were put in place in Okinawa, as well as Yamaguchi and Hiroshima prefectures.

In Yamaguchi Prefecture, 325 residents contracted the virus over the two-week period to January 5. They included 230 who live in Iwakuni – where the US Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni is located.

Iwakuni Mayor Yoshihiko Fukuda told a news conference in early January that a Japanese employee at the base who contracted the Omicron variant and a restaurant employee shared the same type of virus genome. The results have been confirmed by the National Institute of Disease Studies.

“It is likely that the Omicron variant inside the base has leaked to the community,” Fukuda said.

The major cluster of infections confirmed at the Iwakuni base in Yamaguchi-Prefecture seems unrelated to Hiroshima. However, the base is only about 50 minutes by train from the city of Hiroshima, and Hiroshima is the closest thing to a major metropolitan entertainment area from the base.

Okinawa prefectural officials on January 5 confirmed that 623 residents had contracted the virus. On the same day, the local government announced their findings that Japanese employees at Camp Hansen had been infected with the Omicron variant. Other residents are believed to have caught the strain through community transmissions.

“A major cause of the spread of the Omicron variant is that it has seeped through the US military,” Governor Denny Tamaki said at a press conference.

Uncomfortable SOFA
As is the case with its alliances in other parts of the world, the US military enjoys a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Japan, under which its personnel are exempt from domestic laws.

As those laws and regulations include entry, exit and quarantine measures, the Japanese and US governments agreed last summer that US forces in Japan would take measures “consistent” with Japan’s border control measures.

However, it has emerged that the US military canceled PCR inspections on departures from the US mainland to Japan from September to December 25 last year.

This was done without notifying the Japanese side. It appears that Tokyo did not grasp the actual situation until it was too late.

Dr Yasuharu Tokuda, an expert in clinical epidemiology who lives in Okinawa, wrote a scathing online essay, noting that last November, all across Japan infections had drastically diminished. He was particularly angered by the failure of the US to institute PCR tests at a time when Covid was running rampant across the US.

He wrote: “On New Year’s Day 2022, 235 US military personnel were infected in a single day. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were infected daily in the US, at that time, it was announced that the US did not conduct PCR testing or strict quarantine of soldiers moving from the US to Okinawa before and after their arrival.

“US bases in South Korea and Australia continued to conduct testing and quarantine, but it is clear that Japan and Okinawa were being neglected.”

His conclusion was harsh. “Clearly, it was the US military bases that triggered the rapid spread of the disease,” he wrote.

Kishida is not immune from responsibility. He ignored a mid-December request by Tamaki to ban US military personnel from entering or leaving their bases on Okinawa.

There is a particularly contentious background to the Okinawan outbreak. Many Okinawans believe that their island bears too heavy a burden with US bases and that the metropole should accommodate more. Tamaki is, himself, of this belief.

It was not only Okinawa’s fears that were realized. The Omicron strain expanded rapidly in the prefecture and to other parts of Japan. Even the large number of cases in distant Osaka is partly being blamed on the fact that the airline route from Osaka to Okinawa has the greatest number of flights per day, and many Osakans traveled to sunny Okinawa over the New Year Holidays.

The situation is proving a political embarrassment for the Japan-US alliance.

The US military finally announced measures to prevent the spread of the disease – such as a curfew – on January 9.

The following week Kishida told a press conference: “We will discuss health and hygiene issues related to the stationing of US forces in Japan at the Japan-US Joint Commission under the Status of Forces Agreement.”

Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi also held a teleconference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and requested that measures be strengthened, including restrictions on US military personnel from leaving their homes.

Hayashi’s suggestion is the same measure that Tamaki – an outsider in Tokyo’s corridors of power – had requested in December.

And Tamaki is not keeping quiet. He and other prefectural leaders are calling for revisions to the SOFA. Tamaki has argued repeatedly that a clause pertaining to quarantine should be added. Members of the main opposition party in the Diet have also requested such an amendment.

But revisions to SOFA are both highly sensitive and bureaucratically irksome. Despite what Kishida said about SOFA discussions during his press conference, Asia Times has learned that the Japanese bureaucracy is, in fact, not considering it.

“Revising the Status of Forces Agreement is a non-starter,” a source in Tokyo’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Asia Times. “Once we start making requests, the US is going to come back with twice as many – it’s a vicious circle. We just hope that next time, the US will treat Japan with the same consideration they do South Korea, and test their soldiers before letting them come here.”

Japan's daily COVID-19 cases top 46000, a new record for third straight day [The Japan Times, 20 Jan 2022]

Japan's confirmed daily coronavirus cases on Thursday topped 46,000, setting a new record for the third consecutive day as the rapid spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant has left the country struggling with what has become the "sixth wave" of infections.

Also Thursday, the cumulative total of COVID-19 cases has also topped 2 million since the government confirmed the nation's first COVID-19 case in January 2020.

Tokyo confirmed 8,638 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, another record high, as the metropolitan government raised the coronavirus infection alert to the highest level on its four-tier scale for the first time since September amid a surge in infections.

The metropolitan government also raised the alert to monitor the medical availability by a notch to the second-highest level on its four-tier scale.

With infections on the rise since the turn of the year thanks to the spread of the omicron variant, Tokyo's daily figure hit a record for two days in a row after reporting 7,377 cases on Wednesday.

The seven-day average of new cases in the capital came to 5,386.1, up 358.3% from a week before. The number of severe cases fell by one from the previous day to nine, while no deaths from COVID-19 were reported on Thursday.

The occupancy rate for hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 reached 28.9%.

The capital will be subject to coronavirus quasi-emergency measures from Friday, under which the metropolitan government plans to urge restaurants and bars to shorten their operating hours.

Record daily cases were also confirmed in other prefectures, including Kanagawa at 3,344, Aichi at 3,074, Hiroshima at 1,569, Hokkaido at 1,437 and Kyoto at 1,320.

