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Individual investors keep chasing a 2023 stock-market rally, but are showing signs of pivoting toward electric-vehicle makers and away from artificial-intelligence plays, a Wall Street research firm said Thursday.
Investors are not only snapping up individual names but playing equity exchange-traded funds, signaling that they remain bullish on the broad market as well as specific themes, wrote analysts at Vanda Research, in a weekly note.
“We…
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Micron Technology Inc. could be approaching a big new semiconductor cycle as it predicts a huge boost from artificial intelligence, but there could be a roadblock in the path.
Micron
MU,
reported a third-quarter loss and a 57% drop in revenue Wednesday, after the chip industry’s oversupply hit the memory-chip maker hard. On the bright side, Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra said he believed the memory industry “had passed its trough” and that the company’s margins should improve as the supply-demand balance is gradually restored.
Another big issue for the stock right now, though, is China’s decision to recommend that “operators of critical information infrastructure in China should stop purchasing Micron products.” Mehrotra told analysts on the company’s conference call that the decision will impact about 50% of its products sold in China.
“We currently estimate that approximately half of that China-headquartered customer revenue, which equates to a low double-digit percentage of Micron’s worldwide revenue, is at risk of being impacted,” Mehrotra said on the call. “This significant headwind is impacting our outlook and slowing our recovery.”
More from Therese: AI has given a big boost to stock of this lesser-known Silicon Valley computer maker
He said Micron will work with its long-term customers who are not impacted by China’s decision, and hopefully will increase its share with those customers.
On the plus side, Micron expects to see a substantial boost to its memory business as a result of companies gearing up to run generative AI on their own servers or clouds. “Generative AI [is] becoming a big opportunity and we look at it for 2024 as a big year for AI and for memory and storage, and Micron will be well-positioned,” in the data center with its products, Mehrotra said. He added that it is “very, very early innings for AI,” which is really pervasive. “It’s everywhere.”
Full earnings coverage: Micron CEO calls bottom in memory-chip market, but weak PC, smartphone forecasts cut into expected AI gains
He said it will be in both cloud and enterprise server applications, and due to confidentiality of data, enterprises will be building their own large language models, adding that the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) content required for AI in servers is driving higher demand for memory and storage in servers. In super cluster configurations, for example, the DRAM content can be as much as 100 times higher.
Investors appeared to maintain some caution about when the AI impact will kick in, even as some analysts have forecast that AI demand will lead to a general supercycle for many hardware companies. Micron’s shares see-sawed in after-hours trading Wednesday, ending the extended session up about 3%.
See also: Will generative AI complete the cloud transition? One prominent executive thinks so.
In a note ahead of the company’s earnings, Raymond James analyst Srini Pajjuri said that the impact from China “should be short-lived given the commodity nature of Micron’s products.”
Right now, it’s too early to say how long China may be a drag for Micron, but if Mehrotra is right, investors should take heart that the company is going to be another beneficiary of the coming AI boom.
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Shares of Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slumped in the extended session Tuesday following a report that the Biden administration is considering a new ban on sales of AI chips to China.
Nvidia shares
NVDA,
A fell 3% after hours, following a 3.1% gain to close at $418.76, while AMD shares
AMD,
also fell 3%, after a 2.7% gain in the regular session to close at $110.39.
Late Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the Commerce Department could further block sales of AI chips to China unless U.S. companies first obtain a special license.
The ban would follow upon similar actions last year that threatened $400 million in Nvidia sales, but the company found a workaround in supplying a version of products that avoided the ban.
Read: AMD launches new data-center AI chips, software to go up against Nvidia and Intel
Both Nvidia and AMD have launched new AI chips this year: Nvidia in March and AMD earlier in the month. Last year’s release of Open AI’s ChatGPT generative AI — with billions of dollars invested by Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
— resulted in an explosion of interest in artificial-intelligence technology, prompting luminaries to herald the technology as the biggest thing in tech since … you name it.
Read: Bill Gates says AI is only the second revolutionary tech advancement in his lifetime
News of the possible ban happened to follow a claim earlier in the day from Baidu Inc.
