Tag: Epidemics

New omicron subvariants accounted for more cases in New York region in latest week than BA.5, CDC data shows

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The omicron sublineages named BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 continued to spread in the U.S. in the week through Oct. 29, accounting for 27.1% of new cases nationwide, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The two accounted for 42.5% of all cases in the New York region, which includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, up from 37% the previous week. That was more than the BA.5 omicron subvariant, which accounted for 35.7% of new cases in the New York area in the latest week.

The BA.5 omicron subvariant accounted for 49.6% of all U.S. cases, the data show.

BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 were included in BA.5 variant data as recently as three weeks ago, because their numbers were too small to break out. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places.

Last week, the World Health Organization said that BQ.1 and another sublineage dubbed XBB do not appear to have immune-escape mutations that warrant being designated as variants of concern. However, BA.5 is still a variant of concern that is being closely monitored, said a statement from the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution.

Workers in a manufacturing facility that assemble Apple Inc.’s
AAPL,
-1.66%
iPhone in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou appear to have left to avoid COVID-19 curbs, with many traveling on foot for days after an unknown number of employees were quarantined in the facility after a virus outbreak, the Associated Press reported.

Videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms showed people who are allegedly Foxconn workers climbing over fences and carrying their belongings down a road.

Separately, visitors to Shanghai Disneyland were left s t randed at the park on Monday after the resort halted operations to comply with COVID-19 restrictions amid a new outbreak of the virus.

In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 36,869 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 2% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was up 3% to 27,415, while the daily average for deaths was down 6% to 352.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• With a downcast earnings season passing the halfway mark, results from financial-technology companies and vaccine makers will arrive this week amid questions about consumer spending as well as demand for COVID drugs, MarketWatch’s Bill Peters reported. Pfizer Inc.
PFE,
-1.82%
will report earnings on Tuesday, followed by Moderna Inc.
MRNA,
-0.47%
on Thursday. Analysts will have their eye on the state of COVID-19 vaccine and treatment sales and on what executives are anticipating for the full year, as they prepare for a private market for COVID medications and as more people shrug off the pandemic. Pfizer executives, during a call last week, said they intended to charge between $110 and $130 for a single-dose vial of the vaccine for U.S. adults when government purchases end. But they said they believe anyone who has health insurance shouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket.

The FDA authorized newly modified COVID-19 boosters to target the latest versions of the omicron variant. But as WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez explains, a key part of the decision-making process was changed with these new shots. Photo: Laura Kammermann

• A number of young children are being hospitalized because of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and it’s happening at an unusual time of year and among older children than in years past, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. COVID may be a contributing factor, in part because many children were not exposed to RSV last season and also because a prior COVID infection or exposure may change the way a baby’s immune system responds to RSV and may lead to more severe illness from an RSV infection, according to Asuncion Mejias, a principal investigator with the Center for Vaccines and Immunity at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

• On Saturday, more than 3,000 people took part in the first Pride march in South Africa since the COVID pandemic , celebrating the LGBT community and defying a U.S. warning of a possible terror attack in the area, the AP reported. The U.S. government this week warned of a possible attack in the Sandton part of Johannesburg, where the march took place. The South African government expressed concern that the U.S. had not shared enough information to give credibility to the alleged threat. Police said all measures had been taken to ensure safety in the area.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 630.2 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.58 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97.5 million cases and 1,070,266 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.9 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.4% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

So far, just 22.8 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 7.3% of the overall population.

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October 31, 2022
COVID-19 may be to blame for the surge in RSV illness among children. Here’s why.

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A number of young children are being hospitalized because of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and it’s happening at an unusual time of year and among older children than in years past.

RSV infections and related emergency-room visits and hospitalizations are nearing seasonal peaks in some U.S. regions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the current RSV outbreak is different from previous outbreaks in several ways: It’s happening in the fall rather than the winter (RSV commonly peaks after the holidays, starting in late December); older children and not just infants are being hospitalized; and cases are occurring that are more severe than in previous years. And this year, RSV is circulating at the same time as COVID, influenza, and other viruses like the biennial enterovirus, which was behind a rise in pediatric hospitalizations earlier this fall.

“The theory is that everyone’s now back together, and this is a rebound phenomenon,” said Jeffrey Kline, a physician and associate chair of research for emergency medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

Kline runs a national surveillance network that gathers data about viral infections from about 70 hospitals, including four pediatric hospitals. He says those data show that 318 children were hospitalized with acute respiratory illness brought on by RSV in the week starting Oct. 9, compared with 45 hospitalizations in the week starting July 25.

“If we think about the relative increase — ninefold increase — that’s not nothing, especially in the pediatric [emergency departments],” Kline said. “Holy mackerel.”

Source: CDC

The U.S. saw a massive spike in RSV cases in the summer of 2021, after masking and social distancing resulted in a lull in infections the previous year. Even with that spike, fewer young children — 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds — have been exposed to RSV than in a normal year. Most children have usually had at least one RSV infection by the time they are 2 years old, and as children get older, RSV becomes less worrisome, according to the CDC. Infants are at higher risk for severe disease brought on by RSV because babies have more immature immune responses than older children and because infants younger than 6 months of age breathe exclusively through their noses and cannot breathe through their mouths if they are congested.

“Age by itself is a risk factor for more severe disease, meaning that the younger babies are usually the ones that are sick-sick,” said Asuncion Mejias, a principal investigator with the Center for Vaccines and Immunity at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Now, she added, “we are seeing also older kids, probably because they were not exposed to RSV the previous season.”

But there’s another reason that COVID may be worsening some RSV infections in the youngest children. Mejias is studying whether a prior COVID infection or exposure somehow changes the way a baby’s immune system responds to RSV and whether it may lead to more severe illness from an RSV infection.

“That is something to work on and understand,” she said.

For now, however, worries are tied to the possibility of a “tripledemic” of COVID, influenza, and RSV as the U.S. heads into what is expected to be a complicated season for respiratory infections. Stat News reported in mid-October that flu season is already underway, and the CDC said this week that this year’s flu activity may have “atypical timing and intensity.”

COVID itself remains a threat, as well. There are still more children being hospitalized with COVID than with RSV, Kline said, and some kids are getting sick from both viruses at the same time. About 5% of children are thought to test positive for both RSV and COVID, and 60% of the children in that group were hospitalized, according to Kline’s surveillance network.

“All these things are going on all at once right now,” said Alex Frost, managing director for StudyMaker, which is providing software infrastructure to the network. “But the shape of pediatric cases that are showing up in the emergency room is different than it used to be.”

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October 28, 2022
WHO panel says no evidence yet that new omicron subvariants are more dangerous than others that are circulating

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The omicron sublineages named BQ.1 and XBB do not appear to have immune escape mutations that warrant being designated as variants of concern, a World Health Organization advisory panel said Friday.

The decision will be reassessed regularly to ensure there is no change that might warrant a new designation, said the statement.

As of Oct. 25, the XBB and XBB.1 lineages had been detected in 35 countries, according to a WHO weekly update from Thursday. The two are BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 recombinants, which were found in 26 countries in the previous week.

“There has been a broad increase in prevalence of XBB in regional genomic surveillance, but it has not yet been consistently associated with an increase in new infections,” the panel wrote. However, early evidence does suggest a higher reinfection risk compared with other circulating omicron variants.

BQ.1 is a sublineage of BA.5, which remains dominant globally, accounting for 77.1% of sequences forwarded to a centralized database in the week through Oct. 23. BQ.1 has been found in 65 countries.

“While there are no data on severity or immune escape from studies in humans, BQ.1* is showing a significant growth advantage over other circulating Omicron sublineages in many settings, including Europe and the US, and therefore warrants close monitoring,” said the panel.

The real risk of the variants depends on the level of immunity in a given region, it added. And with waning immune response from initial waves of omicron infection, and further evolution of omicron variants, “it is likely that reinfections may rise further,” said the statement.

Read now: COVID-19 may be to blame for the surge in RSV illness among children. Here’s why.

In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 37,412 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 3% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was up 1% at 27,002, while the daily average for deaths is down 5% to 358.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Gilead Sciences Inc.
GILD,
+12.92%
said sales of its COVID treatment Veklury, formerly known as remdesivir, fell 52% to $925 million in the third quarter, driven by lower rates of COVID-19-related hospitalizations compared to the third quarter of 2021.” Last month, Gilead said the World Health Organization expanded its guidance to recommend remdesivir for treatment of patients with severe symptoms.

