Will American adults have access to a fourth shot of COVID-19 vaccine? Drugmaker Moderna has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.
However, rival pharmaceutical company Pfizers request was approval for a booster shot for only seniors.
U.S. officials have been laying the groundwork to deliver additional booster doses to shore up the vaccines protection against serious disease and death from COVID-19. The White House has been sounding the alarm that it needs Congress to urgently approve more funding for the federal government to secure more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, either for additional booster shots or variant-specific immunizations.
U.S. health officials currently recommend a primary series of two doses of the Moderna vaccine and a booster dose months later.
Moderna said its request for an additional dose was based on recently published data generated in the United States and Israel following the emergence of Omicron.
Last Tuesday, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech asked U.S. regulators to authorize an additional booster dose of their COVID-19 vaccine for seniors.
The New York-based drugmaker and its German partner BioNTech SE said that they have sought an emergency-use authorization for a second booster of their vaccine, Comirnaty, for people 65 and older who have already received a booster of any of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer and BioNTech said they submitted data to the FDA from Israel, which began offering a fourth shot to older people and health-care workers last year as the omicron variant was circulating.
In a press release announcing its application to the FDA, Pfizer said an analysis of Israeli medical records showed that the rate of confirmed infections in people 60 and older who received a second booster was half that seen in their counterparts who had had only three doses of the vaccine. In addition, the likelihood of developing severe COVID-19 was four times lower in the group that got a second booster, the company said.
Pfizers FDA application also included results of an unspecified clinical trial in which it offered a second booster shot to Israeli health care workers who wanted it. Among the 154 workers who got the fourth shot, neutralizing antibodies rose by a factor of seven to eight, and antibodies specific to the omicron variant increased by a factor of eight to 10, Pfizer said.
While the study design and names of researchers conducting the trial are unclear in Pfizers press release, these findings appear to reflect a segment of the population that was the subject of Wednesdays New England Journal of Medicine study.
As vaccine experts await a fuller account of the data cited by Pfizer, they pointed to the newly published Israeli study as evidence that any discussion of second-booster-for-all is premature.
In the U.S., people 12 and older can receive a single booster dose of the Comirnaty vaccine if theyve already completed the two dose Pfizer-BioNTech regimen. Among those who initially got a shot developed by Moderna Inc. or Johnson & Johnson, only those 18 and older can get a Comirnaty booster.
People who received a third dose generally fared better against the delta and omicron variants than people who received only two doses, according to studies the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this year.
While COVID-19 cases have dropped sharply from their winter peak, there are signs that another increase in infections could be in the cards in the coming weeks. More than a third of CDC wastewater sample sites in the U.S. showed rising virus trends earlier this month.
Pfizer is also studying an omicron-specific vaccine and a hybrid shot that would target omicron along with earlier variants. The company is expected to report data on these efforts in April.
The CDC recommends some immunocompromised people get a three-dose primary series of mRNA shots and a fourth shot as a booster.
Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious-disease expert at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, said that for older and sicker Americans, three shots of vaccine should probably be considered the primary series. The case for a possible fourth shot a booster for these Americans has yet to be made, he added.
In most people, two to three doses or mRNA vaccine have virtually eliminated the threat of an infection progressing to severe disease or death, Offit said. It will be difficult to demonstrate that the immune system needs more vaccine to protect itself against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he added.
If were going to get past this pandemic, we need to realize that protection against mild illness will not be long-lived, Offit said. Key to that is acknowledging that infections that amount to little more than a sniffle and a cough dont warrant strenuous efforts to prevent. As long as protection against serious illness holds up, we should consider that a win, he said.
--The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Los Angeles Times contributed to this report
The city of Jilin will lock down some 4.5 million people for three days starting Monday to help curb the spread of Chinas biggest coronavirus outbreak.
China has imposed stay-at-home orders on millions more people in the countrys northeast, as it tries to tackle its biggest coronavirus outbreak in two years.
The country has largely kept the virus at bay since it brought to heel its initial outbreak in 2020 using targeted lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.
However, the Omicron strain of COVID-19 has taken hold in multiple cities across China.
Jilin, the second-biggest city in Jilin province, will lock down about 4.5 million inhabitants for three days from Monday night, local authorities announced.
More than 4,000 new infections were reported across China on Sunday, with two-thirds in Jilin province, which borders Russia and North Korea.