BIDU,
on the Chinese search company’s blog, which said its Ernie 3.5 version AI outperformed ChatGPT’s earlier version “in comprehensive ability scores,” and its latest iteration, GPT-4, which was released in mid-March, “in several Chinese-language capabilities.”
Baidu’s claim appeared to be based upon performance metrics published in China Science Daily. On Wall Street, ADRs of Baidu were down 0.7% after hours, following a 3.1% gain to close at $143.90.
As of Tuesday’s close, Nvidia shares were up 187% in 2023, and AMD shares were up 70% for the year.
Read: Snowflake adds partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft for AI double play
Shares of Super Micro Computer Inc.
SMCI,
which have benefited from AI, also declined 3% after hours, while shares of Intel Corp.
INTC,
which supplies chips to data centers, saw shares decline 1% after hours.
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The heads of prominent U.S. and Indian companies will meet at the White House on Friday with President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss investment in areas including artificial intelligence.
Those attending include Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as well as Apple
AAPL,
CEO Tim Cook and Google
GOOG,
GOOGL,
CEO Sundar Pichai. Indian company executives include Mukesh Ambani, chair of Reliance Industries, and Anand Mahindra, chair of Mahindra Group.
“The president and Prime Minister Modi of the Republic of India will meet with senior officials and CEOs of American and Indian companies gathered to discuss innovation, investment, and manufacturing in a variety of technology sectors, including AI, semiconductors, and space,” the White House said.
Friday’s meeting is part of Modi’s high-profile visit to Washington, which included a state dinner at the White House and the announcement of a number of business deals.
Now read: Jet engine, drone deals unveiled as Biden meets India’s Modi
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Adobe
Systems reports financial results after the close of trading on Thursday, but the stock is more likely to move on any tidbits the company shares about its push into artificial intelligence—and the status of its pending $20 billion acquisition of the collaborative design software company Figma.
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Artificial intelligence may destroy humanity, but not before creating enormous wealth. Such is the paradox that now confronts investors after
Nvidia
recent earnings report inadvertently created a large-scale ethics experiment on Wall Street.
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/amazon-misses-rally-8a6e2511
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Chip stocks experienced a significant surge Thursday in the wake of Nvidia Corp.’s upbeat commentary on AI-fueled demand — with one notable exception.
Shares of Intel Corp.
INTC,
were down more than 5% in afternoon trading Thursday, leading Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
laggards by a wide margin, on a day when Nvidia Corp.’s
NVDA,
stock was up 26% and the PHLX Semiconductor Index
SOX,
was ahead 6%.
Read: Chip index heads for highest close in 13 months as Nvidia momentum lifts semiconductor stocks
Nvidia delivered a stratospheric beat on its quarterly revenue outlook Wednesday afternoon, with executives discussing how spending on artificial intelligence is already starting to drive sizable financial benefits for the company. That discussion has Wall Street thinking that many other chip makers will also be able to capitalize on the same wave of interest in the hot technology — shares of Monolithic Power Systems Inc.
MPWR,
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
2330,
TSM,
all joined Nvidia in gaining by double-digit percentages in Thursday’s session.
Intel, though, was a key outlier. Nvidia’s commentary seemed to make investors more worried that Intel is behind the curve on what some see as a massive technological revolution.
Nvidia CFO on record-breaking forecast: ‘The inflection point of AI is here’
Intel’s revenue and profits from central processing units look “even more at risk” after Nvidia’s report, while Intel doesn’t have “any real” competitive position in graphics processing units or generative-AI compute, wrote Mizuho’s Jordan Klein, a desk-based analyst associated with the company’s sales team and not its research arm.
Nvidia’s earnings call “will reinforce the negative view that [Intel] and all their CPU share is a major loser and share donor to GPU, ASICs and lower power ARM design chips on the way,” Klein added.
While Nvidia GPUs typically would run alongside CPUs from either Intel or AMD, Nvidia has been making inroads in CPUs. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on Nvidia’s call that the company has seen “growing momentum for Grace with both CPU-only and CPU-GPU opportunities across AI and cloud and supercomputing applications.”