• The pandemic devastated poor children’s well-being, not just by closing their schools, but also by taking away their parents’ jobs, sickening their families and teachers, and adding chaos and fear to their daily lives, the Associated Press reported, citing an analysis of test scores that was shared on an exclusive basis. The analysis found the average student lost more than half a school year of learning in math and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading—with some district averages slipping by more than double those amounts, or worse. Online learning played a major role, but students lost significant ground even where they returned quickly to schoolhouses, especially in math scores in low-income communities.

• Optimism among U.S. companies in China has hit record low levels, an annual survey showed on Friday, as competitive, economic, and regulatory challenges compound the stresses already imposed by Beijing’s ongoing zero-COVID policies, Reuters reported. Just 55% of 307 companies surveyed by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and consulting firm PwC China described themselves as optimistic about the five-year business outlook. The reading is the lowest in the survey’s 23-year history and worse than in 2020, when COVID first surfaced, and during the trade standoff between Beijing and Washington in 2019.

• The Chinese city of Shanghai has ordered mass testing on all 1.3 million residents of its downtown Yangpu district and is confining them to their homes at least until results are known, the AP reported. The demand is an echo of measures ordered over the summer that led to a two-month lockdown of the entire city of 25 million that devastated the local economy, prompting food shortages and rare confrontations between residents and the authorities.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 629.6 million on Friday, while the death toll rose above 6.58 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97.4 million cases and 1,070,064fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.9 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.4% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

So far, just 22.8 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 7.3% of the overall population.

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October 28, 2022
Almost three years into the pandemic, Chinese city of Wuhan is again in partial lockdown to stem latest outbreak of cases

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Almost three years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and the Chinese city of Wuhan is again in partial lockdown, as it sticks with a strict zero-COVID policy to stem the current outbreak.

Roughly 800,000 people in one district of the city in central China have been ordered to stay at home until Sunday, Reuters reported. Wuhan counted about 20 to 25 new COVID cases a day this week, while China overall reported more than 1,000 new cases on Thursday. That was enough to trigger lockdowns or restrictions in other cities, including Xining in the northwest and Guangzhou in the south.

As of Oct. 24, 28 cities were implementing varying degrees of lockdown measures, with around 207.7 million people affected in regions responsible for around 25.6 trillion yuan ($3.55 trillion) of China’s gross domestic product, according to Nomura. That’s nearly a quarter of China’s 2021 economic output.

The World Health Organization’s weekly epidemiological update, meanwhile, shows cases and fatalities are still falling across the world. The global case tally was down 15% in the week through Oct. 23 from the previous week. The number of deaths fell 13% to just over 8,500.

The highest number of new weekly cases came from Germany at 498,787, followed by France, at 307,610; China at 285,348; and the U.S. at 255,116. Experts are expecting the winter months to bring a fresh wave of cases as people gather indoors in the colder weather.

As it has for some months, the WHO cautioned that the numbers may be undercounted, as many countries have pulled back on testing, resulting in fewer tests and fewer positive readings.

The BA.5 omicron subvariant remains dominant around the world, accounting for 77.1% of sequences forwarded to a centralized database, the agency said.

“BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 and their various subvariants have in many cases acquired the same mutations at the same position, indicating convergent evolution,” said the WHO.

It explained that convergent evolution means the independent genetic adaptation of two or more different variants at the same genomic position, i.e., the same nucleotide or amino acid change is observed in multiple variants, with these variants not being direct descendants of each other.

“Areas of convergent evolution point to a potential role in the adaptation and further evolution of the virus,” said the update.

As of Oct. 25, the XBB and XBB.1 lineages have been detected in 35 countries. The two are BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 recombinants, which were found in 26 countries in last week’s report.

The BQ.1 and its lineages have been found in 65 countries. BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are BA.5 lineages and accounted for about 16.6% of new U.S. cases in the week through Oct. 22, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two were barely registering just a few weeks ago and were included in BA.5 variant data. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places. The CDC is updating the numbers every Friday.

The two are spreading fast in the New York region, which includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and accounted for almost 30% of new cases in the same week, CDC data shows.

In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

See also: A common virus is putting more children in the hospital than in recent years

The daily average for new cases stood at 37,615 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 4% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was flat at 26,792, while the daily average for deaths is down 5% to 361.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Qatar will drop most of its coronavirus restrictions beginning Nov. 1, just before it hosts the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Associated Press reported. Qatar’s Health Ministry made the announcement Wednesday. In a statement, it said that PCR or rapid-antigen test results would not be required for those flying into the country. It also dropped a requirement to register for the country’s Ehteraz contract-tracing app. However, it’s mandatory to use the app to enter healthcare facilities in Qatar.

• Fourteen Mississippi residents have been arrested on criminal charges related to a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain government funds through a federal program for small businesses, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday, the AP reported separately. All are charged with conspiracy, illegal financial transactions and wire fraud by applying for loans through the Payroll Protection Program. The loans were dispersed by the U.S. Small Business Administration early on during the COVID pandemic to prevent businesses from failing.

China’s leader Xi Jinping opened the Communist Party congress in Beijing with a defense of his 10 years in power and a bid for a third five-year term. By staying in power, he would break succession norms established to prevent a return to a Mao-style dictatorship. Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

• LabCorp
LH,
-6.21%
shares tumbled 6% Thursday after the diagnostics company said revenue in the third quarter of 2022 came in lower than expected as fewer people got PCR or antigen tests for COVID. Labcorp had earnings of $352.8 million, or $3.90 per share, in the third quarter of 2022, down from $587.3 million, or $6.05 per share, in the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted earnings per share were $4.68, against a FactSet consensus of $4.09. The company’s revenue was $3.6 billion for the quarter. That’s down from $4.0 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2021. The FactSet consensus was $3.9 billion.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 629.1 million on Thursday, while the death toll rose above 6.58 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97.3 million cases and 1,069,449 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.6 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.2% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 111.4 million have had a booster, equal to 49.1% of the vaccinated population, and 26.8 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 40.6% of those who received a first booster.

So far, just 19.4 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants that have been dominant in the U.S. and around the world for months.

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October 27, 2022
Biden to get updated COVID booster on Tuesday; less than 10% of eligible Americans have had the shot so far

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President Joe Biden will receive his updated COVID booster on Tuesday and will urge Americans to get the shot, which targets both the original virus and omicron variants that have been dominant in the U.S. and elsewhere this year.

The news, first reported by NBC News, was confirmed by a tweet from White House assistant press secretary Kevin Munoz and by an emailed statement, in which the White House said, “The President will receive his updated COVID-19 vaccine and will deliver remarks on the ongoing fight against the virus.”

Biden tested positive for COVID-19 in July, then did so again three days after he had been cleared from isolation in a rare rebound case after receiving the anti-viral drug Paxlovid. The president was fully vaccinated and boosted and suffered only mild symptoms. Health officials recommend that people who have contracted COVID wait at least three months after infection to get the booster.

The bivalent booster has been available to adults and older children since early September, and its use was expanded to children as young as 5 in October. But data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show fewer than 20 million Americans have received it so far — less than 10% of those eligible.

That’s a slow start given expectations for a wave of new cases in the winter months.

As immunity from previous shots wanes and new variants spread, health officials are urging people, especially those over 65, to get the updated booster. A study earlier this month by the Commonwealth Fund concluded that a strong booster campaign this fall could save 90,000 American lives and prevent more than 936,000 COVID hospitalizations in the U.S.

CDC data released Friday showed the two new COVID variants dubbed BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 continued to gain traction in the U.S. in the latest week, accounting for 16.6% of all cases, up from 11.4% a week ago.

The two variants are lineages of BA.5, the omicron subvariant that remains dominant but has shrunk to account for 62.2% of circulating variants, the agency said, down from 67.9% a week ago. The CDC had previously combined data about BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 with BA.5 cases, because the number of cases caused by the new variants was so small. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places. The New York area, which includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, has the highest number of cases involving those variants, at 28.4%, the data show.

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 37,741 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 7% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was down 1% to 26,798, while the daily average for deaths was down 6% to 361.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• The head of the CDC has tested positive for COVID, the Associated Press reported. Rochelle Walensky, who is up to date on her vaccinations, tested positive Friday night and had mild symptoms, the CDC said in a statement. “Consistent with CDC guidelines, she is isolating at home and will participate in her planned meetings virtually,” the agency said. Senior staff and close contacts have been informed of her positive test and are monitoring their health.

• The pandemic caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, erasing decades of academic progress and widening racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis, the AP reported separately. Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly 4 in 10 eighth-graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in average test scores, with some treading water at best. Those are the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — which tested hundreds of thousands of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country this year.

