Majority of Americans think COVID-19 situation is getting worse: Gallup https://thehill.com/homenews/news/5...nk-covid-19-situation-is-getting-worse-gallup A majority of Americans say they feel that the COVID-19 pandemic is getting worse according to a new Gallup poll released on Thursday. According to the January Gallup poll, 58 percent of respondents said they felt the pandemic was getting a little or a lot worse, while just 20 percent said they felt the pandemic was improving and 22 percent said they thought the situation has stayed the same. The level of pessimism surrounding the pandemic saw a sharp increase from when the poll was conducted in October when 18 percent said they felt it was getting worse and 51 percent said it was getting better. However, the rapid spread of the highly-transmissible omicron variant has caused many to feel a sense of hopelessness in the face of a third year in the pandemic. Gallup observed a corresponding change in behaviors as people's thoughts on the pandemic worsened. More people said they were practicing social distancing behaviors and fewer people said they were eating out at restaurants. "When the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out last year, there was great hope that the pandemic would have ended in the U.S. by now," said Gallup. "But with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. skyrocketing due to the omicron variant of the virus, Americans' views of the pandemic have once again turned negative, and worry about getting the virus is on the rise to levels not seen since vaccines were widely available." The Gallup poll was conducted among 1,569 adults from Jan. 3-14. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
How about - "Get Vaccinated, Get Vaccinated, Get Vaccinated". The same f@cken thing they have been saying for months. Arkansas governor urges CDC to provide clear path to endemic status https://thehill.com/homenews/admini...s-cdc-to-provide-clear-path-to-endemic-status Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Monday urged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide clear guidance that will allow states to transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into endemic status. "We need the CDC to help us to have the right standards to end this pandemic and move to more endemic status," Hutchinson said during a meeting with President Biden, Vice President Harris and other governors as part of a meeting of the National Governors Association. "And so that’s an important element that we as governors, in a bipartisan way, hope that the CDC can be helpful to define that more clearly," added Hutchinson, who chairs the association. "We want to go from today to more normal." The governors had met earlier with Jeff Zients, the head of the White House COVID-19 response team. "We got a way to go on that, in my view, but we’re moving," Biden said of the pandemic. "I think it’s all about making sure we have the same standards we’re applying across the board." Biden said the administration would "try like the devil to keep schools open," something Hutchinson had thanked the president for supporting so clearly. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a Monday briefing that the current state of the pandemic and accompanying restrictions are not "the new normal," noting that the country is still seeing high levels of infections and hospitalizations. Hutchinson's call for a clear set of guidelines to help Americans ease back into normal life comes as recent polls have shown much of the public is fatigued and frustrated by the pandemic two years after the first cases were detected in the United States. The Arkansas governor has been a consistent partner for the White House on pandemic messaging, as he has urged vaccinations in a conservative state and praised Biden for his efforts to depoliticize the pandemic.
At this point if you are not vaccinated I doubt you will get it so the bigger issue is unvaxxed people simply forcing their belief that COVID is nothing or that they dont need to isolate when they or their kids get sick and are fine spreading it...
Covid will always be an epidemic virus — not an endemic one, scientist warns https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/covid-will-never-become-an-endemic-virus-scientist-warns.html Last week, the WHO warned that the next Covid variant will be even more contagious than omicron. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an epidemic occurs when the number of cases of a disease increases, often suddenly, above what is usually expected. The WHO declares a disease a pandemic when its growth is exponential and it is spreading globally. Covid-19 will never become an endemic illness and will always behave like an epidemic virus, an expert in biosecurity has warned. Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told CNBC that although endemic disease can occur in very large numbers, the number of cases does not change rapidly as seen with the coronavirus. “If case numbers do change [with an endemic disease], it is slowly, typically over years,” she said via email. “Epidemic diseases, on the other hand, rise rapidly over periods of days to weeks.” Scientists use a mathematical equation, the so-called R naught (or R0), to assess how quickly a disease is spreading. The R0 indicates how many people will catch a disease from an infected person, with experts at Imperial College London estimating omicron’s could be higher than 3. If a disease’s R0 is greater than 1, growth is exponential, meaning the virus is becoming more prevalent and the conditions for an epidemic are present, MacIntyre said. “The public health goal is to keep the effective R — which is R0 modified by interventions such as vaccines, masks or other mitigations — below 1,” she told CNBC. “But if the R0 is higher than 1, we typically see recurrent epidemic waves for respiratory transmitted epidemic infections.” MacIntyre noted that this is the pattern that was seen with smallpox for centuries and is still seen with measles and influenza. It’s also the pattern unfolding with Covid, she added, for which we have seen four major waves in the past two years. “Covid will not magically turn into a malaria-like endemic infection where levels stay constant for long periods,” she contended. “It will keep causing epidemic waves, driven by