Osaka Prefecture reported 5,933 new cases Thursday, after posting a record 6,101 cases the previous day.

Europe Covid rates soar with Germany hit hard but rates drop in England [The National, 20 Jan 2022]

By Simon Rushton

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seeking to introduce compulsory vaccinations

Countries across Europe are struggling to tackle the highly contagious Omicron coronavirus variant with a combination of lockdowns and vaccine passports.

Germany reported more than 100,000 cases for the first time while France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovenia all suffered another day of record numbers.

England drops Covid Plan B restrictions
In England, infection numbers are dropping after a mini-lockdown that included a booster vaccination drive and the requirement of vaccine passports for some events. These measures, known as Plan B, were removed on Wednesday.

The UK was among the first countries in Europe to see cases rise as Omicron became the dominant variant.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seeking to introduce compulsory vaccinations to ramp up the immunity of the country's 83 million people, of which 60 million are fully vaccinated.

But resistance has been growing in the country where the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was first developed.

Germany recorded 112,323 new Covid-19 cases and another 239 deaths on Wednesday, data from the Robert Koch Institute show.

The weekly incidence rate reached 584.4 new infections per 100,000 people over the past seven days. That figure was 497.1 four days ago and 470.6 last Friday.

Germany has introduced some curbs to stop the spread of the disease, such as limiting access to restaurants to people who have received booster shots or those who have been tested on top of being fully vaccinated or recently recovered.

Contact restrictions are also in place keeping private gatherings to 10 people, or two households if an unvaccinated person is present.

Omicron now accounts for 70 per cent of cases in Germany.

In neighbouring France, another record high was registered for the previous 24 hours, with 464,769 new cases.

President Emmanuel Macron has backed strict vaccine passports as a way of hassling the unvaccinated into receiving the injection.

He said: “I won't send [the unvaccinated] to prison, I won't vaccinate by force. So we have to tell them: from January 15, you will no longer be able to go to restaurants. You will no longer be able to go for a coffee, you will no longer be able to go to the theatre. You will no longer be able to go to the cinema.

“[The unvaccinated] come to undermine the strength of a nation. When my freedoms threaten those of others, I become someone irresponsible. Someone irresponsible is not a citizen.”

Slovakia is aiming to limit access to what its government considers the riskiest events and public gatherings.

To attend weddings, parties and swimming centres, people need to have received a booster shot, be fully vaccinated and also be tested for or have recovered from Covid-19.

The Czech government is deciding whether to continue mandatory vaccinations for workers in key professions and people over 60 after 28,469 new cases were recorded.

Polish state employees will move to remote working and private sector companies could be next as the country faces another surge in daily Covid cases.

On Wednesday, Switzerland’s Federal Council extended work-from-home measures until the end of February.

UK lifts COVID restrictions, says omicron wave 'has peaked' [ABC News, 20 Jan 2022]

By SYLVIA HUI

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says face masks will no longer be mandatory in public places and COVID-19 passports will be dropped for large events as infections level off in most parts of the country

LONDON -- Face masks will no longer be mandatory in public places and COVID-19 passports will be dropped for large events as infections level off in most parts of the country, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Wednesday.

Johnson told lawmakers that the restrictions were being eased because government scientists think it is likely that the surge of infections prompted by the highly contagious omicron variant “has now peaked nationally.”

While hospitals in northern England still are getting pressed by high caseloads and infections were still rising in schools, Johnson said hospital admissions and patients in intensive care units elsewhere in England were stabilizing or falling.

The government is no longer advising people to work from home, and compulsory face masks will be scrapped in secondary school classrooms starting Thursday.

Mandatory COVID-19 passes will not be needed to gain entry to large-scale events beginning Jan. 27. Face masks will no longer be legally required anywhere in England as of that day.

“We will trust the judgment of the British people and no longer criminalize anyone who chooses not to wear one,” Johnson said.

The restrictions were introduced in December to slow the rapid spread of the omicron variant and buy time for the population to get their booster vaccine shot.

Johnson said Wednesday that more than 90% of those over age 60 in the U.K. have had booster shots.

Official figures showed that COVID-19 infections have dropped in most parts of the U.K. for the first time since early December. The government reported 108,069 new cases on Wednesday, about half the daily number recorded over the holidays.

The requirement for those infected to self-isolate for five full days remains, but Johnson said that measure will also end in the coming weeks. He said while the self-isolation rule expires on March 24, he will seek to scrap it earlier if the virus data continues to improve.

Johnson and Health Secretary Sajid Javid both suggested that the government is planning for a post-pandemic period when it can treat COVID-19 more like the flu.

“There will soon come a time when we can remove the legal requirement to self-isolate altogether, just as we don’t place legal obligations on people to isolate if they have flu," Johnson said.

Nonetheless, Johnson urged people to remain cautious in the last weeks of winter and stressed that the pandemic was “not over.”

The news was welcomed by businesses, especially those relying on workers re-populating city centers, as well as hospitality and tourism. But some said officials need to give more details about their plans to cope with the coronavirus in the longer term. Johnson’s spokesman said the government would publish such a plan “shortly.”

“There’s a vital need now for greater consistency in how we live with the virus in the longer term. Swinging back and forth between restrictions and normality has been damaging," said Matthew Fell, chief policy director of the Confederation of British Industry.

Scotland and Wales, which set their own public health rules, have also announced similar easing of restrictions.

Britain has the second-worst pandemic death toll in Europe after Russia, with over 153,000 confirmed virus-related deaths.

New Coronavirus News from 12 Jan 2022

Omicron waves appear to slow in New York City, other major metropolitan areas [The Washington Post, 12 Jan 2022]

By Fenit Nirappil and Hannah Knowles

The explosion of omicron cases along the Interstate 95 corridor from the Mid-Atlantic to New England is showing signs of slowing down, according to health officials and epidemiologists, offering reason for cautious optimism that the turning point could be near and that the coronavirus variant’s U.S. trajectory is similar to that of other countries.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Tuesday the rates of tests returning positive and case increases seem to be slowing — particularly in New York City, which emerged as an early epicenter of the highly contagious variant.

