(WXYZ) There was no way to predict who would suffer from lingering symptoms after recovering from COVID-19. But new research has discovered four biological factors linked to Long COVID-19.
Long COVID-19 can be pretty debilitating. People can suffer from lasting symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, and shortness of breath. These symptoms can last weeks to months.
Why is it that only some people suffer from lingering symptoms while others dont? Hoping to answer that question is a group of 50 scientists led by the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. These researchers followed 309 patients after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. These patients were between the ages of 18 and 89. Some were hospitalized, and some were outpatients with mild disease.
Heres what the researchers did. They took blood samples and nasal swabs right after infection and then again two to three months later. They also analyzed the patient's symptoms. Thats how they found four critical biological factors that could raise a persons risk of Long COVID-19.
Here are the factors:
Of all these four factors, the most influential one is autoantibodies. They were linked to two-thirds of the cases during the study. Now, there is no cure for Long COVID-19, but the researchers suggest that people who develop high viral loads might benefit from antivirals right after getting diagnosed. The quicker the virus is eliminated, the less likely a person might develop Long COVID-19.
We're possibly a step closer to figuring out why Long COVID-19 happens in the first place - once that's understood, then treatment can follow.
Additional Coronavirus information and resources:
View a global coronavirus tracker with data from Johns Hopkins University.
See complete coverage on our Coronavirus Continuing Coverage page.
The next coronavirus variant could be more contagious than the omicron variant, experts said Tuesday. The main question, though, is whether or not it will be more deadly.
The news: World Health Organization officials said Tuesday that the new major COVID-19 variant will have the ability to spread quickly because it will work to overtake omicron, according to CNBC.
Why it matters: With omicron cases on the downturn, theres been an ongoing theory that the pandemic might have reached its endgame. But this isnt the case, according to experts.
Warnings: Kerkhove warned against the ongoing theory that the coronavirus will morph into more mild variants.
The bigger picture: For Dr. Anthony Fauci, a variant that evades the COVID-19 vaccine would be the worst-case scenario for what happens next in the pandemic, as I reported for the Deseret News.
(WXYZ) We're approaching the second anniversary of the first COVID-19 cases in Michigan, and the fourth wave, driven by the omicron variant, is beginning to wane.
The 7-day case average in Michigan sits at more than 13,000 cases a day. It's still a lot, but it's down from more than 20,000 cases a day in early January.
With that in mind, is it time to treat COVID-19 like the flu? Health experts say no, but it could be that way soon.
Andrew Cox, the Macomb County Health Officer, attributes the drop in cases to vaccinations and omicron running its course, leaving fewer people to infect. Despite that, it's not time to treat COVID-19 like the flu because hospitalizations are still a problem.
"We still have a high number of people that are hospitalized in the hospitals, and we're not quite there yet," Cox said.
Dr. Teena Chopra also agrees that COVID-19 will shift toward being an endemic like the flu. But for now, the omicron community transmission and societal burden are still too high.
"We are at 30% at this point. If we come to 5%, we can live with the virus. The numbers that will not overwhelm the healthcare system," Chopra said.
So what will it look like when we reach the point of treating COVID like the flu? There will still be outbreaks that require public health efforts to control, like in December when the CDC sent a team to Ann Arbor to investigate a flu outbreak at the University of Michigan. Or, Michigan's 2019 measles outbreak centered in Oakland County.
"That will look like that. We will have to intervene through public health, through infection control measures," Chopra said.
Stepping in to work with facilities, schools or communities where hotspots develop will be important. It will require constant surveillance. But before we can get there, we have another major push ahead. Vaccinating younger kids.
We need to vaccinate our youngest children and get boosters to American's of all ages.
We also need to support efforts of global vaccination. We have seen how variants develop overseas and come to the U.s.
When we start treating COVID-19 like the flu we need to limit the virus's ability to mutate if we want to keep it that way.
Additional Coronavirus information and resources:
View a global coronavirus tracker with data from Johns Hopkins University.
See complete coverage on our Coronavirus Continuing Coverage page.
Lung abnormalities have been discovered in long COVID patients suffering from breathlessness.
Researchers used the colourless, odourless, tasteless and chemically non-reactive gas xenon to investigate possible lung damage in patients who have not been admitted to hospital but still experience the symptom.