The FDA has authorized modified COVID-19 boosters to target the latest versions of the omicron variant. But as WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez explains, a key part of the decision-making process was changed with these new shots. Photo: Laura Kammermann

• The Chinese economy grew 3.9% over a year earlier in the third quarter, quickening from the 0.4% expansion recorded in the second quarter, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The reading topped the 3.5% economic growth expected by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. For the first nine months of the year, China’s GDP expanded 3.0% over a year earlier, well below the 5.5% annual growth target set by the government. Growth has been crimped all year by China’s zero-COVID policy, which has led to repeated lockdowns of commercial and residential areas.

• The pandemic interrupted measles-vaccine campaigns globally in 2020 and 2021, leaving millions of children unprotected against one of the world’s most contagious diseases, whose complications include blindness, pneumonia and death, Reuters reported. After what health experts call the biggest backslide in a generation, 26 large or disruptive measles outbreaks have occurred worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. A devastating outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed more than 700 children this year, chiefly among religious sects that do not believe in vaccinations.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 627.6 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.57 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97.2 million cases and 1,067,686 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.6 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.2% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 111.4 million have had a booster, equal to 49.1% of the vaccinated population, and 26.8 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 40.6% of those who received a first booster.

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October 24, 2022
CDC is discussing using oral polio vaccine for first time in 20 years to stop New York outbreak

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering using the oral polio vaccine for the first time in more than 20 years to stop an outbreak in the greater New York City metropolitan area that left an adult paralyzed over the summer.

“We are in discussions with our New York State and New York City colleagues about the use of nOPV,” said Dr. Jannell Routh, the CDC’s team leader for domestic polio, referring to the novel oral polio vaccine.

“It will be a process. It’s not something that we can pull the trigger on and have it appear overnight,” Routh told CNBC. “There will be lots of thought and discussion about the reintroduction of an oral polio vaccine into the United States,” she said.

The New York State Department of Health, in a statement, said it is collaborating with the CDC on potential future options to respond to the outbreak.

U.S. drug regulators pulled the oral vaccine off shelves in 2000 because it contains a live — but weakened — strain of the virus that can, in rare circumstances, mutate into a virulent form that is contagious and potentially paralyze people who are not vaccinated.

Scientists believe this latest outbreak was caused by someone who was vaccinated with the live virus overseas and started a chain of transmission that eventually found its way to the U.S. Sewage samples in New York are linked to earlier samples in London and Jerusalem. It’s unclear where the transmission began originally. While the oral vaccine doesn’t normally cause polio that paralyzes people, this one did because it was able to mutate into more virulent strains while spreading across among people who weren’t vaccinated.

The U.S. currently uses the inactivated polio vaccine which is administered as a shot and contains chemically killed virus that cannot replicate, mutate or cause disease. While New York state health officials have launched an immunization drive with the inactivated polio shots, that vaccine hasn’t stopped this outbreak.

The CDC has set up a work group within its committee of independent vaccine advisors to develop criteria for when the novel oral polio vaccine might need to be used to stop the current outbreak in the New York City area and potential future ones. The work group met publicly for the first time on Wednesday.

“Since this outbreak occurred in New York, it was determined that we need to revisit polio. It’s really that simple,” said Dr. Oliver Brooks, the workgroup chairperson and chief medical officer at Watts Healthcare in Los Angeles.

The problem is that although the inactivated vaccine is highly effective at preventing paralysis, it does not stop transmission of the virus. The oral polio vaccine is much more effective at stopping transmission of the virus and is normally used to quash outbreaks.

The poliovirus strain currently circulating in the New York City metro area mutated from and is genetically linked to the Sabin Type 2 strain used in an older version of the oral polio vaccine.

The U.S., if needed, would use the novel oral polio vaccine which is a safer and newer version that is more stable and carries a much lower risk of mutating into a virus strain that can spread and cause disease in people who are unvaccinated.

The novel oral polio vaccine was developed to stop poliovirus outbreaks caused by the less stable older version of the vaccine, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. More than 450 million doses have been administered in 21 countries around the world.

Any decision to use the novel oral polio vaccine would require either an approval or emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. CNBC has reached out to FDA for comment.

An unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, New York was paralyzed in June after contracting poliovirus. It was the first known U.S. case in nearly a decade and the first in New York since 1990. There have been no further cases of paralysis so far, though New York state health officials have warned that unvaccinated people are at serious risk and should get up to date on their shots immediately.

New York State Department of Health has detected poliovirus in sewage dating back to April and as recently as September in several counties in the New York City area. The virus has been detected in 70 sewage samples across Rockland, Sullivan, Orange, Nassau, Kings and Queens counties.

The U.S. was declared polio free in 1979.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency in September and Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett declared the spread of poliovirus an imminent threat to public health.

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October 21, 2022
CDC shoots down false claims it will mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren, saying states make that decision

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refuted claims that it’s planning to add the COVID-19 vaccine to immunization schedules for schoolchildren, saying that the authority for that decision lies with states and other local entities.

The false claim spread after it was shared by Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a tweet this week, as the Associated Press reported.

Carlson tweeted that the agency would make the vaccine mandatory in order for children to attend school, a claim the CDC quickly shot down. While an advisory committee to the CDC voted to recommend that the vaccine be added to immunization schedules, the CDC “only makes recommendations for use of vaccines, while school-entry vaccination requirements are determined by state or local jurisdictions,” CDC spokeswoman Kate Grusich told the AP.

Grusich explained that the action was meant to streamline clinical guidance for healthcare providers by adding COVID-19 vaccines to a single list of all currently licensed, authorized and routinely recommended vaccines.

“It’s important to note that there are no changes in COVID-19 vaccine policy,” she said.

The news comes as U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 38,077 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 8% from two weeks ago. Cases are currently rising in 14 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 2% to 26,669, although hospitalizations are rising in almost all northeastern states as cold weather arrives. The daily average for deaths was down 7% to 360.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Pfizer
PFE,
+4.42%
is planning to sell the COVID vaccine it developed with German partner BioNTech
BNTX,
+9.88%
for $110 -$130 a dose once the U.S. market for COVID-19 shots becomes commercial, likely in the first quarter of next year, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. Pfizer and BioNTech are currently paid $30.50 per vaccine dose by the U.S. government, which contracted with the companies, as well as with other vaccine makers like Moderna
MRNA,
+9.07%
and Novavax
NVAX,
+11.35%,
and then made the COVID-19 shots available at no cost to people in the U.S. during the public-health emergency. The emergency declaration in the U.S. isn’t expected to be renewed next year, which will lead to the formation of an official commercial market for COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments.

• Johnson & Johnson
JNJ,
+1.91%
said the volume of surgical procedures is returning to prepandemic levels in many parts of the world, a trend that cheered Wall Street and could bode well for other medical-technology heavyweights like Stryker Corp.
SYK,
+0.57%
and Zimmer Biomet Holdings
ZBH,
+0.18%.
J&J, which reported earnings this week, said its medical-technology business had a “strong September,” with U.S. sales of hip and knee implants and other surgical devices rising 7.7% to $3.3 billion in the third quarter of the year. “We are seeing procedures recovering,” Ashley McEvoy, worldwide chair of J&J’s MedTech business, told investors during this week’s earnings call. “In the U.S., we started to see surgical procedures tick up, predominantly at the latter part of the quarter.”

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual COVID shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to COVID could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

• “As China’s ruling Communist Party holds a congress this week, many Beijing residents are focused on an issue not on the formal agenda: Will the end of the meeting bring an easing of China’s at times draconian ‘zero-COVID’ policies that are disrupting lives and the economy?” the AP reported. It appears to be wishful thinking. As the world moves to a postpandemic lifestyle, many across China have resigned themselves to lining up several times a week for COVID tests, restrictions on travel to other regions and the ever-present possibility of a community lockdown.

• Fantasy Fest, a 10-day annual party, is kicking off in Key West, Fla., on Friday, with a full slate of events for the first time since the pandemic started, the AP reported. “Due to the COVID pandemic, this will be the first full Fantasy Fest since 2019,” the festival’s board chair, Steve Robbins, said. “So I know our guests and staff are excited about getting back to the real Fantasy Fest.” Dozens of themed events are set for the festival, including a nighttime parade Oct. 29 featuring floats and elaborately costumed marching groups. Participants are encouraged to draw costume ideas from the festival’s theme, “Cult Classics & Cartoon Chaos,” and to portray characters inspired by favorite cartoons and television or film productions with a cult following.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 626.9 million on Friday, while the death toll rose above 6.57 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97.2 million cases and 1,067,190 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.5 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.2% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 111.4 million have had a booster, equal to 49.1% of the vaccinated population, and 26.8 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 40.6% of those who received a first booster.