“They’re still high, but we are not at the end, but I want to say that this is, to me, a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of hope in a time when we desperately need that,” Hochul said at a news conference.

Coronavirus levels in Boston-area wastewater are falling, a promising sign because alarmingly high levels spotted earlier presaged record infections. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has seen the rate of teachers testing positive during asymptomatic weekly screening plunge from 25 percent in the week between Christmas and New Year’s to 2 percent in recent days.

Forecasters are expecting similar trends in the Mid-Atlantic, where infections have been slowing in the District and Maryland, but the ongoing strain on hospitals prompted officials to declare emergencies.

“Omicron is more like a flash flood than a wave. It goes to enormously high levels very quickly and then, based on other parts of the world, may come down very quickly,” said Tom Frieden, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and New York City health commissioner. “We know that the more people who are up to date with their vaccines, the fewer deaths there will be, the fewer hospitalizations there will be and the less economic disruption there will be.”

Tracking U.S. cases, hospitalizations and deaths
Experts caution these are still early data points for predicting the trajectory of a virus that has repeatedly shown to be unpredictable. It’s also too soon to declare a rapid decline in infections following the steep spikes, as was observed in South Africa and London. Cases remain alarmingly high, like a reckless driver slowing from 110 mph to 90 mph.

But there is good news.

David Rubin, who tracks national coronavirus trends for PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says federal data shows a sharp decline in emergency room visits for coronavirus in the Northeast and the rest of the nation is on track to follow a similar path.

“You got a picture of an East Coast that’s rapidly improving, a Southeast that’s not far behind, a Midwest that’s maybe a week behind the East Coast while the West Coast has not yet peaked,” Rubin said. “Our assessment is we have likely peaked as a country.”

New York City is still averaging about 40,000 infections a day. While omicron appears to cause milder illness with a lower hospitalization rate, the high volume of cases hitting all at once has led to long emergency room waits and staff shortages at some hospitals.

As omicron spreads, New York is once again the epicenter of the virus
But the overall picture for New York City hospitals looks better.

Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system, has seen new daily admissions remain relatively flat since the new year while about half of patients with coronavirus were admitted for other causes and tested positive on routine inpatient testing. John D’Angelo, who oversees Northwell’s operations and emergency medicine, said other downstate hospitals have reported similar trends in calls organized by the Greater New York Hospital Association.

That’s different from earlier waves — when hospitalizations were usually a lagging indicator — a contrast that experts believe is linked to more mild illness with omicron. But some smaller hospitals have been reporting bigger strains, prompting Northwell to lend staff and accept patients.

“The real game of this wave is plugging all the gaps when you don’t know where there’s going to be pockets of people who are sick,” D’Angelo said. “But a lot of independent hospitals and others don’t have that luxury.”

In the nation's hospitals, this covid wave is different
New Yorkers shouldn’t let their guard down yet to keep the positive trends going and preserve capacity at hospitals to provide care, said Manhattan Borough President Mark D. Levine.

“While we can start to breathe a sign of relief that we appear to be coming off the worst, I think this is still a time for enormous caution,” Levine said in an interview. “The experts I talk to believe that February could be a turning point where hospitals start to feel less pressure, and I think that’s the time we can start to look at pulling back some.”

What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus
Omicron will still loom large over business and entertainment in New York City through the rest of winter. Organizers postponed the annual theater convention BroadwayCon to July, worried the scheduled mid-February date would be unsafe.

But other events are moving forward, bolstered by hopes that omicron will subside in the city. Lunar New Year festivities — including a parade — are on for next month in Chinatown, said Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation.

“Hopefully Kathy Hochul is right that there is a downward turn now, that we may have peaked,” Chen said.

Restaurants are eager for companies to bring their workers back to offices, said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. Those plans have proved ever-shifting. Delta derailed September return dates. Omicron pushed back plans for January.

“Hopefully people who canceled their reservations and stopped going out to eat and drink during the height of the omicron surge will be excited to get back out,” Rigie said.

Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, said people who laid low during the worst of the omicron spikes are susceptible to new infections as they return to their usual activities, potentially resulting in a protracted decline instead of a rapid one.

“If you think about it, if we are just at the peak and if it were to come down as fast as it went up, that means we are halfway through people getting infected,” said Shaman, who previously projected New York City’s omicron wave peaking in early January and in the rest of the country later in the month. “There’s still a lot of infections that are going to happen and that means a lot of people going to the hospital, a lot of work disruption, a lot of school disruptions still.”

There are limitations to case numbers as a window into the state of omicron surges, including a portion of unreported positive rapid test results and widespread asymptomatic screening that catches cases that would have gone unnoticed in earlier surges.

Some areas use wastewater tracking to detect genetic material associated with the coronavirus as an alternate measure of the virus’s prevalence in a community. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority tracking system shows a rapid decline in RNA copies samples associated with the coronavirus after peaking several weeks ago even as the official case count continues to rise.

Shira Doron, a Tufts Medical Center epidemiologist, said this provides additional evidence U.S. states experiencing sharp upticks will also see sharp declines. It could show a way of navigating a pandemic that has flare-ups without requiring long-term closures or mitigation measures, barring the emergence of new variants that act differently.

“This wave like the other will come to an end and there will be better, safer times in the pretty near future,” Doron said. “We don’t know if those times will stick. We don’t know what will happen after that. I truly believe there will be ebbs and flows and highs and lows for this pandemic for a long time to come.”

Opinion | Want to just get omicron and get it over with? Here's why you shouldn't. [The Washington Post, 12 Jan 2022]

By Leana S. Wen

Many people have asked me the same question in recent days: If omicron is a milder variant, and contracting it provides additional immunity, why not get it over with? Even previously cautious individuals are asking whether they should intentionally expose themselves to covid-19. If they’re going to get the coronavirus sooner or later, why not get it now?

