Omicron variant does cause different symptoms from Delta, study finds Data from UK’s Zoe Covid study confirms reports Omicron patients recover more quickly and are less likely to lose sense of smell or taste Researchers reached their conclusions by matching people who had Covid when Delta was the most prevalent variant with individuals who were positive when Omicron dominated. Photograph: Justin Paget/Getty People who have the Omicron Covid variant tend to have symptoms for a shorter period, a lower risk of being admitted to hospital and a different set of symptoms from those who have Delta, research has suggested. As the highly transmissible Omicron variant shot to dominance towards the end of last year, it emerged that, while it is better at dodging the body’s immune responses than Delta, it also produces less severe disease. Now a large study has not only backed up the findings, but confirmed reports Omicron is linked to a shorter duration of illness and a different collection of symptoms. The study comes just days after the NHS added nine further symptoms for Covid to its existing list of fever, a new and persistent cough, and a loss or change in taste or smell. The researchers found people who had Covid when Omicron was prevalent were about half as likely to report having at least one of the latter three symptoms as those who had Covid when Delta was rife. “It is a lesson that we need to be far more flexible in thinking what the virus is and how it is going to present than we have been, certainly in the UK,” said Prof Tim Spector, co-author of the research from King’s College London, adding that the team showed data to the government around five months ago that showed a sore throat was replacing loss of smell as a symptom. The study, which is to be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases and has been published in the Lancet, is based on data from 63,002 participants of the Zoe Covid study. The researchers matched almost 4,990 participants who had a confirmed Covid infection between 1 June and 27 November 2021 – when Delta was the most prevalent variant – with 4,990 individuals who reported an infection between 20 December 2021 and 17 January 2022 when Omicron dominated, with the matching based on age, sex and whether they had received two or three vaccine doses. The experience of both groups were then compared. The team found participants’ symptoms lasted on average 6.9 days during the period when Omicron dominated, compared with 8.9 days when Delta dominated, with infections during the Omicron period linked to a 25% lower likelihood of admission to hospital. The results suggested only 17% of people who had Covid when Omicron dominated lost their sense of smell, compared with 53% when Delta dominated. However, a sore throat and going hoarse were both more common among the former. Spector said the symptom-logging approach used in the research was an invaluable tool. “[It] should alert us what to look out for when there will inevitably be the next variant,” he said, adding action needs to be quicker in the future. “We need to be much more reactive in public health messaging,” he said. Why has it taken so long to add more Covid symptoms to NHS list? Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, who was not involved in the study, said the findings chime with what hospitals experienced at the start of the year when the BA.1 Omicron variant dominated. But the Omicron variant BA.2 has since taken over – and, in his experience, the picture has changed again. “People in hospital are staying in hospital for longer and staff are testing positive for longer, so it is longer before they can return to work,” he said. The research came as the React-1 study revealed the average prevalence of Covid across England was at the highest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, the UK Health Security Agency reported on Thursday that 15.3% of people aged 75 and over have received their spring booster Covid jab so far. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...use-different-symptoms-from-delta-study-finds wrbtrader