The CDC reports that some 19.4 million people have had a dose of the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron and its subvariants along with the original virus.

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October 21, 2022
Pfizer sets new prices for its COVID-19 vaccines. The cost? $110 to $130 per dose

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Pfizer Inc.
PFE,
+4.17%
said Thursday that it plans to sell the COVID-19 shot it developed with BioNTech SE
BNTX,
+7.14%
for $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S. market for COVID-19 shots becomes commercial, likely in the first quarter of next year.

Pfizer and BioNTech are currently paid $30.50 per vaccine dose by the U.S. government, which contracted with the companies (as well as other vaccine makers like Moderna Inc.
MRNA,
+6.57%
and Novavax Inc.
NVAX,
+8.88%
) and then made the COVID-19 shots available at no cost to people in the U.S. during the public-health emergency.

The emergency declaration in the U.S. isn’t expected to be renewed next year, which will lead to the formation of an official commercial market for COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. That said, this change doesn’t mean most Americans will be on the hook to pay for their shots in 2023 and beyond.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis said most people with private insurance won’t be expected to pay anything out of pocket for the vaccines, though the costs may eventually be baked into the price of health-insurance premiums, as is done with flu shots. People with Medicare will have their shots covered by Medicare Part B, while those with Medicaid should also have coverage of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s the uninsured who may find it difficult to find free vaccines and boosters in the future.

Wall Street analysts cheered the news, saying Pfizer’s pricing plan came in above expectations. It also bodes well for Moderna’s stock. SVB Securities upgraded the company to market perform from underperform, though the company has not yet announced its pricing plans for its COVID-19 shots.

“Presuming that MRNA prices as a rational duopolist, this substantially improves the company’s ability to meet 2023 revenue guidance,” SVB analyst Mani Foroohar told investors.

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October 21, 2022
Uninsured kids will still receive Covid vaccines for free after shots move to commercial market

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A child is administered a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pediatric vaccine.

Mayela Lopez | Reuters

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a major step Wednesday toward ensuring that kids who are uninsured can receive Covid-19 vaccines for free after the federal government shifts its immunization program to the commercial market.

The CDC’s independent advisors voted unanimously on Wednesday to include Covid shots authorized for kids by the Food and Drug Administration in the federal government’s Vaccines For Children program.

The Vaccines for Children program provides vaccines to kids under age 19 whose families cannot afford them. Children are eligible for the program if they qualify for Medicaid or are uninsured, underinsured or Native American.

Including Covid shots in the program does not make them a routine childhood vaccination for school, said Dr. Jose Romero, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

The U.S. government has been providing Covid vaccines to everyone in the U.S. for free during the pandemic. But the Biden administration is working on a plan to transition the vaccination program to the commercial market as soon as 2023, which means people will have to start paying for the shots.

Dr. Jeanne Santoli, a CDC official, said the public health agency will start awarding contracts for healthcare providers to give the Covid shots for free to uninsured kids.

Currently, children as young as six months old are eligible for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s two-dose primary series with the first-generation shots that target the original Covid strain. Kids as young as age 5 are eligible for the new booster shots that target the dominant omicron BA.5 subvariant.

The decision to include Covid shots in the free vaccine program will prove crucial to maintaining access for many children. As many as 5.3 million kids are expected to lose health insurance through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program whenever the Biden administration decides to end the Covid public health emergency, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

“This is an access issue. This is an issue to allow children that don’t have insurance to gain access to this vaccine,” said Romero.

Although Covid is generally less severe in kids than adults, more than 162,000 children under age 18 have been hospitalized with Covid since August 2020, according to data from the CDC. More than 1,800 children have died from Covid since the pandemic began, according to the data.

Public health officials are also worried about kids developing long Covid even after a mild infection.

CNBC Health & Science

Read CNBC’s latest global health coverage:

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October 19, 2022
Two new COVID variants are spreading fast in New York region and could account for about 37% of new cases

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The two newly identified omicron subvariants, dubbed BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, are spreading fast in the New York region and could account for about 37% of new cases, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data crunched by NBC News.

The two variants accounted for 11.5% and 8% of new cases, respectively, that were recorded in the area in the week ending Oct. 15, up from 4.1% and 1.9% two weeks earlier. The New York area includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Combined, they accounted for 11.4% of overall U.S. cases in the same week. Before last Friday’s data release, they were included in BA.5 variant data, as the numbers were too small to break out. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places. The CDC is updating the numbers every Friday.

“When you get variants like that, you look at what their rate of increase is as a relative proportion of the variants, and this has a pretty troublesome doubling time,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview with CBS News earlier this week.

The news comes as experts fear another wave of cases during the winter months as colder weather forces people indoors and families gather for holidays.

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 37,888 on Tuesday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 15% from two weeks ago. Cases are currently rising in 10 states: Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Maryland, Wisconsin, Illinois, Vermont, Kansas and Florida. Cases are also rising in Washington, D.C.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 6% to 25,845, although hospitalizations are up in many northeastern states, including Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maine.

The daily average for deaths is down 3% to 382.

In other news, the World Health Organization said its emergency committee came away from a meeting last week with the determination that the pandemic remains a global health emergency, despite recent progress.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he agreed with that decison.

“The committee emphasized the need to strengthen surveillance and expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at-risk, and for all countries to update their national preparedness and response plans,” Tedros told reporters at a briefing.

“While the global situation has obviously improved since the pandemic began, the virus continues to change, and there remain many risks and uncertainties,” he said. “This pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again.”

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual COVID-19 shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to COVID could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Reports that a 16-year-old girl has died at a COVID quarantine center in China are causing anger after her family said their pleas for medical help were ignored, the Guardian reported. Videos of the girl have spread across Chinese social media in the last 24 hours. The distressing footage, which the Guardian said it has not been able to independently verify, shows the teenager ill, struggling to breathe and convulsing in a bunk bed at what is purported to be a quarantine center in Ruzhou, Henan province. The reports come as Communist Party leaders hold their party congress in Beijing amid anger about the country’s strict zero-COVID policy.

• Hong Kong, which is experiencing a massive brain drain thanks to the pandemic and to political upheaval, unveiled a new visa scheme on Wednesday that aims to attract global talent, the Associated Press reported. The region’s chief executive, John Lee, said the Top Talent Pass Scheme will allow people who earn an annual salary of 2.5 million Hong Kong dollars ($318,472) or more, as well as graduates of the world’s top universities, to work or pursue opportunities in the city for two years.

In a rare display of defiance, two banners unfurled from a highway overpass in Beijing condemned Chinese President Xi Jinping and his strict COVID policies. The protest took place days before the Communist Party congress in that city.

• The COVID pandemic catalyzed a major shift in the way Americans live and work, and a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that workers in the U.S. are taking advantage of the widespread shift toward remote work to spend more time sleeping and engaging in leisure activities, MarketWatch’s Chris Matthews reported. “One of the most enduring shifts [resulting from the pandemic] has occurred in the workplace, with millions of employees making the switch to work from home,” wrote David Dam, a former New York Fed research analyst, in a Tuesday blog post.

• The North Dakota Department of Health stored thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses at incorrect temperatures or without temperature data over the past two years, according to a state audit Tuesday that said some of those vaccines were administered to patients, the AP reported. The health department disputed the findings. Tim Wiedrich, who heads the agency’s virus response, said “no non-viable vaccine” was given to patients. In responses that accompanied the audit, the department said clerical errors or other errors of documentation erroneously suggested that expired or bad doses were given.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 625.7 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose above 6.57 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 97 million cases and 1,065,841 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.2 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.1% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 110.8 million have had a booster, equal to 49% of the vaccinated population, and 25.6 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 39% of those who received a first booster.

Some 14.8 million people have had a dose of the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron and its subvariants along with the original virus.

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October 19, 2022
CDC identifies new COVID variants that accounted for 11.4% of new cases in week ending Oct. 15

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a new COVID variant dubbed BQ.1 and a descendant called BQ.1.1 have gained traction in the U.S., accounting for 11.4% of new cases across the nation in the week ending Oct. 15.

The two variants are lineages of BA.5, the omicron subvariant that remains dominant but has shrunk to account for just 67.9% of circulating variants, the agency said in a Friday update. The CDC had previously combined BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 with BA.5 cases because the numbers of the new variants were so small. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places.

