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Tag: Omicron Variant
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COVID hospitalizations steadily rising as U.S. enters Labor Day weekend
COVID hospitalizations steadily rising as U.S. enters Labor Day weekend – CBS News
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WHO places new COVID variant BA.2.86
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The World Health Organization announced Thursday it had stepped up its classification of a recently discovered COVID-19 strain, BA.2.86, citing its large number of mutations.
This strain’s rapid escalation to the WHO’s “variant under monitoring” category is uncommon. Just four cases have been spotted of the variant worldwide. Virus trackers officially designated the strain as BA.2.86 less than a day ago.
It is too early to say whether the variant will be more dangerous than the currently circulating strains of the virus. But the U.N. agency says more data is needed to understand the threat BA.2.86 might pose, given its large number of mutations.
The strain’s dozens of genetic changes — an evolutionary jump on par with the emergence of the original Omicron variant in 2021 — has raised eyebrows among virologists as cases have started to crop up around the world. Its mutations include some changes at key parts of the virus that could help it better dodge the body’s immunity from prior infections or vaccination.
“Deep mutational scanning indicates BA.2.86 variant will have equal or greater escape than XBB.1.5 from antibodies elicited by pre-Omicron and first-generation Omicron variants,” Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, said in a slide deck published Thursday.
XBB.1.5 is the variant from which many recent strains have descended, and Food and Drug Administration officials had previously picked out XBB.1.5 as the strain for vaccines to target in this fall’s booster shots.
BA.2.86 has 36 mutations relative to the XBB.1.5 variant, Bloom said.
Experts say reports of BA.2.86 being spotted in countries in three different continents — Denmark, Israel and U.S. — also suggest it is at least capable of transmitting widely and could have been spreading undetected for some time.
The first U.S. case of BA.2.86 was reported by a lab at the University of Michigan. According to records attached to the sequence uploaded to GISAID, a global virus database, the sample was sequenced by the university’s clinical microbiology lab during “baseline surveillance.”
It is unclear whether the samples were collected from a hospitalized patient in the health system run by the university or from another source.
A spokesperson for the University of Michigan Medical School declined to comment on the possible origin of the sequence, deferring to Michigan’s state health department. A spokesperson for Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services was not able to immediately answer a request for comment.
In Denmark, health authorities say they are currently working to culture the virus, a key step towards further assessing the threat posed by the highly-mutated strain. The two cases spotted there had “no epidemiological link” and were not immunocompromised.
Tracking the spread of COVID variants BA.2.86 and EG.5
For now, experts say BA.2.86 will still need to show it can outcompete other fast-spreading descendants of the XBB Omicron variant already on the rise around the world in order to be more than a “scientific curiosity.”
One XBB descendant, a variant called EG.5, had already climbed to nearly 1 in 5 cases nationwide as of CDC estimates published earlier this month. New projections are due to be published Friday.
The strain’s emergence comes as drugmakers have been preparing to roll out new COVID-19 vaccines next month aimed at the XBB strains of the virus, of which EG.5 is closely related. Moderna announced Thursday that its preliminary clinical trial data from the new shots confirmed “a significant boost in neutralizing antibodies” for EG.5.
Those could face a setback if BA.2.86 is able to spread more widely. Bloom said he thinks the strain’s changes are enough to risk making the XBB-targeted vaccines a “fairly poor match” to BA.2.86.
But he underscored that BA.2.86 remains rare for now, and other defenses mounted by the body may also still work to fend off the highly-mutated variant.
“[T]here are also broader mechanisms of immunity elicited by vaccination and infection that provide some protection against severe disease even for very heavily mutated variants,” he told CBS News in an email.
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New Covid Variant Just Dropped, Happy New Year Everyone
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Despite what you might have heard, Covid is very much alive and well. Now it has a new variant: Omicron sublineage XBB.1.5.
According to CNN, 41% of new Covid infections in the United States in December were caused by the new variant. Maria Van Kerkhove, the lead for the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 response, called XBB.1.5 “the most transmissible form of Omicron to date.”