Old people in China are still scared of the Covid Vaccine...they're now paying a heavy price that's also resulting in lockdowns. --------- ...Among the deaths, 96% occurred in people ages 60 and older, and of those 70% were unvaccinated. "The high overall mortality rate during the ongoing 2022 Hong Kong Omicron COVID-19 outbreak is being driven by deaths among unvaccinated persons aged ≥60 years," the team wrote. In weighing other factors, the team compared Hong Kong's surge with New Zealand, which has a lower population density but, like Hong Kong, was thought to largely have vaccine-induced immunity due to vaccination combined with low infection levels during earlier waves. The investigators found that, during the Omicron peak, New Zealand's mortality reached 2.1 per million population, compared with Hong Kong's nearly 38 deaths per million population, which they said underscores the vaccine's impact on preventing COVID-19 deaths. The reasons for Hong Kong's low vaccination rate in older groups aren't clear, but it might be due to vaccine hesitancy or complacency over the government's earlier success with its "zero COVID" policies, researchers noted... https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-per...ds-light-death-spike-hong-kong-covid-19-surge wrbtrader
The new Covid sub-variant is rapidly taking over the U.S. New Omicron Variant BA.2.12.1 Now Dominant In New York, Driving Infections; Strain Up 47% Nationwide In Past Week https://deadline.com/2022/04/new-omicron-variant-ba-12-1-dominant-new-york-1235010160/
Meet the latest variants... more infectious and immunity evasive than ever. Nope previously having Covid won't help you at all. Just like having Delta didn't protect you from Omicron whatsoever. Nightmare COVID Variants Are Cracking the Code to Our Immunity The speed of mutations has reached a new height, and the subvariants breaking out around the world now are the most transmissible yet. https://www.thedailybeast.com/night...are-cracking-the-code-to-our-immunity-systems You might not know it by looking around you at all those unmasked faces, but there’s still an awful lot of novel coronavirus out there. And the virus appears to be mutating faster than ever, producing steadily more contagious variants and subvariants. The evolutionary trend with SARS-CoV-2 might not mean there are definitely going to be big surges in infections, hospitalizations and deaths. At least not everywhere or for very long. But it underscores an uncomfortable truth: that despite the lifting of COVID restrictions in most countries that aren’t China, despite many people’s eagerness to move past the pain and uncertainty of the past two years, the pandemic isn’t over. The virus isn’t done mutating. The latest subvariants are the most transmissible yet. BA.4 and BA.5, both offspring of the Omicron variant, first appeared in South Africa last month. BA.2.12 and the closely related BA.2.12.1 first showed up in New York around the same time. BA.4 and BA.5 are 10 percent more contagious than their immediate predecessor, the BA.2 form of Omicron. BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 are 25 percent more contagious. Equally alarmingly, BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.12 and B.2.12.1 are quickly becoming dominant in their respective regions of origin just a couple months after BA.2 became dominant. BA.2 for its part out-competed and replaced its own parent, BA.1, just a few months after BA.1 became dominant. In other words, major new subvariants seem to be coming at us faster and faster. In that sense, the virus might seem like it’s winning a genetic game of chance. Confronted with a semi-permeable barrier of antibodies from vaccines and past infection, the pathogen is becoming more transmissible. Immune pressure “will increase the rate of selection of those more fit variants that are circulating already in the population,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast. “This will result in cascades of new variants appearing and spreading in the host population more frequently.” But this cascade of variants is one price we pay for our expanding, population-wide immunity. You can’t have the latter without getting some of the former. So while it might look like COVID is winning, in fact its genetic victories could be fleeting. Niema Moshiri, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, last year urged The Daily Beast to think of every COVID infection as a gambler playing a slot machine. Each individual infection tends to produce two mutations every two weeks, Moshiri explained. In other words, the virus gets two pulls of the lever twice a month, hoping to score a genetic jackpot that will give it some new advantage over other viruses–and some new way to infect its host. “What if we had 50 million people pull slot-machine levers simultaneously at the same time?” Moshiri asked. “We would expect at least one person would hit the jackpot pretty quickly. Now, replace the slot machine with ‘clinically meaningful SARS-CoV-2 mutation,’ and that’s the situation we’re in.” To complete the metaphor, add a mounting sense of urgency on the virus’s part as immunity looms higher