New York and New Jersey currently have the highest proportion of BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 infections, at about 20% of overall cases, according to CDC estimates.

“When you get variants like that, you look at what their rate of increase is as a relative proportion of the variants, and this has a pretty troublesome doubling time,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview with CBS News.

Adding to concerns, the variant seems “to elude important monoclonal antibodies,” he added.

Fauci is confident that Moderna
MRNA,
+3.92%,
as well as Pfizer
PFE,
+1.84%
and German partner BioNTech
BNTX,
+2.45%,
will be able to update boosters to target the new subvariant. “The somewhat encouraging news is that it’s a BA.5 sublineage, so there are almost certainly going to be some cross-protections that you can boost up,” he said.

So far, only 14.8 million people living in the U.S. have taken advantage of the new bivalent boosters that were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in late August. That’s equal to about 7% of the 209 million who were initially eligible.

The FDA authorized the Pfizer booster for use in people aged 12 and older and the Moderna booster for adults aged 18 and older. Last week, the FDA added children aged 5 to 11 to the Pfizer program and children aged 6 through 17 to the Moderna one.

Experts are concerned that the low number of vaccinations is due to a sense that the pandemic is over and no longer poses a major risk for most people. U.S. cases are steadily declining and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April; however, the true tally is likely higher than the official count, because many people are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 37,649 on Sunday, down 19% from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times tracker.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 5% to 26,475, while the daily average for deaths was down 8% to 374.

But cold weather is expected to bring a new wave of cases, and hospitalizations are rising again in much of the Northeast, the Times tracker is showing.

“That’s the thing that’s so frustrating for me and for my colleagues who are involved in this, is that we have the capability of mitigating against this. And the uptake of the new bivalent vaccine is not nearly as high as we would like it to be,” said Fauci.

Coronavirus Update: Ma rketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Moderna and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which is supplying vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, have agreed to cancel remaining orders under their 2022 COVID-19 vaccine agreement given “sufficient supply.” The biotechnology company has supplied Gavi with nearly 70 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to facilitating the donation of more than 100 million doses. Moderna and Gavi said they will create a new framework that enables Gavi to buy up to 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in 2023.

• The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Organization for Animal Health on Monday launched a new initiative that aims to address health threats to humans, animals, plants and the environment. The One Health Joint Plan of Action “aims to create a framework to integrate systems and capacity so that we can collectively better prevent, predict, detect, and respond to health threats,” the four agencies said in a statement.

• China is doubling down on its zero-COVID strategy as a historic Communist Party congress opens in Beijing, BBC News reported. Zero COVID was a “people’s war to stop the spread of the virus,” said President Xi Jinping as he kicked off the meeting. There is increasing public fatigue over lockdowns and travel restrictions, and Beijing has come under strict security measures ahead of the congress, sparking frustration in the city, including a rare and dramatic public protest on Thursday criticizing Xi and his strategy.

In a rare display of defiance, two banners were unfurled from a highway overpass in Beijing condemning Chinese President Xi Jinping and his strict COVID-19 policies. The protest took place days before the expected extension of Xi’s tenure.

• Airline stocks rallied Monday after data showed that on Sunday, more people flew than on any other day since before the pandemic. Data from the Transportation Security Administration showed that 2.495 million travelers went through TSA checkpoints on Sunday, which is just above the previous 2022 high of 2.490 million on July 1 and the most since Feb. 11, 2020, which was exactly one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In comparison, the day with the fewest travelers since the start of the pandemic was April 12, 2022, with 87,534 people traveling. And in 2019, there were 116 days of more travelers than Sunday, while the average for that year was 2.306 million. The U.S. Global Jets ETF
JETS,
+2.02%
was up 2.2%.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 624.7 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.56 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.9 million cases and 1,065,118 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.2 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.1% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 110.8 million have had a booster, equal to 49% of the vaccinated population, and 25.6 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 39% of those who received a first booster.

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October 17, 2022
Omicron BA.5 is declining in the U.S. as emerging variants gain ground, CDC data shows

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The U.S. faces at least seven different versions of Covid-19 omicron as the nation heads into winter when health officials are expecting another wave of viral infections.

Although the omicron BA.5 variant remains dominant in the country, it is starting to lose some ground to other versions of the virus, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published on Friday.

Omicron BA.5 has splintered into several new but related variants that include BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BF.7. The U.K. Health Security Agency, in a report earlier this month, said these three variants are demonstrating a growth advantage over BA.5, which was the most contagious version to date.

In the U.S., omicron BA.5 makes up about 68% of all new infections, down from about 80% at the beginning of October. BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BF.7 are now causing about 17% of new infections combined, according to the CDC data.

About 3% of new infections are attributable to BA.2.75. and BA.2.75.2, which are related to the omicron BA.2 variant that caused a bump in cases during the spring but was pushed out.

Scientists at Peking University in China found that omicron BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 were the most adept at evading immunity from prior BA.5 infection and several antibody drugs. The study, published earlier in October, has not been peer reviewed.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said earlier this week that U.S. health officials are closely monitoring these variants because they are good at evading prior immunity.

“The reason we’re tracking them is because they either have a lot more immune invasiveness or they render many of our treatments ineffective,” Jha said. “Those are the two major things that get our attention.”

But Jha said the new omicron boosters that the U.S. started rolling out last month should provide better protection than the first-generation vaccines against these emerging variants. The boosters target BA.5 and the emerging variants are all omicron and most descend from BA.5.

Jha called on all eligible Americans to get the new boosters by Halloween so they will have full protection for Thanksgiving when family holiday gatherings kick into full swing.

But the scientists at Peking University said the immune evasiveness of variants like BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 could mean that the BA.5 booster shots will not provide sufficiently broad protection.

It’s unclear how much more effective the boosters will prove in the real world. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the shots without direct human data, relying instead on clinical trials from a similar shot that was developed against the original version of omicron, BA.1.

Pfizer and BioNTech on Thursday published the first human data from their BA.5 shots. They triggered a significant boost to the immune system against omicron BA.5 in a lab study that looked at blood samples from adults ages 18 and older, the companies said.

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October 14, 2022
Study finds Paxlovid can interact badly with some heart medications, and White House renews COVID emergency through Jan. 11

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A new study has found that the COVID antiviral Paxlovid can interact badly with certain heart medications, raising concerns for patients with cardiovascular risk who test positive.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and found the reaction involved such medications as blood thinners and statins. As patients who are hospitalized with COVID are at elevated risk of heart problems, they are likely to be described Paxlovid, which was developed by Pfizer
PFE,
-0.45%.

“Co-administration of NMVr (Paxlovid) with medications commonly used to manage cardiovascular conditions can potentially cause significant drug-drug interactions and may lead to severe adverse effects,” the authors wrote. “It is crucial to be aware of such interactions and take appropriate measures to avoid them.”

The news comes just days after the White House made a renewed push to encourage Americans above the age of 50 to take Paxlovid or use monoclonal antibodies if they test positive and are at risk of developing severe disease.

White House coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told the New York Times that greater use of the medicine could reduce the average daily death count to about 50 a day from close to 400 currently.

“I think almost everybody benefits from Paxlovid,” Jha said. “For some people, the benefit is tiny. For others, the benefit is massive.”

Yet a smaller share of 80-year-olds with COVID in the U.S. is taking it than 45-year-olds, Jha said, citing data said he has seen.

On Thursday, the White House extended its COVID pubic health emergency through Jan. 11 as it prepares for an expected rise in cases in the colder months, the Associated Press reported.

The public health emergency, first declared in January 2020 and renewed every 90 days since, has dramatically changed how health services are delivered.

The declaration enabled the emergency authorization of COVID vaccines, as well as free testing and treatments. It expanded Medicaid coverage to millions of people, many of whom will risk losing that coverage once the emergency ends. It temporarily opened up telehealth access for Medicare recipients, enabling doctors to collect the same rates for those visits and encouraging health networks to adopt telehealth technology.

Since the beginning of this year, Republicans have pressed the administration to end the public health emergency.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has urged Congress to provide billions more in aid to pay for vaccines and testing. Amid Republican opposition to that request, the federal government ceased sending free COVID tests in the mail last month, saying it had run out of funds for that effort.

Separately, the head of the World Health Organization urged countries to continue to surveil, monitor and track COVID and to ensure poorer countries get access to vaccines, diagnostics and treatments, reiterating that the pandemic is not yet over.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said most countries no longer have measures in place to limit the spread of the virus, even though cases are rising again in places including Europe.