I understand people’s weariness with the pandemic and continue to believe that the vaccinated should not have restrictions imposed on them. But here are four reasons people shouldn’t deliberately try to catch the coronavirus:
Hospitals are full. It is true that omicron is milder than previous variants. The vast majority of vaccinated and boosted people will not end up hospitalized if they are infected. But some will become severely ill. Hospitals are at or over capacity in many parts of the country, and hospitalizations from covid-19 have just exceeded the previous peak from last winter. If you are sick enough to need care, you may have to wait hours in the emergency room for treatment and then spend days in the ER waiting for a hospital bed.

No one wants such a delay in their own medical treatment. We should also be very worried about the impact on our health-care system. At the beginning of the pandemic, public-health experts talked a lot about “flattening the curve.” The idea was that if we could spread out infections over a longer period of time, there wouldn’t be so much demand for health-care resources all at the same time. Omicron may be less severe, especially for the vaccinated, but the sheer volume of infections is once again overwhelming our hospitals. Now is the time to decompress our hospitals — not add more strain.

Being sick isn’t pleasant. For most vaccinated individuals, getting omicron will feel like a bad cold or the flu. Many people will experience up to a week or longer of fatigue, fever, congestion, sore throat, headache and overall crumminess. Even if these symptoms ren’t life-threatening, they are not something people should want. And even if someone is fortunate to be totally asymptomatic, getting infected could mean days off from work. It could present major challenges in caring for young children and other family members.

There’s also the possibility of long-haul covid-19. Some studies report that more than 1 in 10 people infected with the coronavirus have symptoms 12 weeks after their diagnosis.
Vaccination appears to decrease the likelihood of long covid. Given how new omicron is, it’s not known what proportion of those vaccinated and infected with omicron will have persistent symptoms.

Even if you’re protected, you could still infect others. Children under 5 are not yet eligible for vaccines, and there are millions of immunocompromised Americans who are not afforded the full protection of vaccination. Surely, no one wants to be the person who inadvertently infects a vulnerable individual.

What if you don’t live with young kids or medically frail people? Could you have a “chickenpox party,” omicron-style, and isolate yourself as soon as you test positive? Again, this is not something I’d recommend because you could be a public health hazard to others. The time of maximal infectiousness begins one to two days before the onset of symptoms. Unless you are tested with a reliable test daily, you won’t know when you first become infectious, and could transmit the coronavirus to people who did not choose to get omicron.

What can we do about the rapid spread of omicron? Ask Dr. Leana Wen your questions Jan. 13 at 2 p.m. ET
Better treatments are coming. Only one monoclonal antibody cocktail, sotrovimab, is effective against omicron. But the treatment is in such short supply that some hospitals are forced to use other monoclonal antibodies that likely do not work against this new variant. Pfizer’s antiviral pill, paxlovid, has incredible promise to reduce hospitalization and death, but only 65,000 treatment courses have been allocated to states.

These supply issues will soon improve. The White House is expecting 4 million paxlovid courses to be available by the end of January, for example. Early treatment depends on rapid diagnosis, and 500 million tests are to be rolled out this month, as well. The longer that Americans can hold off from getting covid-19, the more likely they will be able to access timely testing and state-of-the-art treatment.

Omicron is spreading rapidly throughout the United States. Millions will contract it this week. It may be inevitable that most Americans contract covid-19 at some point, but there are good reasons to take common sense measures such as indoor masking to put off omicron for a while longer. That’s better for you, and better for others around you.

New Coronavirus News from 10 Jan 2021

COVID border steps force 300 foreigners to decline Japan teacher jobs [Kyodo News Plus, 10 Jan 2022]

Japan's COVID-19 border restrictions appear to have prompted more than 300 people to decline offers for foreign language teacher and assistant positions in Japan, leading to a fall in the number of such instructors in the country, according to a Kyodo News survey.

The withdrawal from the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program comes as prospective language instructors from the United States and other countries remain in limbo over Japan's strict immigration policies since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the survey shows.

The actual number of withdrawals could be even higher, given that some municipalities have yet to respond to the survey, which covers prefectural governments, major cities and international groups promoting educational exchanges.

The JET program, launched in 1987, works with municipalities -- alongside the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and the Foreign Ministry -- to send those living abroad to teach at elementary, junior high and high schools across the country for a maximum of five years.

According to the internal affairs ministry, 5,761 candidates joined the program in fiscal 2019. But the ministry has not released data for the subsequent years due to an "inability to accurately state the number as the situation evolves," an official said.

However, the number of JET candidates in fiscal 2021 is believed to have fallen to around 4,000, including those who have been reappointed.

The emergence of the Omicron variant late last year has additionally led to participants expected to arrive between December and January to suspend their travel, with some being told not to come on the day they were supposed to leave.

JET candidate Anna Burbo, who had planned to arrive in Japan this month from Michigan, is one such candidate. The 25-year-old said the suspension has led many to suffer economic distress and be unable to find new employment due to uncertainties over when participants may be able to fly over.

About 600 people due to participate in the program have yet to enter Japan, raising concerns that further withdrawals from the initiative may lead to a reduction in opportunities for international exchange and education.

Bahia Simons-Lane, executive director at the U.S. Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme Alumni Association, said Japan should be more flexible in its border restrictions and make exceptions for some foreigners.

Sweden to implement more COVID measures as Omicron squeezes healthcare [Reuters, 10 Dec 2021]

by Johan Ahlander, Simon Johnson and Bernadette Baum

STOCKHOLM, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Sweden will introduce more measures to stem a rising number of COVID cases that have placed a greater burden on the healthcare system, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Monday.

Sweden has seen the fastest spread of COVID cases in recent weeks as the Omicron variant has surged through the country. A record 60,000 cases were detected last week, despite limited testing capabilities.

