We all have Covid-19 fatigue, but BA.5 shows it’s not over yet, #Weve #Covid19 #fatigue #BA.5 #shows Welcome to OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
The BA.5 Covid-19 subvariant is now the most dominant species in the country; the highly contagious strain has led to an increase in cases and hospitalizations both in hotspots like New York City and nationwide, but public health action and messages are less aggressive than in previous outbreaks.
BA.5 usually causes known symptoms such as fever, headache, muscle aches, cough and sore throat, but can still cause serious illness, especially in individuals with pre-existing conditions. It has even entered the highest halls of power, including that of President Joe Biden doctor who says in a letter on Saturday that Biden is probably infected with BA.5. But little attention has been paid to the national plan to control the sub-variety that the Biden administration rolled out on July 12.
Tracking the rise of BA.5 is somewhat complicated due to an increase in rapid home testing to confirm infection, rather than testing in a clinical setting, which would make its way to health authorities and provide a more complete picture of the data. While the number of cases is nowhere near the number of infections due to omicron last winter, the week-over-week total of hospital admissions has risen steadily over the past month, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition, it is likely that the full extent of the BA.5 outbreak is not captured by available data. In some places like San Diego using wastewater monitoring, wastewater analysis showed a huge increase in the number of copies of the virus entering community sewers – 15.5 million copies per liter of wastewater on Wednesday of last week, compared to 8 million copies per liter from the same site the last week, according to Paul Sisson of the San Diego Union Tribune. That trend directly contradicts data available from the San Diego County Health Department, which actually showed a positive 8.3 percent decline over the same period. By comparison, Sisson reported, on January 9, 2022, during the ommicron wave, there were 47.6 million copies per liter in the same location.
The benefit of BA.5 and its fellow omicron subvariant BA.4 likely comes from a combination of increased transmissibility and mutations that enhance their ability to evade the immunity people have from previous infection or vaccination, Natalie Dean, an associate professor biostatistics and bioinformatics and epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told Reuters. “You don’t even need a transferability increase to account for the benefit,” she said.
Given data showing low rates of serious illness and death and fatigue with Covid-19 restrictions in many places, many health authorities have not tighten previously relaxed restrictions.
“I’m like everyone else: I hate wearing that mask. But more than that, I hate the idea that I could accidentally transfer someone else,” Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County public health director, told the New York Times. “That’s my biggest fear — that we are so eager to be done with this virus that we become complacent.”
New York City is a hot spot. Does anyone care?
Throughout the pandemic, New York City has been a hot spot; Due to the busy living conditions and public transport, the virus can easily spread through the air. While the city’s BA.5 infection rate is nowhere near what it was with previous waves, it continues to rise — and may even be much higher than the available data shows.
As the Times’ coverage points out, New York City’s test-and-trace program was phased out in April under Mayor Eric Adams — who got Covid-19 that month. Restaurants no longer need a vaccination certificate to enter, and the city’s mask mandate ended in March, although masks are still mandatory on public transport. Despite the city’s resurgence and his own health department’s recommendation to mask people indoors, Adams has repeatedly… opposed the return of the mask mandate.
“We are always re-evaluating our response efforts to ensure we are providing New Yorkers with the best information possible and so that they can make the decisions that are right for them,” Adams press secretary Fabien Levy told us in an email. vox. However, as City & State, an outlet that covers New York City and Albany politics, noted earlier this month that the New York City Department of Health has removed a color-coded alert system with specific guidelines on how to deal with varying levels of Covid-19 outbreak. , including public health measures. As reported the New York Times earlier this monththe system — which Adams unveiled in March — advised the mayor to require face masks in indoor and busy outdoor environments, and to reduce the vaccination requirement to enter restaurants and bars.
From Sunday, still on the website that the administration is “re-evaluating the city’s COVID alert system” and advising users to “come back here for updates in the coming weeks.” It also recommends that New Yorkers “wear a quality mask in all indoor public settings and around outdoor crowds,” as “there are currently high transmission levels of COVID-19 in the city.”
Rather than roll back such measures, Adams’s office has promoted vaccination, home and community testing sites, and antivirals to tackle Covid-19.
“New York is a nation-leader in testing and treatment delivery, and in the past six months alone, we’ve distributed more than 35 million home tests to New Yorkers and delivered about 90,000 Paxlovid courses,” Levy said in a statement. his email to Vox. “We review the numbers every day and will continue to follow the guidelines of health experts to keep New Yorkers safe and healthy.”
But New Yorkers continue to get sick, with a 22 percent increase in reported Covid-19 cases in the past two weeks, a 25 percent increase in hospitalizations and a 29 percent increase in deaths. according to the New York Times. Again, the numbers are still small in comparison; a daily average of 12 deaths is nothing like the daily averages in the spring of 2020. Vaccines and antivirals undoubtedly help prevent serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths – but they need to be supplemented with other mitigating and supportive measures such as mask, as Ed Yong noted in his article for the Atlantic earlier this month.
Things aren’t so clear from the White House either
Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, and while he is reportedly still at work and experiencing only mild symptomsHis age – he is 79 years old – puts him at increased risk of complications from the disease. He has been boosted twice, as Vox’s Dylan Scott and Li Zhou wrote on Thursday, and is being treated with paxlovid. In a short video posted to Twitter, Biden assured the public that he was feeling good and doing a lot of work.
Although he said he was vaccinated and… fully amplified, he gave no guidelines for those watching — no urgings to get vaccinated or boosted, or to wear masks indoors. “In the meantime, keep the faith,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
That’s not to say the White House hasn’t made an effort lately to address the prevalence of BA.5; on July 12, the administration rolled out new guidelines to manage the latest Covid-19 subvariant.
A press release In announcing the strategy, it was recognized that BA.5’s apparent ability to evade at least some immunity “has the potential to increase the number of infections in the coming weeks,” especially where people have not been vaccinated or where immunity to vaccines is lacking. decreases.
To address this, the White House proposal includes increasing access to antiviral treatments like Biden’s, and continuing to encourage vaccines and booster recording. Increasing the availability of and access to free testing is also a key premise of the strategy, as well as improving ventilation, increasing access to Evusheld preventive treatment for immunocompromised people, and ensuring access to ventilators and a clear indication of situations where masking is advised.
At the very least, that proposal presents a comprehensive – if not aggressive – approach to the new sub-variant and the ‘new normal’ of living with Covid-19. As experts warned during the pandemic, relying on vaccines as a panacea, especially when: an ommicron-specific vaccine booster been gone for months, will not stop Covid-19 and will not prevent the formation of new variants. As Yong points out, we don’t know what those variants will look likeand we have no way of predicting the severity of the resulting disease, or the ways in which they will evade our immune responses in the future.
“Everyone hopes to get a measure of what they call endemic — living with the virus at a level that doesn’t disrupt society,” Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the US, told Barron’s in an interview Thursday. ‘I think that’s where we’re going. I don’t think we’re going to eradicate this.”