all around it. Sensing threats all around it, the novel coronavirus is playing the slots with ever grimmer determination. Throughout the viral waves and crashes of the last 30 months, there have never been fewer than several million active COVID cases. During the worst surges in early 2021 and early 2022, there were tens of millions of simultaneous infections. Given the high rate at which the SARS-CoV-2 mutates, it’s no wonder that the virus has produced a steady line of significant new variants—“lineage” is the scientific term. There was Delta, the more virulent lineage that drove the worst waves of infections of 2021 while much of the world was just beginning to gain access to effective therapies and vaccines. In late 2021, scientists in Botswana and South Africa detected the first cases of a new lineage, Omicron. Mutations along the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells, make Omicron more contagious than Delta. On the worst day of the Omicron wave on Jan. 19, officials tallied no fewer than 4 million new infections in just 24 hours. That’s four times more cases than they counted on the worst days of the back-to-back Delta waves in January and April 2021. Strong global vaccine-uptake, plus lingering antibodies in tens of millions of people owing to past infection, blunted the worst outcomes from Omicron. When Omicron first showed up, around half the world’s nearly 8 billion people had gotten at least one dose of vaccine. Today more than two-thirds are at least partially jabbed. Add to that natural antibodies from hundreds of millions of past infections, and the human species’ wall of immunity looks pretty impressive. Breakthrough infections are common, but all those antibodies are really good at preventing the virus from causing serious illness that can end in death. So cases went way up as Omicron became dominant, but deaths didn’t. On the deadliest day of the Omicron surge on Feb. 9, 13,000 people died globally–5,000 fewer than died on the worst day of Delta on Jan. 20, 2021. More cases but fewer deaths, a phenomenon epidemiologists call “decoupling,” has come to define COVID’s evolution as we muddle through the third year of the pandemic. There are signs decoupling might actually get more extreme. After all, the immunity that leads to decoupling also spurs a virus to mutate more quickly into ever more transmissible lineages. Immunity encourages mutants, which can increase immunity by seeding antibodies from mild infection. It’s an accelerating positive feedback loop whose products are antibodies and viral lineages. A growing gap between infections and deaths might actually be the best-case scenario, absent the novel coronavirus miraculously “self-extincting” by running itself into a genetic corner. Many experts firmly believe an evolutionary dead end is wishful thinking when it comes to respiratory viruses. “I think self-extinction is vanishingly unlikely,” Jesse Bloom, an investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Washington State, told The Daily Beast. The bad news is, we probably need to learn to cope with ever more contagious SARS-CoV-2 variants and subvariants showing up faster and faster. The good news is that we know howto cope. BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 do have some ability to get around our vaccine-induced and natural antibodies–“immune escape,” experts call it. Some immune escape doesn’t mean total immune escape. Natural and vaccine antibodies still work. They’re the reason cases and deaths from the basic Omicron lineage decoupled. They’re the reason decoupling is likely with Omicron’s nasty little offspring, too. “The mutants do not seem to be as pathogenic as say, Delta,” Stephanie James, the head of a COVID testing lab at Regis University in Colorado, told The Daily Beast. All that is to say, expect to hear a lot about new lineages and sublineages in the coming months as they appear and become dominant at an accelerating rate. Don’t be surprised if you catch one of them, even if you’re vaccinated and boosted and maybe even have antibodies from past infection. But don’t panic. Keep up with your vaccinations and you’ll probably be OK. Unless, of course, SARS-CoV-2’s evolution takes a dangerous turn. Immune escape has been pretty minor with all the major lineages and sublineages we’ve seen these past two years. That doesn’t mean the virus can’t evolve to achieve significant immune escape. If mutations are like the pathogen playing slots and a jackpot is a new variant, then a variant that can punch through our antibodies is a mega-jackpot. If the virus ever wins that gamble, everything changes.