Initial results of the Explain study suggest there is significantly impaired gas transfer in the lungs to the bloodstream in long COVID patients - despite other tests including CT scans coming back normal.
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MRI scans detect abnormalities in long COVID patients
Fergus Gleeson, the study's chief investigator, as well as professor of radiology at the University of Oxford and consultant radiologist at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "We knew from our post-hospital COVID study that xenon could detect abnormalities when the CT scan and other lung function tests are normal.
"What we've found now is that, even though their CT scans are normal, the xenon MRI scans have detected similar abnormalities in patients with long COVID.
"These patients have never been in hospital and did not have an acute severe illness when they had their COVID-19 infection.
"Some of them have been experiencing their symptoms for a year after contracting COVID-19.
"There are now important questions to answer. Such as, how many patients with long COVID will have abnormal scans, the significance of the abnormality we've detected, the cause of the abnormality, and its longer-term consequences.
"Once we understand the mechanisms driving these symptoms, we will be better placed to develop more effective treatments."
Radiologists observe how xenon moves from lungs into bloodstream
Patients lay in an MRI scanner and breathed one litre of xenon, which had been altered so it could be seen using MRI.
The gas, which is safe to inhale, behaves similarly to oxygen, allowing radiologists to observe how it moves from the lungs and into the bloodstream.
The pilot study had 36 participants split into three groups. The full Explain study will recruit around 400 participants.
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The groups included patients diagnosed with long COVID who had been to long COVID studies and had normal CT scans, people who had been in hospital with coronavirus and discharged more than three weeks ago and who had normal or nearly normal CT scans and who were not experiencing long COVID.
The third group was an age and gender-matched control group who had no long COVID symptoms and had not been admitted to hospital with the virus.
Dr Emily Fraser, respiratory consultant who leads the Oxford Post-COVID Assessment Clinic, said people should not give up on the current exercises and rehab work they are doing.
The study received government funding and is being supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. Its findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, were posted on the bioRxiv pre-print server.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joined SiriusXM Doctor Radio's "Doctor Radio Reports" and spoke with host Dr. Marc Siegel about the idea of an Omicron-specific booster and next-generation vaccines, responds to personal attacks and says how they're distracting from important questions. He also opened up about how villainizing him and other scientists endangers lives, and goes on to clarify his position about the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Read onand to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had COVID.
"We always have to keep an open mind on this Marc, as always, but if you talk to the real card carrying molecular virologists and molecular viral genesists they feel that the evidence and the circumstances weigh very, very strongly that this is a natural occurrence in the sense of jumping from an animal species, a bat, maybe to an intermediate host, to a human. Very similar to what was proven to be the case with SARS CoV1, as well as with MARS, with the bat to the camel, to the human. Again but you always have to keep an open mind that it could have been something that had been put into a lab to be studied and perhaps leaked out. But most, if not all, of the real card carrying virologists feel that it was a naturally occurring out of the environment from an animal to a human," said Dr. Fauci.
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"As you know, Pfizer has already initiated studies that are multi-tiered. There's one that takes people who've been fully vaccinated with the standard mRNA and boosting them with either the standard mRNA or an Omicron specific boost. In another set of studies, they're gonna use Omicron as the primary vaccination and those who've not been vaccinated to see what the relative capability of Omicron boost versus standard boost to enhance the response. That's what's going on with Omicron specific boost. Your first question about where do we go now with different platforms? There's a big effort, and I'm gonna be talking about this tomorrow at the White House press conference is the efforts that we're putting in to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, which is gonna be multiphasic. It's not gonna be trying to get a vaccine against all the coronaviruses all at once, but start with a vaccine that covers all the different variants of SARS CoV2. And then get a pan-sarbecovirus which includes SARS CoV1 and SARS CoV2..a lot of activity that's going on in that regard," he said.