“Most countries have reduced surveillance drastically, while testing and sequencing rates are also much lower,” Tedros said in opening remarks at the IHR Emergency Committee on COVID-19 Pandemic on Thursday.

“This,” said the WHO leader, “is blinding us to the evolution of the virus and the impact of current and future variants.”

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 38,530 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 19% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in six states, namely Nevada, New Mexico, Kansas, Maine, Wisconsin and Vermont, and are flat in Wyoming. They are falling everywhere else.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 7% at 26,665, while the daily average for deaths is down 7% to 377.

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has urged German states to reintroduce face-mask requirements for indoor spaces due to high COVID cases numbers, the Local.de reported. Lauterbach was launching his ministry’s new COVID campaign on Friday. “The direction we are heading in is not a good one,” he said at a press conference in Berlin, adding it’s better to take smaller measures now than be forced into drastic ones later.

• Health officials in Washington and Oregon said Thursday that a fall and winter COVID surge is likely headed to the Pacific Northwest after months of relatively low case levels, the AP reported. King County (Wash.) Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin said during a news briefing that virus trends in Europe show a concerning picture of what the U.S. could soon see, the Seattle Times reported.

Two banners unfurled from a highway overpass in Beijing condemned Chinese President Xi Jinping and his strict Covid policies, in a rare display of defiance. The protest took place days before the expected extension of the leader’s tenure.

• Kevin Spacey’s trial on sexual-misconduct allegations will continue without a lawyer who tested positive for COVID on Thursday, Yahoo News reported. The “American Beauty” and “House of Cards” star is on trial in Manhattan federal court facing allegations in a $40 million civil lawsuit that he preyed upon actor Anthony Rapp in 1986 when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. Jennifer Keller’s diagnosis comes after she spent about five hours cross-examining Rapp on the witness stand over two days — a few feet away from the jury box without wearing a mask.

• A man who presents himself as an Orthodox Christian monk and an attorney with whom he lived fraudulently obtained $3.5 million in federal pandemic relief funds for nonprofit religious organizations and related businesses they controlled, and spent some of it to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” federal prosecutors said Thursday. Brian Andrew Bushell, 47, and Tracey M.A. Stockton, 64, are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unlawful monetary transactions, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston said in a statement, as reported by the AP.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 623.9 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.56 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.9 million cases and 1,064,821 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.2 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.1% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 110.8 million have had a booster, equal to 49% of the vaccinated population, and 25.6 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 39% of those who received a first booster.

Some 14.8 million people have had a shot of the new bivalent booster that targets the new omicron subvariants.

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October 14, 2022
Risk of Covid death almost zero for people who are boosted and treated, White House Covid czar says

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People who stay up to date on their vaccines and receive treatments when they have breakthrough infections face almost no risk of dying from Covid-19, a top health official said on Tuesday.

Dr. Ashish Jha, head of the White House Covid task force, said the U.S. has made major strides in fighting Covid since the early days of the pandemic when thousands of people were dying daily from the virus.

“If you are up to date with your vaccines and if you get treated if you have a breakthrough infection, your risk of dying from Covid is now close to zero,” Jha told reporters at the White House.

More than 300 people are still dying every day from Covid on average, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jha told reporters last week that 70% of the people dying from the virus are 75 and older and don’t have the latest shots or aren’t getting treated as needed. He said this level of death is unacceptable given all the tools the U.S. now has at its disposal to manage the virus.

Jha encouraged people who have Covid symptoms to get tested so they can get diagnosed and receive treatments such as the antiviral pill Paxlovid when needed.

“Treatments which we have available today for free keep people out of the hospital, keep people out of the ICU, prevent the worst outcome at all,” Jha said.

People older than 50 and those who are otherwise at elevated risk, such as people with weak immune systems or serious medical conditions, should be seriously considered for treatments, he said.

The U.S. rolled out new booster shots that target the dominant omicron BA.5 subvariant in September. Although there’s no real-world data on their effectiveness yet, Jha said they should provide a much higher degree of protection based on what scientists know about how the human immune system works.

Health officials are expecting Covid infections to increase in November through January as they have every fall and winter since the pandemic began, Jha said. But it’s difficult to predict whether the U.S. will face another major Covid surge because the virus continues to evolve, he added.

“We are not helpless against these challenges. What happens in the weeks and months ahead will have a large impact on how the winter goes and really what happens this winter is largely up to us as the American people,” Jha said on Tuesday.

He called on everyone ages 12 and older to get their new Covid booster shot by Halloween so they have protection in time for Thanksgiving when the holiday season gets into full swing. Everyone who is eligible should go out and get their annual flu shot as well because health officials are expecting a significant flu season for the first time since the pandemic began, he said.

One caveat is people who recently caught Covid can wait three months to get their booster because infection also boosts your immunity, Jha said.

“Don’t wait — get your new flu shot and your new Covid shot today,” Jha said. “If Americans did that we could save hundreds of lives each day this winter.”

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October 11, 2022
Large number of U.S. COVID deaths could be prevented if patients would take Pfizer’s Paxlovid, White House coordinator warns

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A large number of U.S. COVID deaths could be prevented if patients would take Paxlovid, the antiviral developed by Pfizer
PFE,
-1.79%
that helps reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, according to White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha.

Jha told the New York Times that the average daily death count could be reduced to about 50 a day from 400 currently, if every American aged 50 and above that tests positive for the virus took a course of either Paxlovid or used monoclonal antibodies.

“The public doesn’t seem to understand that the evidence around hospitalization and deaths is really powerful,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco told the paper.

The issue seems to be a combination of worry about certain issues that Paxlovid can cause, including a strange metallic taste and the potential for “rebound COVID,” where patients quickly become reinfected after the five-day course of pills has been completed. That happened to both President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden recently.

The second reason is that many Americans — and Republicans, in particular — have refused to take COVID seriously and are not willing to take steps to reduce its impact. Trials have found Paxlovid to be effective across all age groups, but mostly among older patients. But as the COVID death rate for people under 50 is already close to zero, reducing it in a statistically significant way is difficult.

See now: CDC scraps travel health notices as countries slow testing, and study confirms Republican-leaning counties suffered more COVID deaths than Democrat-leaning ones

“I think almost everybody benefits from Paxlovid,” Jha said. “For some people, the benefit is tiny. For others, the benefit is massive.”

Yet a smaller share of 80-year-olds with COVID in the U.S. is taking it than 45-year-olds, Jha said citing data he has seen.

From the CDC: Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines Including Boosters

The news comes as U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, with data generally not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 41,605 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 25% from two weeks ago. Cases are declining in northeastern states including New York and New Jersey, while cases are rising in the western states Montana, Washington and Oregon.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 11% at 27,021, while the daily average for deaths is down 8% to 391.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Molnupiravir, the COVID pill developed by Merck
MRK,
+0.18%
and privately held Ridgeback Therapeutics, produced mixed results in two recent studies, the companies said Thursday. Early data from a trial conducted in the U.K. by the University of Oxford found no evidence of a difference when molnupiravir was added to usual care in reducing hospitalizations and death. A second study conducted in Israel found a benefit in patients who were 65 and older, but no benefit for 40- to 60-year-olds.

• Homelessness is surging in the U.S. again as pandemic programs that halted evictions are being phased out, the Associated Press reported. The overall number of homeless people in a federal report to be released in the coming months is expected to be higher than the 580,000 unhoused before the coronavirus outbreak, the National Alliance to End Homelessness said. The AP tallied results from city-by-city surveys conducted earlier this year and found the number of people without homes is up overall compared with 2020 in areas reporting results so far.

• The idea was to have China in stable and tip-top shape when thousands of delegates gather in Beijing to usher in a historic third term in power for Xi Jinping, BBC News reported. However, the coronavirus is not playing nicely. In recent weeks, tens of millions of people have again been confined to their homes in lockdowns across 60 towns and cities, and this is bringing political pressure on the man who has become the most powerful Chinese figure since the first communist-era leader, Mao Zedong.

Covid-19 lockdowns, corruption crackdowns and more have put China’s economy on a potential crash course. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains how China’s economic downturn could harm the U.S. and the rest of the world. Illustration: David Fang

• A new COVID-19 wave appears to be brewing in Europe as cooler weather arrives, with public health experts warning that vaccine fatigue and confusion over types of available vaccines will likely limit booster uptake, Reuters reported. The omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 that dominated this summer are still behind the majority of infections, but newer omicron subvariants are gaining ground. Hundreds of new forms of omicron are being tracked by scientists, the World Health Organization said this week.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 620.5 million on Friday, while the death toll rose above 6.55 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.6 million cases and 1,062,130 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 225.8 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 110.5 million have had a booster, equal to 48.9% of the vaccinated population, and 24.8 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 37.9% of those who received a first booster.