Sadly DeSantis is ignoring that Covid hospitalizations are rising in Florida with a new variant on the loose. Worries Over the Strain on Health Care Grow in U.S. as Hot Spots Spread https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/wo...grow-in-the-u-s-as-hot-spots-spread/20268454/ When the coronavirus was in retreat across the United States in late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new recommendations that veered away from depending on the number of new cases in a community to determine the need for pandemic safety measures. The focus shifted more toward the number of hospitalized people with the virus. Far more new cases than before would be required to push a community into the medium or high-risk categories. The change turned most of the U.S. map green at a stroke. Until then, 95% of U.S. counties were considered high-risk, but afterward, fewer than one-third of Americans were living in places in that category, the agency said. The new guidelines gave millions of people confidence to remove their face masks and recommended that as long as the pressure on hospitals remained manageable, the country could return to some version of normal life. That strategy will be put to the test in the next few weeks, because hospitalizations are rising again nationally. As of Thursday, an average of more than 18,000 people with the coronavirus are in U.S. hospitals, an increase of 20% from two weeks ago. The figure includes patients who are in the hospital because they are very ill with COVID-19, as well as those admitted for other reasons who test positive on arrival. More than half of American adults have at least one underlying chronic condition, and for many of them, the winter omicron wave was not as mild as it was for others. The recent influx has been even steeper in the largest high-risk area now on the national map, the hot spot that has spread across upstate New York and spilled into nearby states. According to New York state, there were 2,119 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID-19 on Tuesday, 47% more than the figure from two weeks before. The state's figure is still well below the winter omicron peak of January, when about 13,000 people were hospitalized statewide. But it has been increasing, propelled by rapidly spreading BA.2 subvariants, which were detected in Central New York and have become a growing share of new U.S. cases. In the University of Rochester Medical Center system, which includes six hospitals in the Finger Lakes region and in western New York, coronavirus hospitalizations have quadrupled in recent weeks, rising to about 200 patients from a low of about 50 in early April, according to Chip Partner, a spokesperson for the hospital system. Most of those patients were in the hospital for other reasons, like surgery, but tested positive when they were admitted, Partner said, adding that relatively few COVID-19 patients have needed intensive care recently. At the same time, staffing shortages at hospitals in the region have been compounded by a recent increase in infections among their staffs. At F.F. Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua, New York, 45 of the hospital’s 1,750 workers were out with the virus recently, and there are 252 unfilled job openings. “COVID is here, COVID is an issue, but the main challenge up here is the staffing,” said Michael Stapleton, the hospital’s CEO. Other hot spots are also putting pressure on health care systems. In Puerto Rico, 245 people on the island were in hospitals this week with the virus, more than five times the caseload from a month ago. Although hospitalizations generally lag behind the trends in new cases, they remain among the most reliable kinds of data about the pandemic, experts agree — much more so than official reports of positive test results, which experts say significantly understate the true number of infections, especially with the rise of at-home testing. As of Thursday, the average number of new confirmed U.S. cases was almost 68,000 a day, nearly a 60% increase over the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Hospitalizations are reported fairly rigorously. “For hospital data, even given that all the people were not admitted because of COVID, we can be sure that the numbers are pretty accurate,” said Dr. Eric S. Toner, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “So it’s the best data source we have now. The number of new COVID admissions is the number that I pay the most attention to.” About 11% of people hospitalized with coronavirus infections in the United States were in intensive care, as of Wednesday, according to federal data. The CDC is also keeping a close eye on the nature of hospitalizations. “We’re seeing less oxygen use, less ICU stays, and we haven’t fortunately seen any increase in death associated with them,” compared with earlier periods of the pandemic, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said last week. While the criteria for declaring a county to be at high, medium or low risk have changed, the threat that the virus and its new variants pose has not. Most experts say everyone should continue to be tested frequently if they are mixing in large groups, and that people who are vulnerable should consider continuing to wear masks in indoor public settings, even if they are not required. This week, the CDC restated its recommendation that travelers wear masks in airplanes and airports, and on trains and buses, even though a judge struck down a federal mask mandate for public transportation last month. Dr. Ashish Jha, the new White House coronavirus response coordinator, was asked on the “Today” show Friday about rising cases and the end of the mask requirement on airplanes. While maintaining the mandate “would’ve been helpful,” he said, he cited the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant as “the primary driver” of rising infections. “The only way to slow the surge is to test and isolate if positive,” said Mara Aspinall, an expert in biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University. That would help stave off a looming problem for medical workers. “Another surge of hospitalizations would be extraordinarily difficult,” Toner said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.