RELATED: 6 Safest Things to Do Right Now, During Omicron
"It's unfortunate Marc, as you well know, you've known me for decades. The only thing that I care about, that I've devoted my entire professional career, including the almost 40 years that I've been director of NIAID is to get the basic and clinical science to work for the safety and the health of the American public. And since the United States is a leader in the world, indirectly, we do it for the rest of the world. It is very unfortunate the distraction of those who would politicize me by saying things that just don't make any sense, Marc because the only thing I talk about out is things like getting vaccinated, getting boosted, wearing a mask, getting us to do the research, to be able to get interventions. And for that, by some people I've been villainized. I don't quite get that, except that that's the hard knocks of being in a situation that's become politicized. It's so unfortunate that in our era now, where we're all trying to fight against a common enemy, which is the virus, that some people use that for political purposes. And that's really unfortunate because that does nothing, but endanger the lives of our citizens," he said.
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"Well, it's unfortunate. Of course it doesn't feel good, Marc. It doesn't make any sense. It's purely political. And then I feel worse about, I feel less worried about the attacks on me than I feel about the politicization of a pure public health issue. We should not be doing that. We should be all pulling together to end this pandemic rather than making it ad hominems, which are really preposterous. I mean, you've seen them, those at the hearings and other places where instead of asking questions that are important questions about where we're going with the outbreak, it becomes pure ad hominem, which of course doesn't feel good, but it doesn't make any sense either" he said.
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Follow the public health fundamentals and help end this pandemic, no matter where you liveget vaccinated or boosted ASAP; if you live in an area with low vaccination rates, wear an N95 face mask, don't travel, social distance, avoid large crowds, don't go indoors with people you're not sheltering with (especially in bars), practice good hand hygiene, and to protect your life and the lives of others, don't visit any of these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.
Under the earlier stimulus law, known as the Cares Act, Congress set aside $25 million. The initial start-up investment allowed Miller to hire staff, bulk up on technical capabilities, and set about scrutinizing early-pandemic initiatives, including the Main Street Lending Program, an effort by the Federal Reserve to sustain cash-starved small- and medium-size businesses as well as nonprofits.
Aides to the watchdog say they now have opened more than two dozen cases, as they keep guard over a total of $22.5 billion in outstanding loans and other stimulus assistance. Their efforts helped lead to an enforcement effort announced last week, after a woman in Oklahoma pleaded guilty to federal charges of fraud. But the special inspector general said that its initial $25 million allocation still is not enough money to sustain its current level of operations, especially since it has a five-year mandate for oversight.
Without another infusion of funds, the office could run out of cash by July 2022, Miller wrote in a series of letters to lawmakers, one of which was obtained by The Washington Post late Thursday. Even before that deadline, he wrote, the office may have to wind down some of its operations under federal law as soon as March. And already, Miller froze planned hiring and halted expansions pending a resolution on Capitol Hill.
The covid-19 pandemic is not over, and Congresss unprecedented investment in the American economy has been prey to unprecedented levels of crime and fraud, Miller wrote, later adding: Without such funding, for the first time in history, an inspector general office will close prematurely for want of funding.
The letters underscore the vast and expensive task facing the US government as it tries to keep watch over roughly $6 trillion in federal stimulus approved since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The money helped revive an economy in the throes of a deep recession, yet it also has tempted criminals and fraudsters, putting unprecedented pressure on federal watchdogs to ensure the quickly disbursed sums land in the hands of those who need it most.
The task has fallen to a slew of committees on Capitol Hill, a wide array of inspectors general scattered across government, and other oversight agencies, including the Government Accountability Office.
At times, though, some of the efforts have generated controversy. Last spring, the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery, in particular, tangled with the Justice Department over the scope of its jurisdiction. Top Biden administration officials ultimately determined that Miller, who was appointed during the Trump administration, only had purview over a small slice of the Cares Act and not the broader tranche of funds allotted to the Treasury Department.
The oversight office criticized the decision at the time, arguing the limitations threatened to diminish the oversight over government funds in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Months later, the special inspector general for pandemic recovery said in a separate letter to Congress that the decision forced it to terminate and transfer multiple audits and investigations.
The funding debacle arrives amid an already pitched congressional battle over the future of federal spending, just weeks before an existing agreement is set to expire. Democrats and Republicans have less than a month to broker a new deal, otherwise the government is set to shut down after Feb. 18.
In recent months, lawmakers have pushed the country nearly to the brink, narrowly avoiding a shutdown by adopting short-term measures that mostly sustain existing federal programs at their current levels. This time, though, top House and Senate appropriators are hoping to strike a deal that could fund Washington operations until the end of the fiscal year, which concludes in September. The two sides have insisted in recent weeks they are making progress toward such a resolution, which could open the door for a series of domestic spending increases previously proposed by President Biden.