Read: ‘Ride the Nvidia wave.’ Wall Street says the ‘undeniably pricey’ stock can keep roaring.
Nvidia is perceived to be ahead of the pack in AI-related computing technology, but AMD is at least in a better position than Intel, with more of a one-stop shop across CPUs and GPUs. That’s likely why AMD’s stock is riding on Nvidia’s coattails Thursday, up more than 10% in afternoon action.
AMD is “the only other real GPU supplier,” Klein wrote, though the company “could lose CPU spend in process and [has] a far way to go to catch [Nvidia].”
In his view, it “will take some time for more advanced and higher performance GPU and software platform to ramp and really drive upside potential” at AMD. “But seeing how fast and much [Nvidia] benefited, few will want to wait and see how long that takes for AMD.”
A more clear beneficiary, he noted, is Taiwan Semiconductor, whose stock was up more than 12% Thursday. You “cannot get any of these GPUs, inference, etc. without their fabs,” according to Klein.
As for Intel, Klein likes that the company is approaching a second-quarter bottom and positioned to capitalize on a personal-computer refresh, but he said its stock “feels totally stuck at best and could get shorted.”
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Nvidia Corp. executives predicted record revenue well beyond anything the company has experienced Wednesday, pushing shares toward all-time highs, as margins improve with AI-driven data-center sales.
Nvidia
NVDA,
guided for second-quarter revenue of $11 billion, plus or minus 2%; the chip maker has never before reported quarterly revenue higher than $8.29 billion, which it hit in the fiscal first quarter a year ago. Analysts on average were expecting $7.17 billion, according to FactSet, a gain from the $6.7 billion in sales Nvidia put up in the fiscal second quarter last year.
On the conference call with analysts, Huang said the simple way to think about it is that the world has “a trillion dollars of data center installed and it used to be 100% CPU,” or central processing units, as opposed to Nvidia’s graphics processors that data centers and AI models have embraced in recent years. And while the world’s data-center budget is strapped, at the same time larger and larger AI models require more and more computing power, he said.
“The easiest way to think about that is over the next four or five, 10 years, most of that trillion dollars, and compensating adjusting for all the growth in data center still, it will be largely generative AI,” Huang said.
“What happened is, when generative AI came along, it triggered a killer app for this computing platform that’s been in preparation for some time,” he added.
The company forecast adjusted gross margins of 70% for the second quarter, after reporting 66.8% for the first quarter, not only as higher data-center margins counter the deficit in gaming, but as Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on the call: ” We believe the channel inventory correction is behind us.”
Shares soared more than 25% in after-hours trading, following a 0.5% decline in the regular session to $305.38. Nvidia’s record closing price is $333.76 and the all-time intraday high is $346.47, according to FactSet data. After-hours “prices” topped both of those marks, reaching more than 14% beyond all-time highs for the regular session, as shares registered as high as $395, according to FactSet. The last time Nvidia shares rallied as much in a single session was Nov. 11, 2016, when shares surged 29.8% after the company reported that profit more than doubled.
Meanwhile, shares of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
rallied 6% after hours.
Nvidia did not provide full-year guidance, but Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been effusive in his predictions that increased focus on AI from Big Tech partners such as Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
and Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
GOOG,
will lead to revenue gains in the near future. Speaking to the media at Nvidia’s developers conference in March, he said that generative AI has only accounted for a “tiny, tiny, tiny” single-digit percentage of revenue over the past 12 months, but predicted that in the next year, revenue from generative AI will grow to be “quite large — exactly how large, it’s hard to say.”
Nvidia reported fiscal first-quarter earnings of $2.04 billion, or 82 cents a share, on sales of $7.19 billion, a decline from $8.29 billion a year ago but well ahead of expectations. After adjusting for stock compensation and other effects, the chip maker reported earnings of $1.09 a share, a decline from $1.36 a share a year ago. Analysts on average were expecting adjusted earnings of 92 cents a share on sales of $6.53 billion, according to FactSet.
Gaming sales for the first quarter fell 38% to $2.24 billion, while data-center sales at Nvidia rose 14% to a record $4.28 billion, “led by growing demand for generative AI and large language models using GPUs based on our Nvidia Hopper and Ampere architectures.”