"The situation has deteriorated, without doubt. The level of infections in Sweden is at a historically high level," Andersson told a news conference.

The new measures, most of which will be introduced on Wednesday, include a work-from-home mandate, where possible, and a cap on the number of people allowed at public events.

Restaurants will have to close by 11 p.m. and guests will have to be seated and in groups no greater than eight people. Adults will be asked to limit social contact in indoor settings.

The measures will be evaluated after two weeks, but are expected to be in place for at least four weeks.

Still, while infection numbers have soared, the number of COVID patients hospitalized iswell below the peaks seen in previous waves. The number of new deaths has also been comparatively low.

More than 1,000 people are being treated in hospital for COVID and roughly 100 of them are in intensive care units.

The strain on healthcare is being exacerbated by the spread by other respiratory viruses as well as staff shortages, the National Board of Health and Welfare said.

"Unfortunately, we need to make another effort to get down the number of new infections," Andersson said.

The health agency said on Monday that the peak of the wave will come later than previously expected and that the Omicron variant made the disease harder to predict. The previous assessment was for a peak in mid-January and then a gradual decline.

COVID-19: What do we know about Omicron in 2022? [World Economic Forum, 10 Dec 2021]

By Kate Whiting

• The World Health Organization has warned against calling the COVID-19 Omicron variant 'mild'.
• A new wave of COVID-19 infections is sweeping the globe, caused by the new Omicron variant.
• From symptoms to severity, here's what you need to know about Omicron in 2022.

"Just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalizing people and it is killing people."

This was the stark warning against complacency from Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General, at a press conference on 6 January.

A little over six weeks since the Omicron variant was first reported to the WHO in South Africa on 24 November, it has spread rapidly across the globe, causing what Dr. Tedros described as a 'tsunami of cases' that is overwhelming health systems.

And the pandemic is far from over. The week ending 2 January saw the highest number of cases reported since the pandemic's start, according to the WHO, and new record COVID-19 infections being reported by countries from Argentina to Israel each day.

What we know about the Omicron variant now
Omicron is less severe than the Delta variant. Janet Diaz, WHO lead on clinical management, said early studies showed there was a reduced risk of hospitalization from the variant compared with Delta. There appears also to be a reduced risk of severity in both younger and older people, but uncertainties remain.

South Africa announced on 30 December it had passed its peak of Omicron infections, without seeing a major spike in deaths.

But Dr. Tedros warned against categorizing the variant as 'mild'.

"Hospitals are becoming overcrowded and understaffed, which further results in preventable deaths from not only COVID-19 but other diseases and injuries where patients cannot receive timely care."

Omicron spreads quickly. In the last week of 2021, 1 in 15 people in England had COVID-19, rising to 1 in 10 in London, according to the Office of National Statistics, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling it the "fastest growth in COVID cases that we have ever known".

The number of people in London hospitals with COVID-19 almost quadrupled in a month, from 1,100 in early December to 4,000 in early January, the BBC reported, and 200 military personnel were deployed to help London hospitals hit by staff shortages.

And in Australia, total confirmed COVID-19 infections have passed 1 million - with more than half of these coming in the last week, according to Reuters.

The symptoms appear to be different from previous COVID-19 variants. While the main COVID-19 symptoms are still said to be cough, high temperature and loss of smell and taste, Omicron accounted for half of all cold-like illnesses in the UK, the ZOE COVID study reported in December.

The top five symptoms reported in London on the ZOE app for those testing positive for COVID-19 were runny nose, headache, fatigue, sneezing and sore throat.

Studies on animals suggest Omicron infects the upper airways more than the lungs, which could explain the different symptoms. But this has implications for children, reports Nature, who tend to be more affected by upper respiratory tract infections due to smaller nasal passages.

Do COVID-19 vaccines work against the Omicron variant?
Research continues, but one study from Imperial College London suggests the best protection comes from three COVID-19 vaccine shots, which is why countries have rolled out COVID-19 vaccination booster programmes.

Compared to the Delta variant, scientists found Omicron to evade the immune response from either previous infection or vaccination much more easily.

In December, they estimated vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccine, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose.

The UK Health Security Agency's chief medical adviser, Dr Susan Hopkins, told the Guardian: “I think what we’re seeing is that if you’ve had two doses more than three months ago, then it’s not going to prevent you from getting symptomatic disease.”

But it's not sustainable to administer boosters every three to six months, Patrick Vallance, Britain's chief scientific adviser, has said. The long-term view would be to settle into a "more routine type of vaccine programme".

Meanwhile, Dr. Tedros again warned that vaccine inequity across the globe risks prolonging the pandemic.

Based on the current rate of vaccine rollout, 109 countries will miss the WHO's target for 70% of the world's population to be fully vaccinated by July, he said. That aim is seen as helping end the acute phase of the pandemic.

"Booster after booster in a small number of countries will not end a pandemic while billions remain completely unprotected," Dr. Tedros said.

New COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising as the omicron surge continues [MarketWatch, 10 Dec 2021]

By Jaimy Lee

The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations is soon expected to break last year’s record, experts say

The U.S. is still weeks away from a peak in the number of new COVID-19 cases as the country continues to report soaring rates of new infections due to the rapid spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant.

Airlines are still canceling flights, citing weather and outbreaks among workers. More lawmakers are testing positive for the virus, including Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), Young Kim (R-Calif.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“We believe cases in major metropolitan areas on the coasts will likely peak in the next two weeks,” Chris Meekins, a health policy expert and a health care analyst at Raymond James, told investors on Monday. “Areas in the Midwest will likely trail by a few weeks.”

Though infections with omicron are thought to be milder, the sheer volume in cases still means that hospitals are filling up. It takes about two weeks after cases first start to increase to see a rise in hospitalizations.

The U.S. is expected to hit a record number of COVID-19 hospitalizations within days, Meekins said.

There is a difference between people who are hospitalized for COVID-19, and people who test positive for the virus while in the hospital.