waning vaccine immunity, new variants that escape vaccine protection, unvaccinated pockets, births and migration.” “This is why we need an ongoing ‘vaccine-plus’ and ventilation strategy, to keep R below 1 so we can live with the virus without major disruptions to society,” MacIntyre said, adding a warning that “there will be more variants coming.” Last week, the World Health Organization warned that the next Covid variant will be even more contagious than omicron. Global Biosecurity, the Twitter account representing a collective of UNSW research departments covering epidemics, pandemics and epidemiology, argued last year that Covid will continue to “display the waxing and waning pattern of epidemic diseases.” ″[Covid] will never be endemic,” the organization said. “It is an epidemic disease and always will be. This means it will find unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people and spread rapidly in those groups.” Pandemic, epidemic or endemic? According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an epidemic occurs when the number of cases of a disease increases, often suddenly, above what is usually expected. The WHO declares a disease a pandemic when its growth is exponential and it is spreading globally. “While an epidemic is large, it is also generally contained or expected in its spread, while a pandemic is international and out of control,” experts from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health explained in a blog post last year. “The difference between an epidemic and a pandemic isn’t in the severity of the disease, but the degree to which it has spread.” Endemic disease is defined as “the constant presence or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area” by the U.S. CDC. For Covid to become endemic, enough people need to have immune protection from it for it to become endemic, according to the American Lung Association, highlighting the importance vaccination will play in the virus’s transition away from pandemic status. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that there was a chance that Covid could be ended as a global health emergency this year if the right course of action — which includes addressing vaccine and health-care inequity — is taken. His comments came a week after another senior WHO official warned that “we won’t ever end the virus” and that “endemic does not mean ‘good,’ it just means ‘here forever.’”
America's economic recovery is about to go into reverse https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/03/economy/january-jobs-report-preview/index.html The Omicron variant put a massive speed bump in the road to America's recovery this winter. The first signs of trouble could show up in the January jobs report Friday. The White House on Monday prepared Americans for disappointment about the jobs numbers: Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told CNN the number of jobs added at the start of 2022 could be "unusually low" because of Omicron. The highly infectious variant led millions of workers to call in sick, or in some cases show up to work ill, in the past weeks. Economists polled by Refinitiv predict 150,000 jobs were added in January. That would make it the worst report since December 2020, when the economy shed jobs. Rising Covid infections were also an issue then. But a closer look at the forecast shows that plenty of analysts anticipate job losses: Goldman Sachs (GS) expects a drop of 250,000, while research consultancy Capital Economics and Jefferies (JEF) predict a loss of 200,000 positions. On Wednesday, the ADP Employment Report, which tracks private payrolls, showed an unexpected drop of 301,000 jobs last month. Although the ADP and government reports aren't correlated, it is adding to the worry about what Friday's tally might look like. Data published Thursday showed a small improvement in claims for unemployment benefits in the last full week of January. Claims were also lower than economists had predicted. Jobless claims stood at 238,000, adjusted for seasonal swings. The number of Americans filing for benefits for at least two straight weeks edged down to 1.6 million in the week ending January 22, the Labor Department reported. Omicron's bad timing The Omicron surge began in December. But the full fallout will probably become visible in the economic data for the start of 2022. The December jobs report showed the US economy added 199,000 jobs, but that was based on surveys conducted before the Omicron wave gathered pace. That's why economists predict January will look worse. "It turns out that the peak of Omicron cases coincided with when the [January] data for the payroll survey was being collected, and if you were not at work, if you were on unpaid leave, you're not counted as being on the payroll," Bernstein told CNN's Victor Blackwell in an interview Monday. Those numbers include workers who got sick themselves, but also those who had to stay home to care for ill relatives or children home from school. Nearly 9 million American workers said they were not working because of the virus -- either because they were sick themselves or because they cared for someone in their household -- according to the most recent US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, conducted between December 29 and January 10. The good news: Omicron rates are falling rapidly, and the economy should bounce back quickly. Last winter's brief drop and the Delta surge in the summer didn't prevent a year of record-breaking jobs growth in 2021. Even so, the impact from the variant will permeate economic reports throughout early 2022. Last week, Bank of America (BAC) warned of a significant risk that America's GDP will shrink in the first quarter because of Omicron. Goldman Sachs echoed that sentiment this week, forecasting an abrupt slowing of growth and consumer spending.
Obama said this April 22, 2020. Meanwhile MA has performed much worst than FL. This is pure comic gold.
Amusing -- since Biden came into office in January of 2021 -- why don't you tell us how Massachusetts performed compared to Florida.
With Omicron Waning, Americans Are Ready for the Reopening https://www.barrons.com/articles/covid-cases-omicron-waning-reopening-51644020971?tesla=y
You are really poor at this data analysis thing arent you. Mass 3,252 deaths/million Florida 3,095 deaths/million