Some 11.5 million people have had a shot of the new bivalent booster that targets the new omicron subvariants.

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October 7, 2022
U.S. will screen people arriving from Uganda for Ebola as East African nation battles outbreak

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The U.S. will rout and screen passengers for Ebola at five designated airports if they have traveled in Uganda within three weeks prior to their arrival, federal officials said on Thursday.

Uganda, a nation in East Africa, is battling a deadly outbreak of Ebola with 63 confirmed and probable cases and 29 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. No cases of Ebola have been reported in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC is working closely with Uganda’s health ministry and the WHO to respond to the outbreak.

The U.S. Embassy in Uganda, in a health alert Thursday, said passengers who have been in the East African nation within 21 days of their arrival in the U.S. will be routed to one of five airports: New York JFK, Newark, Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare or Washington Dulles.

Passengers arriving from Uganda at those airports will undergo temperature checks and verification of their contact data, a federal health official said. Airlines will send passenger information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so the agency can conduct health follow ups, the official said. Contact information will also be sent to state health departments so they can conduct follow ups locally.

Uganda is battling an outbreak caused by a strain of Ebola called Sudan ebolavirus. The virus spreads through direct contact with body fluids of a person who has fallen ill with the virus or died from it, as well as infected animals and contaminated objects, according to CDC. Ebola does not spread through airborne transmission, the health agency said.

People infected with ebolavirus are not contagious until symptoms appear, which can take anywhere from two to 21 days after contact with the virus, according to CDC. On average, it takes about 8 to 10 days for symptoms to appear.

Symptoms include unexplained hemorrhaging, bleeding or bruising; fever; severe headache and muscle and joint pain; stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting. Other symptoms include red eyes, skin rash and hiccups.

There is no vaccine licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to protect against the Sudan ebolavirus strain. The FDA approved a vaccine to combat Zaire ebolavirus based on animal studies, but it’s not expected to protect against the Sudan strain, according to CDC. There is also no FDA approved treatment for Sudan ebolavirus.

The CDC, in a health alert Thursday, said health-care providers should be on the alert for any patients suspected of having Ebola. Physicians and other clinicians should obtain a detailed travel history for any patients suspected of having the disease, particularly for people who have been to the regions in Uganda where there is an outbreak.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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October 6, 2022
U.S. risks prolonging pandemic if it doesn’t back WTO push to get vaccines and treatments to lower-income countries, lawmakers warn

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The U.S. is at risk of prolonging the COVID pandemic if it fails to back an initiative that aims to get vaccines, diagnostics and treatments to lower-income countries, a congressional group has told President Joe Biden.

In a letter to Biden from the group led by Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, the group urged him to back the World Trade Organization’s agreement in June to ease exports of lifesaving therapies.

“With more than 600 million shots in arms, 21,500 free testing sites, the ability to order at-home tests for free, and more treatments available now than at any point in the pandemic, the outlook in the United States is better than ever. Unfortunately, however, the prospect for many low-income countries is not so positive — putting the United States’ own success in jeopardy,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter was sent ahead of a meeting of the WTO council for trade-related aspects of IP rights that is due to kick off Thursday.

The group noted that lower-income countries are facing a higher risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death as only a small percentage of their populations are vaccinated. Just 19% of people in those countries are vaccinated, compared with about 75% in high-income countries, according to the Multilateral Leaders Taskforce on COVID-19, a joint initiative of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Health Organization and the WTO.

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 43,149 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 23% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in most northeastern states by 10% of more, while cases in the western states Montana, Washington and Oregon are rising.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 11% at 27,184, while the daily average for deaths is down 8% to 391.

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• China’s huge Xinjiang region has been hit with sweeping COVID travel restrictions ahead of a key Communist Party congress later this month, the Associated Press reported. Trains and buses in and out of the region of 22 million people have been suspended, and passenger numbers on flights have been reduced to 75% of capacity in recent days, according to Chinese media reports. The region is home to minorities who have been forced into prison-like re-education centers to force them to renounce their religion, typically Islam, and allegedly subjected to human-rights abuses.

• Five current or former Internal Revenue Service workers have been charged with fraud for illegally getting money from federal COVID-19 relief programs and using a total of $1 million for luxury items and personal trips, prosecutors said, the AP reported. The U.S. attorney’s office in Memphis said Tuesday that the five have been charged with wire fraud after they filed fake applications for the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, which were part of a federal stimulus package tied to the pandemic response in 2020.

• Peloton Interactive Inc.
PTON,
+3.84%
said it plans to cut about 500 jobs, roughly 12% of its remaining workforce, in the company’s fourth round of layoffs this year as the connected fitness-equipment maker tries to reverse mounting losses, the Wall Street Journal reported. After enjoying a strong run early on in the pandemic, Peloton has struggled since the start of the U.S. recovery, and CEO Barry McCarthy, who took over in February, said he is giving the unprofitable company another six months or so to significantly turn itself around and, if it fails, Peloton likely isn’t viable as a stand-alone company.

Don’t miss: Peloton CEO says ‘naysayers’ are looking at the company’s $1.2 billion quarterly loss all wrong.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 619.9 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose above 6.55 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.6 million cases and 1,061,490 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 225.3 million people living in the U.S., equal to 67.9% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 109.9 million have had a booster, equal to 48.8% of the vaccinated population, and 23.9 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 36.6% of those who received a first booster.

Some 7.6 million people have had a shot of one of the new bivalent boosters that target the new omicron subvariants that have become dominant around the world.

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October 6, 2022
A strong fall COVID booster campaign could save 90,000 U.S. lives and avoid more than 936,000 hospitalizations, study finds

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A strong fall COVID booster campaign could save about 90,000 people living in the U.S. from dying of the virus and avoid more than 936,000 hospitalizations, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund.

As immunity wanes and new variants that can evade protection from early vaccines emerge, surges in hospitalizations and deaths are increasingly likely this fall and winter, the authors wrote. That makes it important that people get the bivalent boosters recently authorized by the Food and Drug Administration and help stop transmission, they wrote.

Researchers analyzed three scenarios to evaluate the impact of vaccination on reducing fatalities, hospitalizations and medical costs to both the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The first measured the outcome if daily vaccination rates remain unchanged from current levels; they have gradually declined since the first wave of the omicron variant. Federal financial support has also not been replenished, amid a perception among many Americans that the pandemic is over and as congressional Republicans oppose legislative efforts to continue the pandemic fight.

As of Oct. 3, some 68% of the U.S. population has had primary shots, but fewer than half of those have received a booster dose, and only 36% of those aged 50 and older have had a second booster.

The second and third Commonwealth Fund scenarios looked at outcomes if rates increased by the end of 2022.

In one scenario, researchers imagined booster uptake would track flu-shot coverage in 2020 to 2021. The other scenario assumed 80% of eligible individuals 5 and older get a booster by the end of 2022.

Source: Commonwealth Fund

The data found that more than 75,000 deaths could be prevented along with more than 745,000 hospitalizations if coverage reaches similar levels to 2021 to 2022 flu vaccination. The best scenario would save $56 billion in direct medical costs over the course of the next six months.

“Stratifying by insurance type, we found direct medical costs would be reduced by $11 billion for Medicare alone under scenario 1 and $13 billion under scenario 2,” the authors wrote. “An additional $3.5 to $4.5 billion in savings would accrue to Medicaid. Even if the federal government paid all vaccination costs, accelerated campaigns would generate more than $10 billion in net savings from federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”

The study comes as U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, with data not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 44,484 on Tuesday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 22% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in most northeastern states by 10% of more, while cases in the are rising in the western states Montana, Washington and Oregon.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 12% at 27,334, while the daily average for deaths is down 8% to 393.

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Long COVID, a condition that can encompass symptoms such as respiratory distress, cough, “brain fog,” fatigue and malaise that last 12 weeks or longer after initial infection, is becoming a long-term challenge as both employers and workers navigate an ever-mutating virus, according to Liz Seegert, writing for NextAvenue.org. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in five COVID survivors younger than 65 experienced at least one incident that might be related to previous COVID-19 infection. Among those 65 and older, the rate was one in four. Their data also show that nearly three times as many people age 50 to 59 currently have long COVID than those 80 or older.