As part of his 2022 fiscal year blueprint, Biden proposed to augment the funding for the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, providing it with another $25 million. This funding is critical in ensuring that SIGPRs audit and investigative services have the necessary resources to protect the integrity of CARES Act funds, the presidents budget proposal specified at the time.
Senate Democrats soon after pursued a $10 million appropriation of their own, though the politically deadlocked chamber failed to move any of its spending bills. Instead, lawmakers enacted a series of short-term stopgaps, which ultimately meant that the office never actually received any additional money.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) When the coronavirus began spreading around the world, the remote Pacific archipelago of Kiribati closed its borders, ensuring the disease didnt reach its shores for nearly two full years.
Kiribati finally began reopening this month, allowing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to charter a plane to bring home 54 of the island nations citizens. Many of those aboard were missionaries who had left Kiribati before the border closure to spread the faith abroad for what is commonly known as the Mormon church.
Officials tested each returning passenger three times in nearby Fiji, required that they be vaccinated, and put them in quarantine with additional testing when they arrived home.
It wasnt enough.
More than half the passengers tested positive for the virus, which has now slipped out into the community and prompted the government to declare a state of disaster. An initial 36 positive cases from the flight had ballooned to 181 cases by Friday.
Kiribati and several other small Pacific nations were among the last places on the planet to have avoided any virus outbreaks, thanks to their remote locations and strict border controls. But their defenses appear no match against the highly contagious omicron variant.
Generally speaking, its inevitable. It will get to every corner of the world, said Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccine expert at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Its a matter of buying enough time to prepare and getting as many people vaccinated as possible.
Only 33% of Kiribatis 113,000 people are fully vaccinated, while 59% have had at least one dose, according to the online scientific publication Our World in Data. And like many other Pacific nations, Kiribati offers only basic health services.
Dr. Api Talemaitoga, who chairs a network of Indigenous Pacific Island doctors in New Zealand, said Kiribati had only a couple of intensive care beds in the entire nation, and in the past relied on sending its sickest patients to Fiji or New Zealand for treatment.
He said that given the limitations of Kiribatis health system, his first reaction when he heard about the outbreak was, Oh, my lord.
Kiribati has now opened multiple quarantine sites, declared a curfew and imposed lockdowns. President Taneti Maamau said on social media that the government is using all its resources to manage the situation, and urged people to get vaccinated.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in the U.S. state of Utah, has a strong presence in many Pacific nations, including Kiribati, where its 20,000 members make it the third-largest Christian denomination. The church has about 53,000 missionaries serving full time around the world, working to convert people.
The pandemic has presented challenges for their missionary work, which is considered a rite of passage for men as young as 18 and women as young as 19.
As the pandemic ebbed and flowed, the church responded. Itrecalled about 26,000 missionaries who were serving overseasin June 2020, reassigning them to proselytize online from home before sending some back out into the field five months later.
When COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in many countries in April 2021, church officialsencouraged all missionaries to get inoculated and required it of those serving outside their home countries.
Church spokesperson Sam Penrod said the returning missionaries remained in quarantine, were cooperating with local health authorities and would be released from their service upon completion of their quarantine.
With Kiribatis borders being closed since the onset of the pandemic, many of these individuals have continued as missionaries well beyond their 18 to 24 months of anticipated service, with some serving as long as 44 months, he said.
Before this months outbreak, Kiribati had reported just two virus cases: crew members on an incoming cargo ship that ultimately wasnt permitted to dock.
But the Kiribati charter flight wasnt the first time missionaries returning home to a Pacific island nation tested positive for COVID-19.
In October, a missionary returning to Tonga from service in Africa wasreported as the countrys first and so far only positive case after flying home via New Zealand. Like those returning to Kiribati, he also was vaccinated and quarantined.
Tonga is desperately trying to prevent any outbreaks as it recovers from adevastating volcanic eruptionandtsunamiearlier this month. The nation of 105,000 has been receiving aid from around the world but has requested that crews from incoming military ships and planes drop their supplies andleave without having any contactwith those on the ground.