XBB.1.5 was first discovered in the U.S., but it has since spread to 29 countries. However, Kerkhove stresses that the countermeasures already being taken against Covid—namely masks, vaccinations, rapid tests, and air filtration systems—should still be effective against the new variant. “We do expect further waves of infection around the world, but that doesn’t have to translate into further waves of death because our countermeasures continue to work,” Kerkhove said.
Researchers don’t yet know if XBB.1.5 causes more severe illness than other Covid variants.
In a Twitter thread, White House Covid-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha shared more details about the variant. One thing Jha stressed was that the best protection against XBB.1.5 is the bivalent booster that many received in September. If you didn’t get boosted, Jha warns, “you likely have very little protection against infection.”
Jha also outlines some basic safety measures you can take against Covid, including getting the booster, testing before you visit people, and wearing a high-quality mask indoors.
Now that we’re going into year 3 of the Covid era and many regions have dropped mask mandates and other precautions, it can be tempting to treat Covid like any other cold or flu. But with Covid, Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and the seasonal flu all going around at the same time, it’s still critical to practice basic safety precautions. Does wearing a mask and living in fear suck? Yes. It sucks hard, and we all hate it, and we all wish this whole thing was over. But it doesn’t suck as much as getting seriously ill, or dying, or infecting someone who’s immunocompromised and watching them get seriously ill and possibly die. There’s an order of suckage in these days of Covid, and we can do things that suck in order to prevent other things that are even worse.
Mask up, get boosted, and make sure you’ve got some tests on hand. Welcome to 2023.
(featured image: Polina Tankilevitch via Pexels.com)
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
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Julia Glassman
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Why Do Rapid Tests Feel So Useless Right Now?
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Max Hamilton found out that his roommate had been exposed to the coronavirus shortly after Thanksgiving. The dread set in, and then, so did her symptoms. Wanting to be cautious, she tested continuously, remaining masked in all common areas at home. But after three negative rapid tests in a row, she and Hamilton felt like the worst had passed. At the very least, they could chat safely across the kitchen table, right?
Wrong. More than a week later, another test finally sprouted a second line: bright, pink, positive. Five days after that, Hamilton was testing positive as well. This was his second bout of COVID since the start of the pandemic, and he wasn’t feeling so great. Congestion and fatigue aside, he was “just very frustrated,” he told me. He felt like they had done everything right. “If we have no idea if someone has COVID, how are we supposed to avoid it?” Now he has a different take on rapid tests: They aren’t guarantees. When he and his roommate return from their Christmas and New Year’s holidays, he said, they’ll steer clear of friends who show any symptoms whatsoever.
Hamilton and his roommate are just two of many who have been wronged by the rapid. Since the onset of Omicron, for one reason or another, false negatives seem to be popping up with greater frequency. That leaves people stuck trying to figure out when, and if, to bank on the simplest, easiest way to check one’s COVID status. At this point, even people who work in health care are throwing up their hands. Alex Meshkin, the CEO of the medical laboratory Flow Health, told me that he spent the first two years of the pandemic carefully masking in social situations and asking others to get tested before meeting with him. Then he came down with COVID shortly after visiting a friend who didn’t think that she was sick. Turns out, she’d only taken a rapid test. “That’s my wonderful personal experience,” Meshkin told me. His takeaway? “I don’t trust the antigen test at all.”
That might be a bit extreme. Rapid antigen tests still work, and we’ve known about the problem of delayed positivity for ages. In fact, the tests are about as good at picking up the SARS-CoV-2 virus now as they’ve ever been, Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told me. Their limit of detection––the lowest quantity of viral antigen that will register reliably as a positive result––didn’t really change as new variants emerged. At the same time, the Omicron variant and its offshoots seem to take longer, after the onset of infection, to accumulate that amount of virus in the nose, says Wilbur Lam, a professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at Emory University who is also one of the lead investigators assessing COVID diagnostic tests for the federal government. Lam told me that this delay, between getting sick and reaching the minimum detectable concentration of the viral antigen, could be contributing to the spate of false-negative results.