• A retired judge opened a public inquiry on Tuesday into how Britain handled the coronavirus pandemic, saying bereaved families and those who suffered would be at the heart of the proceedings, the Associated Press reported. Former Court of Appeal judge Heather Hallett said the inquiry would investigate the U.K.’s preparedness for a pandemic, how the government responded, and whether the “level of loss was inevitable or whether things could have been done better.”

With each mutation, the Covid-19 virus is becoming more transmissible. WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez breaks down the science of how Covid variants are getting better at infecting and spreading. Illustration: Rami Abukalam

• Health experts are keeping an eye on new versions of the BA.5 omicron subvariant amid concerns those virus versions can evade the drugs developed to fight COVID, Salon reported. Of particular concern are two named BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, along with BA.2.75.2, which is spreading in Singapore, India and parts of Europe. Then there’s XBB, which some research suggest is the most antibody-evasive strain tested so far. The World Health Organization said in its weekly update on the virus that BA.5 descendent lineages continued to be dominant in the latest week, accounting for 80.8% of sequences shared through a global database. It also noted “increased diversity” within omicron and its lineages.

• Eiger BioPharmaecuticals Inc.
EIGR,
-5.01%
said Wednesday it will not pursue emergency authorization of its experimental treatment for mild and moderate COVID-19 infections. It had asked the Food and Drug Administration to consider an EUA application based on data from the Together trial, a Phase 3 study that has assessed 11 possible treatments for COVID-19 that is being conducted in Brazil and Canada. Eiger said the FDA instead recommended the company consider running its own pivotal trial for peginterferon lambda that would support full approval of the drug.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 619.2 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose above 6.55 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.5 million cases and 1,060,446 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 225.3 million people living in the U.S., equal to 67.9% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 109.9 million have had a booster, equal to 48.8% of the vaccinated population, and 23.9 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 36.6% of those who received a first booster.

Some 7.6 million people have had a shot of the new bivalent booster that targets the new omicron subvariants that have become dominant around the world.

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October 5, 2022
CDC scraps travel health notices as countries slow testing, and study confirms Republican-leaning counties suffered more COVID deaths than Democrat-leaning ones

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dropped its country-by-country COVID-19 travel health notices that it began issuing early in the pandemic, the Associated Press reported.

The reason: Fewer countries are testing for the virus or reporting the number of COVID cases. That limits the CDC’s ability to calculate travelers’ risk, according to the agency.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency will only post a travel health notice for an individual country if a situation such as a troubling new variant of the virus changes CDC travel recommendations for that country.

The CDC still recommends that travelers remain up-to-date on vaccines and follow recommendations found on its international travel page.

From the CDC: Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines Including Boosters

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research has confirmed that political affiliations played a key role as a risk factor for dying of COVID, finding evidence that Republican-leaning counties suffered higher death rates than Democratic-leaning ones.

“We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered
Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states,” the authors, Jacob Wallace and Jason L. Schwartz of the Yale School of Public Health, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham of the Yale School of Management wrote.

“Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.”

The researchers used data from Ohio and Florida and matched 2017 voter registration data with mortality data from 2018 to 2021. They also found a link between political affiliation and views on vaccines, with Republican-leaning counties showing far lower vaccination rates.

Source: NBER paper

In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 45,495 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 24% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in 11 states plus Washington, D.C. They are up by double-digit percentages in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 11% at 27,854, while the daily average for deaths is down 12% to 386.

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd.
NCLH,
+16.84%
is removing all COVID testing, vaccination and masking requirements from its health and safety protocols. The company said the new protocols, which follows “significant, positive progress” in the public health environment, will be effective Oct. 4. “Health and safety are always our first priority; in fact, we were the health and safety leaders from the very start of the pandemic,” said Chief Executive Harry Sommer. “Many travelers have been patiently waiting to take their long-awaited vacation at sea and we cannot wait to celebrate their return.”

See also: Would you take a cruise without such COVID-19 testing, vaccination and masks? MarketWatch asked health experts to weigh in.

• Ringo Starr has test positive for COVID, forcing the former Beatle to cancel scheduled concerts in Canada with his All Starr Band, the AP reported. Five concert dates from Tuesday to Sunday — in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Lethbridge, Alberta; and the British Columbia cities of Abbotsford and Penticton — will be rescheduled. “Ringo hopes to resume as soon as possible and is recovering at home. As always, he and the All Starrs send peace and love to their fans and hope to see them back out on the road soon,” said a statement from the band.

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

• A federal appeals court in New Orleans on Monday became the latest to hear arguments on whether President Joe Biden overstepped his authority with an order that federal contractors require that their employees be vaccinated against COVID, the AP reported separately. The contractor mandate has a complicated legal history. It is being challenged in more than a dozen federal court districts, and the mandate has been blocked or partially blocked in 25 states.

• The Chinese resort city of Sanya has ordered all tourists to take PCR tests, and those who fail to do so by noon on Tuesday will be slapped with a yellow code restricting their mobility, according to local officials, the South China Morning Post reported. The city in the southern province of Hainan logged two asymptomatic Covid-19 cases on Monday. It carried out a round of mass testing and locked down several areas in Haitang district, including a scenic island that received around 2,000 tourists on Monday.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 618.7 million on Tuesday, while the death toll rose above 6.54 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.4 million cases and 1,059,888 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 225.3 million people living in the U.S., equal to 67.9% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 109.9 million have had a booster, equal to 48.8% of the vaccinated population, and 23.9 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 36.6% of those who received a first booster.

Some 7.6 million people have had a shot of the new bivalent booster that targets the new omicron subvariants that have become dominant around the world.

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October 4, 2022
Monkeypox eradication unlikely in the U.S. as virus could spread indefinitely, CDC says

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The monkeypox virus is unlikely to be eliminated from the U.S. in the near future, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week.

The CDC, in a technical brief, said the outbreak is slowing as the availability of vaccines has increased, people have become more aware of how to avoid infection, and immunity has likely increased among gay and bisexual men, the group most impacted by the virus.

But low-level transmission of the virus could continue indefinitely among men who have sex with other men, according to the report. The CDC said it does not have a projection of how many total people might get infected by the virus.

The Biden administration declared a public health emergency in August in an effort to ramp up vaccines, testing, treatment and community outreach in an effort to eradicate the virus from the U.S.

The U.S. is trying to contain the largest monkeypox outbreak in the world, with nearly 26,000 cases reported across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico, according to CDC data. At least two people have died from the disease in the U.S., according to the data.

The global monkeypox outbreak, the largest in history, is highly unusual because the virus is circulating widely in countries where it is not normally found. Historically, monkeypox has circulated in remote parts of West and Central Africa. In that context, people normally caught the virus from animals. There was little spread between people.

Monkeypox is now spreading widely between people, mostly through close contact during sex among gay and bisexual men. The disease is rarely fatal, but patients develop lesions resembling blisters in sensitive areas that are extremely painful. In some cases, the pain is so great people require hospitalization and in rare instances people with weak immune systems have died.

The CDC, in its report, said the virus is still spreading primarily among men who have sex with men. But anyone can catch the virus through close contact with someone who is infected or with contaminated materials. Health authorities have confirmed 29 cases of children catching the virus to date, and 78 total pediatric cases are under investigation as of late September.

Though 96% of patients are men, 408 women have caught the virus to date in the U.S. Four pregnant women and one who was breastfeeding have caught monkeypox.

The CDC said the percentage of patients who identify as gay or bisexual men has declined over time, with 75% of people who provided recent sexual history reporting male-to-male contact.

But a large number of cases are missing data on sexual history and more than 90% of infections are among males, according to CDC. The decline in the percentage of cases reporting male-to-male sexual contact is likely due to missing data rather than a change in how the virus is spreading, according to the public health agency.

The CDC said the outbreak will likely remain concentrated among men who have sex with men over the long term, with infections continuing to decline over the coming weeks and dropping significantly over the next several months.

More than 684,000 people have received the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine so far. Earlier this week, the CDC reported preliminary data indicating that the vaccine is providing at least some protection against infection. The vaccination campaign is primarily focused on gay and bisexual men.

The outbreak could start accelerating again if the virus starts spreading widely among the U.S. population through heterosexual networks or contact that doesn’t involve sex, according to CDC. But there is no country in the current global outbreak that has found clear evidence of sustained spread of the virus outside sexual networks of gay and bisexual men, according to the CDC.

The public health agency also warned that the virus could start spreading faster again among people if it becomes established in an animal population in the U.S. The CDC said it is unknown which animals in North America are most susceptible to infection.

In Africa, the virus mostly spread from animals to people. If monkeypox becomes established in animals in the U.S., it would be very difficult to eradicate.

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October 1, 2022