Theyve got enough on their hands without compounding it with the spread of COVID, said Petousis-Harris, the vaccine expert. Anything they can do to keep it out is going to be important. COVID would be just compounding that disaster.
In the long term, however, it is going to be impossible to stop the virus from entering Tonga or any other community, Petousis-Harris said.
Nearby Samoa, with a population of 205,000, is also trying to prevent its first outbreak. It imposed a lockdown through until Friday evening after 15 passengers on an incoming flight from Australia last week tested positive.
By Thursday, that number had grown to 27, including five front-line nurses who had treated the passengers. Officials said all those infected had been isolated and there was no community outbreak so far.
While the incursion of the virus into the Pacific has prompted lockdowns and other restrictions, there were signs that not all traditional aspects of island life would be lost for long.
Government has decided to allow fishing, Kiribati declared on Thursday while listing certain restrictions on times and places. Only four people will be allowed to be on a boat or part of a group fishing near shore.
The staffing crisis in health care reached a farcical extreme last week when ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin, filed for a temporary restraining order to block a number of its employees from leaving their jobs and moving to another nearby hospital.
The hospital argued that, because the pandemic had created a shortage of health care workers, it needed the court to block the employees from leaving at least until it was able to come up with a staffing plan.
As medical workers burn out, isolate due to Covid-19, and leave for other professions, the ensuing staffing shortage has gotten so severe that ThedaCare turned to the courts to try to fix it. It was a striking example of how the pandemic has turned the health care labor market upside down, putting nurses and doctors in higher demand than ever even as they must face the most grueling working conditions of their careers.
The workers and the hospital that hired them, Ascension Northeast Wisconsin, countered that ThedaCare could have matched the offers made by Ascension, but didnt. By declining to match and then failing to come up with a plan before the workers were to set to leave, they argued ThedaCare was attempting to punish the workers for its own shortsightedness.
It appeared for a moment that ThedaCares gambit might work: A local judge granted the temporary injunction. But the judge changed course a few days and lifted the order, allowing the workers members of an interventional radiology and cardiovascular team to start work at their new employer.
It was all bizarre. I talked to several health care economists and none of them could remember a situation in which one hospital had sued another to prevent their employees from leaving. It runs counter to the way the US has set up its health care system, which largely treats medical workers as free agents, able to pick where they will work at will. If anything, before the pandemic, the opposite happened: Nurses had sued hospitals, arguing that they were colluding to depress wages.
But the pandemic has changed the dynamic. The demand for health care services has grown dramatically but the supply of labor is relatively stagnant. That has allowed health care workers to command better salaries, with many moving to traveling nurse agencies that place workers in high-demand areas for salaries much higher than they would normally make in standard full-time employment.
What we have seen is a very rapid shift in the balance of power in hospital labor markets, Hannah Neprash, a health economist at the University of Minnesota, told me. This is a pretty extreme example of a health system acting out a bit in the face of this totally shaken-up labor market.
On its face, there was nothing unusual about Ascension hiring seven members of ThedaCares interventional radiology and cardiovascular team. According to the workers, it was not even a case of poaching; one employee saw the job listing, applied and received an offer, and other members followed suit because the pay and benefits were better.
But even if they had been poached hired all at once away from their prior employer that is just how the game is played. Health systems will sometimes recruit entire teams because they have built a rapport with one another that is essential to good medicine. Hospitals will often market themselves as having good teams in a specific area of treatment stroke care, for example and they justify the claims based on the amount of experience the workers have together.
Thats not new behavior in any way at all, Joanne Spetz, a health economist at the University of California San Francisco, told me. The poaching and recruitment of full teams happened pre-pandemic.
But in the last two years, when Covid-19 cases soared, so did the demand for medical workers. In some areas, the number of jobs for certain specialties, such as ICU nurses, increased by more than 300 percent early in the pandemic, according to one study on the health care labor market during Covid-19.
Even with demand soaring, the supply of health care workers couldnt keep up. In fact, there was some downward pressure on supply. Many medical workers left the profession in the pandemic, burned out by the most difficult working conditions of their lives. There were also new restrictions on medical workers migrating into the United States during the public health emergency, cutting off another source of new workers to meet the demand.