That problem isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon. The same basic technology behind COVID rapid tests, called “lateral flow,” has been around for years; it’s even used for standard pregnancy tests, Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago, told me. Oliver Keppler, a virology researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who was involved in a study comparing the performance of rapid tests between variants, says there isn’t really a way to tweak the tests so that they’ll be any more sensitive to newer variants. “Conceptually, there’s little we can do.” In the meantime, he told me, we have to accept that “in the first one or two days of infection with Omicron, on average, antigen tests are very poor.”
Of course, Hamilton (and his roommate) would point out that the tests can fail even several days after symptoms start. That’s why he and others are feeling hesitant to trust them again. “It’s not just about the utility or accuracy of the test. It’s also about the willingness to even do the test,” Ng Qin Xiang, a resident in preventative medicine at Singapore General Hospital who was involved in a study examining the performance of rapid antigen tests, told me. “Even within my circle of friends, a lot of people, when they have respiratory symptoms, just stay home and rest,” he said. They just don’t see the point of testing.
Landon recently got COVID for the first time since the start of the pandemic. When her son came home with the virus, she decided to perform her own experiment. She kept track of her rapids, testing every 12 hours and even taking pictures for proof. Her symptoms started on a Friday night and her initial test was negative. So was Saturday morning’s. By Saturday evening, though, a faint line had begun to emerge, and the next morning—36 hours after symptom onset—the second line was dark. Her advice for those who want the most accurate result and don’t have as many tests to spare is to wait until you’ve had symptoms for two days before testing. And if you’ve been exposed, have symptoms, and only have one test? “You don’t even need to bother. You probably have COVID.”
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Zoya Qureshi
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Examining the impact of the CDC’s new COVID travel policy from China
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Examining the impact of the CDC’s new COVID travel policy from China – CBS News
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XBB variant’s arrival won’t cause a new deadly COVID surge, officials hope
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed Friday it is now tracking a new COVID-19 variant of concern around the U.S. known as XBB, which has grown to make up an estimated 3.1% of new infections nationwide.
The strain’s prevalence has grown furthest so far in the Northeast, according to the agency’s weekly estimates. More than 5% of infections in the regions spanning New Jersey through Maine are linked to XBB, in this week’s “Nowcast” from the CDC.
XBB is behind a vast swath of infections across some South Asian countries and has made up an increasing share of reported virus sequences from around the world and in arriving international travelers.
Earlier this month, the CDC offered preliminary estimates suggesting XBB is potentially doubling in proportion about every 12 days. That could be faster than the current pace of the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants now dominant across the country.
However, , the Biden administration’s top COVID officials and experts say they do not think XBB will pose a new threat on the scale of when the Omicron variant first emerged a year ago.
“Where we’ve seen surges, they’ve seen mostly it be driven by seasonality, people coming inside, spending more time around one another, but not being specifically being driven by the emergence of a new variant,” the CDC’s Ian Williams told a meeting of the CDC’s emergency response and preparedness advisers earlier this month.
XBB is one of several new lineages that have displaced BA.4 and BA.5, the Omicron variant siblings that had driven a wave of cases over the summer. As of this week, the CDC says BA.5 has fallen to less than 1 in 5 new infections nationwide and BA.4 has now virtually disappeared.
The strain’s arrival also comes at a time when most regions, including the Northeast, are seeing relatively flat or slowing COVID-19 hospitalization rates.
Around 3 in 4 Americans currently live in counties deemed at “low” COVID-19 Community Levels, the lowest tier of precautions recommended by the agency, according to figures released Friday by the agency.
“However, there’s a lot of worry that a new variant could emerge and start us all over again. So there’s a lot of work focusing on making sure we’re prepared and thinking about that and watching if it emerges around the world, so we can become prepared,” Williams added.
A “recombinant” strain
First named by scientists back in September, XBB is believed to be a “recombinant” of two different Omicron subvariants – BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 – that emerged earlier this year. It is the latest in a now-dominant crowd of strains carrying mutations that could evade key COVID antibody drugs.
“There has been a rapid rise in XBB, but it doesn’t look like it’s particularly more severe than other variants,” Derek Smith, director of the Center for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge, told CBS News in an interview late last month.