Changchun, Jilin provinces capital, said Saturday it would also tighten restrictions for three days.
On Saturday, China reported its first two COVID-19 deaths in more than a year. The deaths, both in Jilin province, bring the countrys coronavirus death toll to 4,638 since the start of the pandemic.
Both fatalities occurred in elderly patients and were the result of their underlying conditions, Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, told a news briefing on Saturday.
One of them had not been vaccinated for COVID-19, she said.
Since March 11, Changchuns nine million people have only been allowed out once every two days to buy food.
The new measures mean only medical personnel and other anti-epidemic workers will be authorised to leave their homes.
Meanwhile, restrictions are being eased in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen, which locked down its 17.5 million residents a week ago.
Public transport will resume fully from Monday, alongside some administrative and business activities, local health authorities said on Sunday.
Non-essential businesses will remain closed and the downtown Futian business district is still under strict anti-COVID measures.
Shenzhen is home to some of Chinas biggest tech firms, meaning any curbs on businesses come at a significant economic cost.
Tens of millions of people are currently in lockdown in other regions and authorities are rushing to create hospital beds, fearing the outbreak could put the healthcare system under strain.
East of the capital Beijing, the city of Tangshan banned traffic for 24 hours on Sunday in an effort to slow the virus spread, and will test all its 7.7 million people.
President Xi Jinping earlier this week urged tighter virus controls at ports of entry and stressed the need to swiftly control local clustered outbreaks.
In March 2020, just as COVID-19 cases began to surge in Boston, Massachusetts, Esther Freeman noticed something peculiara deluge of people with discoloured toes requesting appointments. Freeman, director of global health dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, had seen these kinds of toes before. The itchy red and purple patches are a classic sign of chilblains, a skin condition that typically appears in cold weather. But usually, she would see one or two cases each winter. Suddenly, I was seeing 15, 20 patients a day, she says. Intriguingly, the surgeseen by physicians around the globeseemed to coincide with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, when physicians examined people with what the media began calling COVID toes, most didnt test positive for a coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infection. Scientists were stumped, and have been looking for answers ever since.
The latest study, published on 25 February, is an immunological deep dive, examining 21 people who developed chilblains during the early months of the pandemic in Connecticut. Although the results dont rule out a direct connection between COVID-19 and chilblains, the authors couldnt find any immunological evidence of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection in 19 of those people. The report adds to the argument by some researchers that COVID toe could have been caused by something unrelated to the virus. For instance, it might have arisen from people in lockdown being at home, not wearing shoes and socks, says Jeff Gehlhausen, a dermatologist and immunologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and first author of the study.
Still, the results raise some very interesting questions that deserve further study, says Freeman, who was not involved in the research. For instance, the study doesnt exclude the possibility that people exposed to the virus could have fought it off using an innate immune responsea first-line defence that would not prompt the body to produce detectable antibodies and T-cells against SARS-CoV-2. So for now, she adds, the mystery remains.
How chilblains arise isnt entirely clear. We think of it as a cold-weather-related injury, says Patrick McCleskey, a dermatologist and researcher at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. We always see some amount of chilblains in the winter, and then it goes down in the summer. Researchers think that the cold probably leads to a restriction in blood flow, causing some cells to die and kicking off an inflammatory process. The purple or red patches that appear on toes (and sometimes fingers, ears or noses) can be itchy, tender or, in some cases, downright painful.
Most of the people in the latest study developed COVID toes between April and May 2020, when COVID-19 cases surged in Connecticut. About one-third reported having some symptoms of COVID-19 before developing the condition, and one-third reported that they had been in contact with a person confirmed or suspected to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
The researchers used a variety of methods to look for antibodies and T-cells specific to the coronavirussigns of the body having whats called an adaptive immune response to a pathogen. These people were months past the onset of their chilblains, so their immune systems would have had plenty of time to respond to SARS-CoV-2 if they had been infected. But the team picked up signs of a past infection only in two people, one of whom had initially tested positive.
Many groups have tested people with chilblains for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, but nobody had looked really into this hypothesis about the T-cell response, Freeman says. The team did a fantastic, really extraordinary job. But she emphasizes that the study is smalland therefore not necessarily generalizableand that much larger epidemiological studieshave shown a connection between chilblains and SARS-CoV-2.