“Both of those things are happening at the same time,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday during a press briefing, later adding: “Those hospital screening programs have been ongoing for months now. So I don’t think that that’s a reason for the [increased] number of cases.”

Other COVID-19 news to know:
• Citigroup Inc. is moving forward with its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. According to a report in Bloomberg News, Citi employees must be vaccinated by Jan. 14 or will be placed on unpaid leave, with their last day of work set for Jan. 31.
• The American public is losing faith in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as we round the corner into the third year of the pandemic. It has been criticized for a series of messaging missteps, according to Axios, including the change in isolation policy and its scattered recommendations about booster shots.
• It’s still somewhat unclear how well rapid antigen tests can catch omicron. One expert told The Wall Street Journal that people who are vaccinated and boosted might not get a positive test until three or four days after infection, based on the “peak concentration of the virus.” Another expert said people may be infectious before they have enough virus to test positive.
• That said, some rapid tests are easier to use than others, according to the ECRI Institute, which formally evaluated seven tests. The test that’s the easiest to use? The On/Go.
Here’s what the numbers say

The average number of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is now 677,243 per day, according to a New York Times tracker. The daily average for hospitalizations stands at 130,006, up 80% from two weeks ago, and the daily average for COVID-19-related deaths is 1,559, up 16% from two weeks ago. New cases are rising across the U.S. but are highest in northeastern states, including New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

About 207.6 million people in the U.S., or 62.5% of the population, are fully vaccinated, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, while 75.3 million people have gotten a COVID-19 booster shot. That’s 36.3% of the population.

New Coronavirus News from 4 Jan 2022

Sweden’s king and queen test positive for the coronavirus. [The New York Times, 4 Jan 2022]

By Aina J. Khan

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and Queen Silvia, his wife, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday evening, the Swedish Royal Court said in a statement Tuesday.

The king, who is 75, and the queen, who is 78, “have mild symptoms and feel well under the circumstances,” the statement said. Both were fully vaccinated and had received booster shots.

Omicron complicates Winter Olympics [WPRI.com, 4 Jan 2022]

AUSTIN (KXAN) — With one month until the start of the Winter Olympics, cases of COVID-19 continue to rise worldwide as the omicron variant spreads, but deaths are on a downward trend according to data from Worldometer.

Dick Pound, the longest-serving member of the International Olympic Committee, told USA Today Monday there’s “no indication” the Olympics would be canceled but the possibility of doing so remains.

US Speedskating announced this week it will bar all spectators from watching its trials Jan. 5-9 as a COVID-19 precaution.

“It’s vital that we continue to keep a strong focus on the health and welfare of our athletes,” U.S. Speedskating Executive Director Ted Morris said. “Our ability to create a competition bubble provides us with the best situation to protect our athletes while providing them with the opportunity to qualify for the Beijing team at the Olympic Trials. We appreciate the understanding of parents, fans and media so that we can provide the best environment possible for our athletes.”

The Tokyo Olympics clamped down on fans during the Games last year, only allowing people from the host country to attend amid strict COVID-19 safety precautions. And athletes, coaches and staff effectively lived and competed in a “bubble,” where they were only allowed in certain areas of the Olympic Village and competition spaces.

COVID-19 has also affected athletes during their preparations for the Games. Two-time gold medal skier Mikaela Shiffrin tested positive nine days ago and was cleared this week to compete in the women’s World Cup in Croatia, according to the Associated Press. But, her teammate Nina O’Brien has now tested positive and must sit out the slalom on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Men’s hockey team announced its new head coach in late December. David Quinn, who had earlier been tapped as an assistant coach and has worked with the New York Rangers, will now step up after the National Hockey League announced it will not send players or coaches to the Games, according to the Associated Press, concerned that a surge in COVID-19 cases could disrupt its season. The AP reports the decision in mid-December was an abrupt about-face from an earlier deal between the NHL, union, International Olympic Committee and International Ice Hockey Federation that would let those players participate. NHL players also did not participate in the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

On the women’s side of the sport, USA Hockey announced its final roster on the first of the year. It includes eight first-time Olympians and 15 who have previously competed at the Games, according to a release on its website. It said Team USA has medaled in every Games since women’s hockey was added in 1998.

Busy day Feb. 13
The Winter Olympics begin the first week in February, and this year coincide with another huge televised event: the Super Bowl. We want to know — which one will you be watching? Vote in our Twitter poll below:
WOOD-TV Sports Director Jack Doles joins us to discuss that big day, plus his take on the latest on the Olympics at 9 a.m. CT.

Posts misleadingly claim Japan 'declared end of Covid' after cases dropped [AFP Factcheck, 4 Jan 2022]

by Richard Kang

A claim circulated online in South Korea in late December 2021 that neighbouring Japan had "declared the end of Covid". The posts were shared as coronavirus infections in South Korea soared while Japan saw a decrease in cases. But as of January 4, 2022, Japanese authorities have not made any such declaration. In fact, officials have warned of a possible rebound in cases from holiday travel and the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

"Japan with a population of 140 million declared the end of Covid-19," reads a Korean-language post shared on Facebook on December 28, 2021.

The post shared a graph of daily Covid cases reported in Japan as of December 27, 2021.
AFP found the graph directly corresponds with genuine data from Johns Hopkins University published here on Google.

It shows daily reported cases in Japan plummeting to 163 on December 27 after cases surged to over 25,000 in late August.

Similar posts were also shared on Facebook here and here and on Twitter here.

"[Korean] countermeasures? They're just a self-flattering move," one social media user wrote in response to a post.

In contrast to the downward trend in Japan's cases in December, daily infections in Korea soared to a record high of nearly 8,000 on December 15.

The daily numbers prompted the Korean government to impose tighter mobility restrictions until mid-January.

The country added more than 3,000 new Covid infections on January 3, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.

But the posts are misleading.