Smith helps lead the National Institutes of Health’s effort to detect and analyze variants early as they emerge, as part of an “Avengers-Like” program that spans multiple American federal agencies and outside experts.
“XBB, it got our attention and then was prioritized, even though it was small numbers, because it had quite a number of substitutions different from the currently circulating viruses in the [receptor-binding domain], which meant that it might be an escape variant,” Smith said.
The NIH effort’s scientists early on began ordering supplies to manufacture mock-ups of XBB to test how it might escape immunity in the laboratory compared to other strains.
Data also now suggests the new COVID boosters will offer at least some improved protection against the strain.
A study released by Pfizer and BioNTech earlier this month, which was posted as a preprint and has yet to be peer reviewed, found their updated COVID booster looks to be effective at triggering better antibody responses against an XBB strain.
However, the company’s scientists also said it was among the variants that saw the worst neutralization from their shot.
“It doesn’t fall off the map, but it goes down. So, you could expect some protection, but not the optimal protection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said Wednesday at a White House briefing.
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CDC now tracking BN.1, the latest new COVID variant on the rise
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now tracking the rise of another COVID-19 variant known as BN.1, according to figures published by the agency this month, marking the latest new Omicron descendant now spreading around the country this fall.
Some 4.3% of new COVID-19 cases nationwide are now linked to the BN.1 variant, according to “Nowcast” estimates released on Friday by the CDC.
Prevalence of the new strain is largest in the West, in the region that spans Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada. 6.2% of new cases in that area, HHS Region 9, are from BN.1.
News of the new variant comes as the nationwide pace of new COVID-19 hospitalizations, which had been falling since September, has begun to inch up again over the past few weeks.
A CDC official said Saturday at a webinar hosted by the Infectious Disease Society of America that BN.1 is estimated to be doubling in proportion roughly every two weeks across the country, though they cautioned that early estimates remain muddy.
“The uncertainty in that doubling time is a little higher because the absolute number of sequences is low, because the proportions are low, so has much larger confidence intervals,” the CDC’s Natalie Thornburg said.
Scientists first designated the BN.1 strain back in September, from descendants spotted in Europe and Asia of the BA.2.75 variant.
Some BN.1 strains carry mutations that could result in “high immune escape,” according to predictions from a tool designed by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s Bloom Lab.
All BN.1 strains carry a change dubbed the R346T substitution, which Thornburg said “we see in a lot of the circulating viruses right now.” That mutation to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 could thwart a key medication used to protect people with weakened immune systems.
BQ.1, BQ.1.1, and XBB
BN.1 joins a crowded field of emerging Omicron variant descendants that have swelled in recent months, overtaking the BA.5 variant that had dominated cases over the summer.
The BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants remain the most prevalent of the recent new strains. Close to half of infections nationwide are from one of the two, in the CDC’s estimates.
“Our best estimate is that it’s doubling about every 10 days. So if you do the math, BQ.1.1 is likely to become dominant in the next months,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s top COVID-19 official, told CBS News last month in an interview.
Another variant that had been watched closely abroad – XBB – has yet to reach large enough levels in the U.S. to merit being listed as a standalone strain. Thornburg said Saturday that the CDC still estimated XBB at less than 1% nationwide.
However, the CDC’s variant surveillance in international airports has spotted growing numbers of XBB in arriving travelers so far: 13% of samples through late October were from XBB, 30.4% were from BQ.1 or BQ.1.1, and none were from BN.1.
Findings announced by Moderna on Monday from its updated COVID-19 booster shot suggests the new vaccines may still offer at least some protection against BQ.1.1.
At the Saturday webinar, Thornburg said the CDC is also working on releasing “very soon” new real-world data on the effectiveness of the bivalent shots against the current strains so far.
But the rise of the new strains threatens to bench other key tools used to treat and prevent COVID, especially for more vulnerable Americans.
The National Institutes of Health’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines panel warned last week that new variants could evade some COVID-19 treatments like Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody, bebtelovimab, urging clinicians to stop using the drug in regions where these strains were dominant.
That now includes the New York and New Jersey region, where the CDC estimates that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now make up a majority of infections.