As a result, the market had to compensate as best it could. Hospitals facing the greatest strain were willing to pay the highest rates to meet their demand. Many hospitals resorted to traveling nursing agencies to fill their short-term needs. Because of this extraordinary demand, those positions were being paid salaries exponentially higher than the typical full-time employment salary.
One way to accommodate that demand is temporary workers moving to where theyre needed at the moment. The wages for these temp workers has gone through the roof, Joshua Gottlieb, a health care economist at the University of Chicago, told me. That is normal supply and demand. In the short term, its hard for quantities of workers to adjust, so prices have to adjust.
This effect has been felt most acutely in the practice areas most strained by Covid-19 itself: ICU workers, ER nurses, etc. As Gottlieb and his co-author Avi Zenilman noted in the paper on labor market elasticity, the pandemic had not had appreciable effect on, for example, the wages of labor and delivery nurses.
But the pandemic may have still indirectly contributed to the circumstances that led ThedaCare to make such an extraordinary gambit to try to block employees from leaving the interventional radiology and cardiovascular team, which focuses on minimally invasive procedures for heart- and blood-related conditions.
Hospitals have on the whole fared okay during the pandemic, Spetz told me. There was a dramatic drop in elective procedures in the spring of 2020, but hospitals have largely been able to keep those services operating during subsequent waves. The federal government also provided substantial financial relief to the industry. That is not universally true some hospitals have been forced to close as a result of Covid-19, concentrated in rural areas that were already struggling before the pandemic but taken as a whole, the industry has not been as battered as much as was originally feared.
There are exceptions, but one does not look at the hospital industry and say this is an industry thats in big trouble, she said. Its doing just fine from a profitability standpoint.
But the government relief has since run out and the omicron variant put new unexpected pressure on hospital systems, forcing some to cancel or postpone more lucrative lines of services once again. Hospitals might be feeling the financial squeeze now more than ever, unless Congress appropriates another round of financial support.
And this kind of care interventional radiology in particular tends to be a moneymaker for hospitals, Neprash pointed out to me.
They are doing the stuff that is really lucrative, she said. She wondered what would have happened if members of the labor and delivery or the inpatient psychiatric teams, two less lucrative areas, had walked out. It would not have put the institutions revenue on the line.
The gambit failed. But that they attempted it at all is just a sign of the times for the US health system.
Below is the full COVID-19 report for Jan. 27.
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) Case counts, test positivity rates and hospitalizations are all trending downward as the weekend begins all signs that the COVID-19 numbers will continue to decline in Clark County and across the state.
Hopes that the omicron variant has reached its peak continue to see evidence in the numbers released today. The delta variant remains as a source of concern after several weeks that brought soaring numbers of omicron cases.
Deaths often reported days or even weeks after they actually occur will continue in the wake of the latest surge. In todays reports, of the 39 deaths reported statewide, 33 occurred in Clark County.
COVID-19 patients in hospitals declined by 68 in Clark County (now 1,524 total) and by 69 statewide (now 1,797 total).
Clark County reports 2,566 new COVID-19 cases about 250 fewer than yesterday while the state reported 3,999 new cases. Omicron accounts for 99% of the cases statewide, with the remaining 1% caused by the delta variant.
Test positivity rates continue to fall, with Clark County reporting 34.3% and the state reporting 34.0%. Its a long way to the states goal of 8% (or lower) test positivity, but the rate has now dropped for five straight days.
The lower infection rate doesnt mean the virus isnt still circulating. The omicron variant is highly contagious, and vaccines have proven to reduce the chance of severe illness. Health officials emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors in public places.
In a report on breakthrough cases, the Southern Nevada Health District said that the delta variant not omicron is responsible for 94% of all breakthrough cases. Omicron hasnt caused any hospitalizations or deaths, SNHD said in a recent report, and it is causing only 1% of breakthrough cases to date.
The graphs below show the test positivity for the state (first image), followed by Clark Countys test positivity rate.
A total of 15,339 tests were reported in the county, and 20,242 across Nevada. People can now begin ordering four COVID-19 home tests from the post office for free delivery (https://www.covidtests.gov/). At-home tests are not even counted in the states figures.
Information from the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory indicates that 100% of the recently tested samples in Clark County were from the omicron variant. Omicron accounts for 99% of the recent cases across the state. About 5% of all tests are analyzed to determine which strain of COVID-19 is present, according to the labs website.