'Cases could rebound'

Despite the low number of infections in December, Japanese authorities have warned there could be an uptick in new cases following the holidays and suspected cases of the Omicron variant.

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged the country on December 29 to keep wearing masks, wash hands frequently and take other anti-infection measures.

"[The Japanese government] while simulating the worst-case scenario of an expansion in infections in Japan, is doing its best in moving ahead with plans to provide third vaccine shots, the expansion of free PCR tests and supply of treatment pills," Kishida said in a video message.

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike also urged residents on December 27 to "avoid busy hours and crowded places, wear a mask properly and refrain from talking loudly".

She said people should "regularly open windows even in cold winter" and added basic measures against infectious diseases are "effective" against Omicron.

Japan recorded over 500 new Covid cases on January 2, according to the country's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

Keyword searches on Japanese government websites did not find posts that the country "declared the end of Covid".

Population count
The claim in the misleading posts that Japan has "a population of 140 million" is also inaccurate.

As of December 1, the country's population was 125,470,000, according to the Japan Statistics Bureau.

Japan's Kishida lays out new contigency plan against Omicron risk [WHBL News, 4 Jan 2022]

By Leika Kihara and Kantaro Komiya

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan will gear up efforts to deal with a possible surge in Omicron coronavirus cases and aim to deliver oral treatment using Pfizer Inc’s drugs nationwide next month, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Tuesday.

Kishida also said the government will decide next week whether to extend border controls, which he said had prevented a spike in infection numbers.

“We’ll prepare to shift the focus of Japan’s Omicron response to domestic measures to guard against the worst-case scenario of a possible spike in community transmissions,” Kishida told a news conference.

Aside from antiviral pills developed by Merck & Co Inc already delivered nationwide, the government will aim to roll out “at the earliest date possible in February” Pfizer’s oral treatment drugs in Japan, he said.

As more oral drugs become available, Japan will allow more patients to receive treatment at home to avoid a resurgence in infections from triggering a shortage of hospital beds, he said.

Japan is betting heavily on oral treatments to keep serious infections and deaths at bay should a feared sixth wave of the pandemic emerge. The government agreed in November to pay Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics about $1.2 billion for 1.6 million courses of their drug molnupiravir.

“If a spike in infections lead to a shortage of hospital beds, we must flexibly consider ramping up curbs on activity,” Kishida said.

The prime minister also said he will forgo overseas visits before the next session of parliament starts on Jan. 17 to focus on laying out anti-pandemic measures. There have been media reports that Kishida was planning to visit Australia and the United States before parliament convenes.

In December, Japan confirmed its first known case of an Omicron infection that could not be traced back to overseas travellers.

A total of 993 Omicron cases have been found in Japan as of Monday, including 295 cases considered as community transmissions, according to the health ministry.

Jiji news agency reported that daily COVID-19 infections in Japan exceeded 1,000 on Tuesday for the first time in three months.

The southernmost prefecture of Okinawa has entered the “sixth wave” of the coronavirus, Okinawa goveror Denny Tamaki told reporters on Tuesday, noting the highly transmissible Omicron variant’s role in the spread of infections.

Okinawa reported a fresh 225 virus cases on Tuesday, the highest in more than three months, said Tamaki, adding infections inside U.S. military bases in the prefecture continued to increase.

A coronavirus cluster linked to a U.S. base in Okinawa was discovered last month.

New Coronavirus News from 5 Jan 2022

US daily coronavirus cases top one million [NHK WORLD, 5 Jan 2022]

The number of daily coronavirus infections in the United States has surpassed one million for the first time.

Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University show that new cases in the US hit a record high of more than 1.08 million on Monday. The prior record was 590,000 marked on December 30.

The number of infections has been rising rapidly in the country since last month. Observers say the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant is likely causing the hike.

Concerns are rising about the strain on medical services. In New York City, more than 5,000 coronavirus patients were hospitalized as of Sunday.

Officials fear further surges in the case count as many people traveled and dined together during the Christmas and New Year holidays.

The US government is urging people to get booster vaccine shots to increase their protection against the virus.

Israel to start reopening to foreigners even as omicron surges｜Arab News Japan [The News Motion, 5 Jan 2022]

By Kayla Roberts

JERUSALEM: Israel said it will admit foreigners with presumed COVID-19 immunity from countries deemed medium-risk next week, partially reversing a ban imposed in late November in response to the fast-spreading omicron variant.

The change suggests Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s government sees waning value in sweeping travel curbs — which wrecked winter tourism — as domestic coronavirus cases surge.

The Health Ministry said that, as of Jan. 9, foreign travelers from 199 “orange” countries will be admitted if they can prove they are vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19.

Orange-listed countries include Australia, Italy and Ireland. The ministry recommended that South Africa, Nigeria, Spain, Portugal, France and Canada, among 16 countries listed as “red” or high COVID-19 risk, be changed to “orange.”

The announcement came even as Bennett predicted that new cases could increase tenfold within days. The rapid pace of infection has led to many Israelis waiting hours in lines for COVID-19 tests, although omicron has not brought corresponding rises in mortality.

Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Israel would adjust its criteria for compulsory testing and focus primarily on people at high risk. Subsequently, more Israelis “will be required to exercise personal responsibility and perform tests at home,” he said in televised remarks.

The government’s strategy is focused on vaccinations, with a fourth dose — or second booster — offered to vulnerable cohorts. Within a day of making it available, 100,000 people received or made an appointment to get the second booster.

“I closed the skies five weeks ago when everything was good,” Bennett said in a televised address on Sunday, referring to Israel’s Nov. 25 ban on most travel to and from red-listed countries after omicron was first detected abroad.

“And, over the coming week, it would be reasonable for us to reopen anew.”

The US, Britain, the UAE, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mexico, Switzerland and Turkey remain on Israel’s red list, the Health Ministry said. Visitors from those countries require advance special permission from an Israeli committee to enter.