“The revenue growth reflects strong demand from large consumer internet companies and cloud service providers,” the company said in a statement. “Enterprise demand for GPU platforms was strong, although general purpose networking solutions declined both sequentially and from a year ago.”
Analysts had expected gaming sales of $1.97 billion — nearly half of last year’s $3.62 billion — and data-center sales of $3.9 billion, a 4% increase from a year ago. Auto chip sales soared 114% to $296 million from a year ago.
Nvidia’s profit and sales have declined in recent quarters as the company deals with oversupply in the market, a result of pandemic-era shortages flipping to a glut after demand for personal computers and gaming gear waned. Analysts expect that trend to end with this report, however, as demand for gear that can power artificial intelligence kicks into higher gear amid a bevy of promises from tech companies about the power of generative AI.
Nvidia’s stock has soared toward all-time highs amid the hype for generative AI, which was launched after the successful debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT service. Shares have more than doubled so far this year, growing 109% as the S&P 500 index
SPX,
has increased 8%.
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Things move quickly in the world of artificial intelligence. It is easy to sit back and complain about developments that could be disruptive, but sometimes investors are best served by putting emotions aside and observing new developments and how they affect markets. Could AI developments and related trends make you a lot of money?
Below is a new screen showing a group of AI-oriented companies expected to increase their sales most rapidly through 2025, based on consensus estimates among analysts polled by FactSet. Then we show expected revenue growth rates for the largest AI-oriented companies in the screen.
Over the long haul, many businesses might perform more efficiently by employing AI. Maybe this technology can create an economic revolution similar to the one that moved the majority of the working population away from agricultural labor during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Back in February, we screened 96 stocks held by five exchange-traded funds focused on AI and related industries and listed the 20 that analysts thought would rise the most over the following 12 months.
Three months is a long time for AI, and the shakeout hasn’t even started.
Read: Congress and tech seem open to regulating AI efforts, but that doesn’t mean it will happen
There is no way to predict how politicians will react to perceived or real threats of AI and machine learning. And the largest U.S. tech players are doing everything they can to employ the new technology and remain dominant. But that doesn’t mean they will grow more quickly than smaller AI-focused players.
Once again we will begin a screen with these five ETFs:
Altogether and removing duplicates, the five ETFs hold 270 stocks of companies in 23 countries. We first narrowed the list to 197 covered by at least nine analysts and for which consensus sales estimates are available through calendar 2025. We used calendar-year estimates because some companies have fiscal years that don’t match the calendar.
Here are the 20 screened AI-related companies expected by analysts to have the highest compound annual growth rates (CAGR) for sales from 2023 through 2025. Sales estimates are in millions of U.S. dollars. The list also shows which of the above five ETFs holds each stocks.
| Company | Ticker | Estimated sales – 2023 ($mil) | Estimated sales – 2024 ($mil) | Estimated sales – 2025 ($mil) | Two-year estimated sales CAGR through 2025 | Held by |
| BioXcel Therapeutics Inc. |
BTAI, |
$5 | $39 | $121 | 411.5% | WTAI |
| Luminar Technologies Inc. Class A |
LAZR, |
$86 | $266 | $588 | 161.0% | ROBT, WTAI |
| BlackBerry Ltd. |
BB, |
$685 | $769 | $1,925 | 67.6% | ROBT |
| Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. |
CRDO, |
$183 | $259 | $363 | 40.9% | IRBO |
| SentinelOne Inc. Class A |
S, |
$619 | $881 | $1,176 | 37.9% | WTAI |
| Wolfspeed Inc. |
WOLF, |
$982 | $1,323 | $1,860 | 37.6% | WTAI |
| SK hynix Inc. |
000660, |
$18,319 | $27,899 | $34,542 | 37.3% | WTAI |
| Mobileye Global Inc. Class A |
MBLY, |
$2,109 | $2,782 | $3,920 | 36.3% | ROBT, WTAI |