A look at current COVID-19 numbers:
As of Jan. 20, the Southern Nevada Health District reports there are 282 breakthrough deaths (+12), 919 breakthrough hospitalizations (+23) and 50,443 breakthrough cases (+11,342). (Increases are compared to numbers reported on Jan. 13.) Breakthrough cases now account for almost 42% of all new COVID-19 cases.
SNHD notes that the delta variant accounts for 86% of all breakthrough deaths, 92% of breakthrough hospitalizations and 94% of breakthrough cases. Omicron hasnt caused any hospitalizations or deaths, SNHD said, and it is causing only 1% of breakthrough cases to date.
*NOTE: Daily lab data from DHHS and SNHD reports is updated every morning for theprevious day.
The test positivity rate in Clark County is at 35.0%, which keeps the county on the states watch list for elevated transmission risk. The rate must be below 8% and a separate measure of the countys case rate currently high at 702.7 cases (per 100,000 population over the past seven days) needs to drop below 50 for two straight weeks before the mask mandate can end.
In todays report, all of Nevadas 17 counties are flagged for high transmission.
Clark Countys case rate (4,427 per 100,000 over the past 30 days) and test positivity rate (34.3%) are flagged in data reported today. Testing (639 tests per day per 100,000) is within the states acceptable range.
Thestates health department reports4,184,649 dosesof the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Nevada,as of Jan. 27.
As of yesterday, 55.70% of Nevadans currently eligible for the vaccine are fully vaccinated, and 66.33% of the eligible population has initiated vaccinations. Clark County reports that 55.08% of its eligible residents are fully vaccinated.
NOTE: The state is not updating hospitalization dataonweekendsor holidays.
According to the statesDepartment of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the number of hospitalized patients in Nevada wasdown (-69) since yesterday. The number of patients dropped by 68 in Clark County.
The current number of hospitalizations is1,797 confirmed/suspected cases statewide. Hospitals reported 325 of those patients were in intensive care units, and 169 were on ventilators.To give some perspective, the state set a record high for hospitalized patients on Dec. 13, 2020, with 2,025 patients.
A weekly update from the Nevada Hospital Association notes that the sheer volume of omicron cases has overwhelmed hospitals in Clark County.
While omicron appears to be less virulent than other variants, the sheer volume of cases is stressing the hospitals combined with employee illness and required isolation days, NHA said.
The graphs below show hospitalizations in Nevada (first image) and in Clark County:
The number of people who have recovered from the virus in Southern Nevada continues to increase. The latest county update estimates a total of 430,339 recovered cases; thats 91.7% of all reported cases in the county, according toSNHDs latest report.
Nevadareopened to 100% capacity on June 1and social distancing guidelines lifted, helping the state return to mostly pre-pandemic times, with some exceptions.
The CDC reversed course on July 27, saying fully vaccinated Americans in areas with substantial and high transmission should wear masks indoors when in public as COVID-19 cases rise. Most of Nevada falls into those two risk categories.
Nevada said it would adopt the CDCs guidance with the new mask guidelinethat went into effect at 12:01 a.m. on July 30. Thisoverrides Clark Countys employee mask mandate, which went into effect in mid-July.
On Aug. 16, Gov. Sisolak signed a new directivethat allows fully vaccinated attendees at large gatherings to remove their masks, but only if the venue chooses to require everyone in attendance to provide proof of vaccination. Those who have just one shot and are not fully vaccinated would still be allowed to attend, as would children under 12, but both would need to wear masks.
Masks still must be worn when required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules and regulations, including local businesses and workplace guidance.
State approval for vaccinating children 5-11 years old was given on Nov. 3, with plans by the Southern Nevada Health District to begin vaccinations on Nov. 10. The Pfizer vaccine is the only vaccine approved for children at this time.
SEE ALSO:Previous days report
WASHINGTONPresident Biden took office with a detailed plan to battle Covid-19 by accelerating vaccinations, reopening schools and selling a massive stimulus proposal to help embattled state and local officials rein in the virus.
The course of the pandemic has repeatedly forced the administration to deviate from that initial script.At times, administration officials have been able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. But in other cases, by their own admission, they failed to anticipate how the virus would evolve and how Americans would respond.