The rise of these and other evasive Omicron variants also threatens the protection offered by AstraZeneca’s Evusheld, the panel warned, which had been a key tool to protecting immunocompromised Americans.
Jha said it could take up to six months for companies to develop new versions of their drugs to counter the latest variants. He blamed Congress for not passing funding which could have subsidized proactive development of new formulations.
“I can’t say I’ll pay for it through the U.S. government, because we don’t have the money and they know it,” said Jha.
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NIH probes whether Boston University COVID experiments should have triggered review
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The National Institutes of Health is now examining whether experiments performed at Boston University should have triggered a federal review, the agency says, after scientists at the school tested strains they created of the virus combining the ancestral and Omicron variants.
Federal health authorities say they are looking into whether the scientists should have sought their permission before undertaking research that could lead to a “gain of function” in the virus gaining new or enhanced abilities, which can be “inherently risky.”
However, Boston University says its research followed “all required regulatory obligations and protocols” to safely experiment with the viruses.
“Before anything is done in the [National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories], it goes through multiple layers of careful safety review and this is done through committees that are part of Boston University and also committees that are outside of, independent of, BU,” Robert Davey, a professor at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, said in a statement.
The scientists were studying what role the Omicron variant’s highly-mutated spike protein might play in its generally milder severity compared to previous waves.
Mice were exposed to “chimeric recombinant” versions created by the scientists, which carried the Omicron variant’s spike protein combined with the “backbone” of the original strain. Similar kinds of recombinant variants have evolved in the wild.
Their findings were released Friday as a preprint that has yet to be peer-reviewed. The NIH’s scrutiny was first reported by Stat News.
Though NIH money was not directly sought for the experiments, the agency is probing whether it may have still been subject to their grants policy.
The experiments may have also required clearance first by the federal government’s rules governing experiments that could lead to a “gain of function” in the virus, the NIH said. This kind of research is supposed to be vetted by a group of experts convened by the federal government before it can be funded.
However, Boston University says it “did not have an obligation to disclose this research” to the NIH.
While funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was acknowledged by the scientists in their paper, Boston University said the grants were only for “tools and platforms” used by the scientists .
“NIAID funding was acknowledged because it was used to help develop the tools and platforms that were used in this research; they did not fund this research directly. NIH funding was also acknowledged for a shared instrumentation grant that helped support the pathology studies,” Rachel Lapal Cavallario, a spokesperson for the university, said in a statement.
News of the NIH’s probe follows coverage of the Boston University research first in the Daily Mail. The university had denounced the tabloid for sensationalizing their research, with “false and inaccurate” reporting that took their findings out of context.
For example, those early reports on the findings highlighted that 80% of infected mice died after scientists infected the animals with the recombinant strain, while none died after being exposed to the Omicron variant.
The university points out that the original variant led to 100% of the mice dying, meaning that their recombinant virus was made effectively “less dangerous.”
If there were any signs the viruses they created for their experiments were “gaining function,” the scientists would have “immediately” stopped and reported their research, Lapal Cavallario said.
The research was also conducted in the university’s “BSL-3” lab. That is the second-highest tier of precautions scientists can take when studying viruses, short of those taken for studying the most dangerous pathogens “for which no vaccine or therapy is available.”
“We take our safety and security of how we handle pathogens seriously, and the virus does not leave the laboratory in which it’s being studied,” Ronald Corley, director of Boston University’s NEIDL, said in a statement.
The study’s lead author, Mohsan Saeed, and other experts have cited other research that have performed similar kinds of experiments without controversy.
One study co-authored by Food and Drug Administration researchers over the summer also generated “chimeric viruses” with the Omicron and ancestral strains to test on mice.
That study’s authors and an FDA spokesperson did not return requests for comment.
The preprint comes amid scrutiny of the federal government’s policies governing research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (ePPP) research, which are in the midst of a review by an NIH working group.
“It is concerning that this research – like the research in Wuhan that may have caused the pandemic – was not identified by the funding agency as possible ePPP research,” Rutgers University Professor Richard Ebright wrote on Twitter.
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