| Snowflake Inc. Class A |
SNOW, |
$2,811 | $3,863 | $5,139 | 35.2% | IRBO, THNQ, WTAI |
| Lemonade Inc. |
LMND, |
$395 | $471 | $712 | 34.2% | THNQ, WTAI |
| Nio Inc. ADR Class A |
NIO, |
$11,874 | $16,733 | $21,304 | 33.9% | ROBT |
| Stem Inc. |
STEM, |
$607 | $833 | $1,055 | 31.8% | WTAI |
| Upstart Holdings Inc. |
UPST, |
$547 | $768 | $938 | 31.0% | BOTZ, WTAI |
| Cloudflare Inc. Class A |
NET, |
$1,284 | $1,669 | $2,194 | 30.7% | THNQ |
| Samsara Inc. Class A |
IOT, |
$830 | $1,062 | $1,364 | 28.2% | THNQ |
| Ambarella Inc. |
AMBA, |
$287 | $355 | $472 | 28.2% | IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| iflytek Co. Ltd. Class A |
002230, |
$3,561 | $4,582 | $5,851 | 28.2% | THNQ |
| Tesla Inc. |
TSLA, |
$99,558 | $128,412 | $161,061 | 27.2% | ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Class A |
CRWD, |
$2,935 | $3,793 | $4,739 | 27.1% | THNQ, WTAI |
| PB Fintech Ltd. |
543390, |
$358 | $462 | $573 | 26.5% | IRBO |
| Source: FactSet | ||||||
Click the tickers for more about each company or ETF.
Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information for free on the MarketWatch quote pages.
We have screened for expected revenue growth, rather than for earnings or cash flow, because in a newer tech-oriented business area, investors are most likely to consider the top line as companies sacrifice profits to build market share.
It is important to do your own research if you consider purchasing any individual stock, to form your own opinion about a company’s ability to remain competitive over the long term. Starting from the top of the list, BioXcel Therapeutics Inc.
BTAI,
is expected to show exponential sales growth, but that is from a low expected baseline this year.
What about the largest AI-related companies held by these ETFs?
Here are the largest 20 companies in the screen by market capitalization, ranked by expected sales CAGR from 2022 through 2025. Once again the sales estimates are in millions of U.S. dollars, but the market caps are in billions.
| Company | Ticker | Estimated sales – 2023 ($mil) | Estimated sales – 2024 ($mil) | Estimated sales – 2025 $mil) | Two-year estimated sales CAGR through 2025 | Market Cap ($bil) | Held by |
| Tesla Inc. |
TSLA, |
$99,558 | $128,412 | $161,061 | 27.2% | $528 | ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| Nvidia Corp. |
NVDA, |
$29,839 | $36,877 | $46,154 | 24.4% | $722 | BOTZ, IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. ADR |
TSM, |
$71,434 | $86,284 | $101,112 | 19.0% | $445 | ROBT, WTAI |
| Advanced Micro Devices Inc. |
AMD, |
$22,976 | $26,823 | $30,359 | 15.0% | $163 | IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| ASML Holding NV ADR |
ASML, |
$28,974 | $32,374 | $37,796 | 14.2% | $263 | THNQ, WTAI |
| Microsoft Corp. |
MSFT, |
$223,438 | $251,028 | $282,397 | 12.4% | $2,318 | IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. |
005930, |
$200,595 | $227,286 | $252,129 | 12.1% | $292 | IRBO, WTAI |
| Amazon.com Inc. |
AMZN, |
$559,438 | $626,549 | $702,395 | 12.1% | $1,164 | IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| Adobe Inc. |
ADBE, |
$19,470 | $21,784 | $24,276 | 11.7% | $158 | IRBO, THNQ |
| Netflix Inc. |
NFLX, |
$33,915 | $38,067 | $42,275 | 11.6% | $148 | IRBO, THNQ |
| Tencent Holdings Ltd. |
700, |
$88,727 | $99,212 | $110,556 | 11.6% | $422 | IRBO, ROBT |
| Salesforce Inc. |
CRM, |
$34,392 | $38,273 | $42,786 | 11.5% | $205 | IRBO, THNQ |
| Alphabet Inc. Class A |
GOOGL, |
$299,810 | $333,077 | $369,195 | 11.0% | $710 | IRBO, ROBT, THNQ, WTAI |
| Intel Corp. |
INTC, |
$51,060 | $57,799 | $62,675 | 10.8% | $122 | IRBO, ROBT |
| Meta Platforms Inc. Class A |
META, |
$125,901 | $139,545 | $154,259 | 10.7% | $528 | IRBO, WTAI |
| Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. ADR |
BABA, |
$134,140 | $148,206 | $162,199 | 10.0% | $235 | ROBT, THNQ |
| Texas Instruments Inc. |
TXN, |
$17,941 | $19,433 | $20,799 | 7.7% | $148 | IRBO |
| Apple Inc. |
AAPL, |
$390,845 | $416,761 | $445,956 | 6.8% | $2,706 | IRBO, WTAI |
| Siemens Aktiengesellschaft |
SIE, |
$84,681 | $89,145 | $93,925 | 5.3% | $130 | ROBT |
| Johnson & Johnson |
JNJ, |
$98,761 | $100,990 | $103,870 | 2.6% | $414 | ROBT |
| Source: FactSet | |||||||
Tech-stock picks that are small and focused: This fund invests in unsung innovators. Here are 2 top choices.