Israel has also scaled down precautionary self-isolation periods for people who have been exposed to COVID-19 carriers, concerned that mass quarantining could paralyze the economy.

Rio de Janeiro cancels carnival street parade over Omicron [Japan Today, 5 Jan 2022]

Authorities in Rio de Janeiro announced on Tuesday the cancelation of next month's carnival street celebrations due to an increase in COVID-19 cases brought on by the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.

It is the second year running that the coronavirus has forced the Rio street parade, which was due to take place from February 25 to March 1, to be called off.

"The street carnival in the form that took place in 2020, which did not happen in 2021, will not take place in 2022," Mayor Eduardo Paes said in a live broadcast on social media platforms.

The street parade by musical bands called "blocos" is different to the better known procession by samba schools that takes place in Rio's Sambadrome.

The Sambadrome can hold 70,000 people in a stadium that allows authorities to control those that enter.

Amongst the options available to them are proof of vaccination, a negative covid test and the wearing of masks for those in attendance.

"The street carnival, given its nature and its democratic aspect, makes any type of control impossible," said Paes.

In 2020, there were an estimated seven million revelers for the days-long street parades, according to the Riotour travel agency.

Although previous meetings between Rio authorities and the blocos failed to reach a compromise, new talks are planned for Friday where the musical groups association president Rita Fernandes told AFP they will make "a more decentralized proposal."

The arrival of the highly contagious Omicron variant, coupled with an increase in social gatherings over Christmas and the New Year, has seen covid cases soar in Rio.

New COVID cases jumped from 21 on December 14 to 458 just two weeks later.

So far, though, the rise in cases has not led to a significant increase in hospital admissions or deaths.

Four fifths of Rio's population have had at least two vaccine doses while almost a quarter have also been given a booster shot.

Some 67 percent of the South American country's 213 million population are vaccinated with two doses, while 12 percent have had the third.

Almost 620,000 people in Brazil have died of coronavirus, second only in the world to the United States.

Japan's Okinawa sees doubling of COVID-19 cases, considers emergency steps [Reuters, 5 Jan 2022]

TOKYO, Jan 5 (Reuters) - The southern Japanese island chain of Okinawa emerged on Wednesday as the epicentre of a new coronavirus surge, with cases more than doubling from the previous day and officials were considering imposing emergency curbs.

New infections in the prefecture jumped to 623 from 225 on Tuesday, the highest since August when Japan was in the midst of its fifth and biggest wave of COVID-19.

Governor Denny Tamaki on Tuesday told reporters the region had entered a sixth wave of infections and the highly transmissible Omicron variant was responsible.

Okinawa, 1,500 km (932 miles) southwest of Tokyo, hosts 70% of U.S. military facilities in Japan. Discoveries of coronavirus clusters and Omicron cases among service members have rankled relations with Japanese authorities there and residents, who number just under 1.5 million.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Japan was asking the U.S. military to make all efforts to rein in rising infections.

As of Tuesday, a total of 1,191 cases of the Omicron variant had been found in Japan, including 479 cases considered community transmissions, according to the health ministry.

"Omicron is rapidly increasing in some regions," Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto told reporters.

While Goto said it was too early to say if a sixth wave of infections had arrived, Japan's major metropolitan areas saw tallies rising to levels not seen for months.

Tokyo reported 390 cases while the western prefecture of Osaka said 244 had been found, the highest levels since September for both.

Nationwide, new cases exceeded 2,000 on Wednesday, according to a tally by national broadcaster NHK, the most since Sept. 26.

Okinawa health experts will meet later on Wednesday to determine whether to ask the central government to impose new restrictions, a prefectural official said.

It would be the first such declaration of what are known in Japan as quasi-emergency measures since Sept. 30, when all states of emergency and quasi-emergency that had been in effect for a good part of 2021 were lifted.

Tokyo officials may also ask for emergency measures to be reinstated in the capital, the Sankei newspaper said, citing unidentified sources.

The central government hopes to respond quickly to any requests for emergency steps, Matsuno told reporters. Measures would likely include limiting the opening hours of restaurants and bars.

Separately, a U.S. Marine Corps station in the prefecture of Yamaguchi, in western Japan, reported that 182 people on the base there had tested positive on Tuesday.

Rampant spread of omicron could foster more dangerous variants, WHO warns [The Japan Times, 5 Jan 2022]

Soaring omicron cases around the globe could increase the risk of a newer, more dangerous variant emerging, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned Tuesday.

While the COVID-19 variant is spreading like wildfire around the world, it appears to be far less severe than initially feared and has raised hopes that the pandemic could be overcome and life return more to normality.

But WHO Senior Emergency Officer Catherine Smallwood has sounded an ominous note of caution, noting that the soaring infection rates could have the opposite effect.

"The more omicron spreads, the more it transmits and the more it replicates, the more likely it is to throw out a new variant. Now, omicron is lethal, it can cause death … maybe a little bit less than delta, but who's to say what the next variant might throw out," Smallwood said in an interview.

Europe has registered more than 100 million COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, and more than five million new cases in the last week of 2021, "almost dwarfing what we have seen in the past," Smallwood said.

"We're in a very dangerous phase, we're seeing infection rates rise very significantly in Western Europe, and the full impact of that is not yet clear," she said.

Smallwood also noted that while "on an individual level there's probably a decreased risk of hospitalization" with the omicron variant compared to delta, overall, omicron could pose a greater threat because of the sheer number of cases.

"When you see the cases rise so significantly, that's likely to generate a lot more people with severe disease, ending up in hospital and possibly going on to die," she said.

The U.K. on Tuesday faced warnings of an impending hospital crisis due to staff shortages caused by a wave of omicron infections, as the country's daily COVID-19 caseload breached 200,000 for the first time.

Smallwood said she expected that scenario to play out in other European countries as well.
"Even in well-capacitated, sophisticated health systems there are real struggles that are happening at the moment, and it's likely that these will play out across the region as omicron drives cases upwards."