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Vice President Kamala Harris will host the chief executives of Alphabet GOOG GOOGL, Microsoft MSFT, OpenAI and Anthropic at the White House on Thursday to discuss artificial-intelligence issues.
Harris and senior administration officials aim to have a “frank discussion” of the risks in AI development and of “ways we can work together to ensure the American people benefit from advances in AI while being protected from its harms,” according to an invitation for the meeting obtained by MarketWatch.
The…
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Chegg Inc. shares plunged more than 30% Monday afternoon and were headed toward their lowest price since 2017, after the online-education company’s forecast called for an unexpected revenue decline as students begin to use ChatGPT.
Chegg CHGG reported first-quarter earnings of $2.2 million, or 2 cents a share, on net revenue of $187.6 million, down from $202.2 million a year ago. After adjusting for stock compensation and other effects, the company reported earnings of 27 cents a share, down from 32 cents a share in the same…
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Alphabet Inc.’s stock rose 1.4% in extended trading Tuesday after Google’s parent company reported quarterly results that slightly topped analysts’ revenue and earnings estimates.
Alphabet also said its board of directors authorized $70 billion in share repurchases.
“Resilience in Search and momentum in Cloud resulted in Q1 consolidated revenues…
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Nvidia
should be insulated from any slowdown in the broader economy by increased spending on artificial intelligence, say analysts at Oppenheimer, who lifted their price target for the semiconductor company.
The heightened interest around artificial-intelligence should set investors’ minds at ease ahead of
Nvidia
‘s earnings next week, say the analysts, with the semiconductor maker’s commentary on data-center spending in focus.
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Investors are in a feeding frenzy over artificial-intelligence software plays, and you have to think this isn’t going to end well.
You can date the start of the AI stock craze to the Nov. 30 launch of ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot created by the start up OpenAI. Recent data show that ChatGPT reached more than 100 million users in January, reaching that market faster than other buzzy apps like TikTok.
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Nearly two years after biotechnology stocks began to tumble, executives at small and midsize companies in the space are finally accepting that share prices aren’t bouncing back anytime soon.
With reality setting in, it’s a buyer’s market for companies looking for acquisitions and partnerships, according to many of the pharmaceutical and medical technology executives who gathered at this year’s
J.P. Morgan
healthcare investor conference, which wrapped up in San Francisco on Thursday.
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Want to know why you lost your sense of smell after a COVID-19 infection? A small new study may have the answer.
The research, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, found it has to do with inflammation in the olfactory system, which includes the nose and the nasal cavities. That’s where our ability to smell is located.
It has long been a mystery why some people who get COVID lose their sense of taste or smell. In some cases, people have lost their sense of smell for years after recovering from COVID. Physicians refer to this as “olfactory dysfunction.”
Patients who reported the loss of smell have fewer olfactory sensory neurons than those who could smell normally, based on an analysis of 24 biopsies of nasal tissue in people who recovered from COVID. Nine of those samples came from patients with long-term loss of smell.
“We think the reduction of sensory neurons is almost definitely related to the inflammation,” Dr. Brad Goldstein, one of the study’s co-authors and a sinus surgeon at Duke University in Durham, N.C., told The Wall Street Journal.
T cell–mediated inflammation can persist in the olfactory system long after infection, the study found. T-cells, like antibodies, are part of the body’s immune response to a COVID infection.
Another study, published earlier this month in PLOS One and conducted by researchers at Columbia University, had a similar finding, citing antibodies as the reason for the loss of smell. “Our results suggest the presence of a robust anti-Spike IgG response in individuals experiencing smell and taste loss during COVID-19 infection,” those researchers concluded.
COVID news to know:
• Stop testing patients for COVID before surgery. That’s the new recommendation from the Healthcare Epidemiology of America, which says that universal screening of asymptomatic patients before a hospital visit has an “unclear benefit.”
• Hospital in China expects millions of new COVID cases. A hospital in Shanghai reportedly told its workers to prepare for half of the city’s 25 million residents to get sick by the end of next week, calling it a “tragic battle” with COVID, according to Reuters.
• India is preparing for a COVID surge. The country’s health minister told people to start wearing masks again and get their boosters, according to the BBC. Cases in India remain low; however, the country is paying close attention to the surge in infections in China.
• A monoclonal antibody gets full FDA approval. The Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to Roche Holding’s
ROG,
Actemra, its rheumatoid arthritis treatment, for adults who have been hospitalized with severe COVID. The monoclonal antibody, which has treated more than 1 million people, first received emergency authorization in mid-2021.
• COVID infections in the U.S. are still rising. The seven-day average of daily new COVID cases surged to a 15-week high of 67,491 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, the most since Sept. 8. Three states have seen cases more than double in the past two weeks, with Michigan jumping 378%, Georgia growing 127%, and Rhode Island rising 105%. The number of COVID-related hospitalizations has increased 8% in two weeks to 40,129, and the daily average for deaths was 413, up 21% in two weeks.
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Outgoing Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is considering a presidential run, took a shot at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s call to investigate the COVID-19 vaccines, arguing that “we shouldn’t undermine the science.”
Hutchinson, a Republican, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Arkansas didn’t have vaccine mandates, but that he and other medical experts had sought to educate state residents about why the shots are beneficial.
DeSantis, a Republican who is also mulling a presidential run, last week called for the Florida Supreme Court to have a grand jury investigate what information was disseminated about the vaccines, including by the drugmakers that developed them. DeSantis had previously encouraged people to get vaccinated but has recently changed his views.
“We do need to make sure we get the protection, whether it’s a flu shot or whether it’s a COVID vaccine,” Hutchinson said. “Everybody makes their decision, but I’m for the education and the science behind it.”
The comments came as the U.S. is facing an uptick in COVID cases with temperatures dropping and the holiday season well under way. About 65,000 people are testing positive every day, a daily average that’s 26% higher than it was two weeks ago, according to a New York Times tracker.
The number of people who are dying, hospitalized or being treated in intensive-care units is also increasing. About 400 deaths are being reported in the U.S. every day, a 63% increase over the past 14 days. The higher counts come about two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Other COVID news to know:
The bivalent boosters do a good job preventing severe disease. New research, published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the new shots are better at reducing the risk of hospitalization than the first round of shots. The bivalent shots, which are designed to equally protect against the original strain of the virus and the BA.4/BA.5 subvariants of omicron, “provide a modest degree of protection against symptomatic infection.” the study found.
Los Angeles is running out of hospital beds. There were only 242 available hospital beds in Los Angeles last week as a result of the recent increase in COVID, flu and RSV cases, along with patients receiving long-delayed elective care, the Los Angeles Times reports. It’s the fewest number of beds available in the county over the past four years.
China adds two to its COVID death count. Chinese health officials said Monday that two people have died in Beijing, the first COVID-related deaths to be reported since Dec. 4. The country recently began lifting its stringent zero-COVID restrictions amid a surge of cases and widespread protests, according to the Associated Press. China has said that about 5,200 people in the country have died from COVID since the pandemic began.
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