Dermatologist Thierry Passeron, at Cte dAzur University in Nice, France, still thinks COVID toes are triggered by the virus. His team foundthat people who developed chilblains during the pandemic showed evidence of a strong innate immune response. The researchers posit that many people with pandemic chilblains clear the virus in this way, so very few develop antibodies, he says.
Previous studieshave examined whether people with chilblains had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by taking tissue biopsies and staining the samples with a dye that identifies parts of the virus. Gehlhausen and colleagues tried the stain and found that it stuck to some of their tissue samples. But they also tested the stain on random tissue samples collected before the pandemic, when the virus was not in circulation, and found that it also marked some of those. Our study suggests that there may be a lack of specificity in that staining, Gehlhausen says.
With the link between COVID-19 and chilblains still in question, some researchers point to the lockdown theorythat people spent more time at home barefoot early in the pandemic and got cold feet, literally. Or perhaps all the media coverage of COVID toes led to more people than usual seeking medical attention for the problem.
For Freeman, the case is not yet closed. On one hand, she has seen patients who developed chilblains, justifiably, after walking in flip flops during a snowstorm. On the other hand, she has seen people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then develop chilblains with no other obvious explanation.
The debate has become strangely polarizing, Gehlhausen says. But the hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Its possible that all these things are true, he says. I am not on any team.
Its also possible the problem might be fading. Were still seeing patients with new chilblains, but it seems to be kind of back to the old background rate, says Yale dermatologist William Damsky, an author on the paper.
In the end, the issue makes for an intriguing scientific debate, but the answer isnt likely to alter how dermatologists treat patients, McCleskey says. Irrespective of whether a person had COVID-19, chilblains generally go away on their own in two or three weeks.
Honestly, I think maybe we can chill out about chilblains, he says.
This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon March 162022.
Starting in December 2019 with the first reports out ofWuhan, China, the COVID-19 pandemic very rapidly began to impact almost every aspect of daily life in Kern County, and in many respects, it continues to do so.
Here's a look at the last two-plus years with a timeline that charts how the coronavirus's rapid progression occurred:
Dec. 12, 2019: A number of patients in Wuhan report experiencing shortness of breath and fever.
Dec. 31, 2019: The World Health Organization finds out about multiple cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause in Wuhan.
Jan. 17, 2020: A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team is dispatched to Washington state to help with contact-tracing efforts after the first case of the novel coronavirus, provisionally designated by the WHO as 2019-nCoV, is reported in the United States.
Jan. 25, 2020: An Orange County manwho had recently been to Wuhan is the first case of the coronavirus found in California. The nation now has three confirmed cases.
Feb. 6, 2020: A Santa Clara resident is the first person to die of causes related to the coronavirus in the United States.
Feb. 11, 2020: The WHO announces its official designations for the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes: SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
Feb. 27, 2020: The Californian reports 11 people in Kern County are being monitored for the highly contagious coronavirus but they are considered to be at low risk of being carriers, according to local health officials.
March 4, 2020: Gov. Gavin Newsom declares a state of emergency in California following similar declarations by a number of local governments. The move puts anti-price-gouging protections in place.
March 10, 2020: Five Kern County residents are being monitored for COVID-19 while 13 of 18 individuals have successfully moved through the monitoring process, according to county public health spokeswoman Michelle Corson. Theres been no confirmed circulation of the coronavirus locally and no confirmed cases in the county, according to the Kern Public Health Services Department.
March 11, 2020: The World Health Organization declares the fast-spreading outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic.
March 13, 2020: President Donald Trump declares a nationwide emergency.
March 15, 2020: The plans of both public and private schools in Kern County to serve students in the midst of coronavirus concerns are rapidly evolving. The following day, the heads of the Kern County Superintendent of Schools and Kern County Public Health Services Department tell public schools to temporarily close to aid in the fight against the virus.
March 17, 2020: The first patient in Kern County tests positive for the coronavirus, county health officials say, signifying the first instance of the pandemic within county borders. The Bakersfield Police Department announces that then-interim Police Chief Greg Terry is assembling a COVID-19 resource team at the department. The Kern County Sheriffs Office is evaluating inmates at its Lerdo and Central Receiving facilities for potential early release. Low-level, nonviolent inmates whose ages and medical conditions place them at risk of the virus could be let out early.
March 19, 2020: Newsom issues a shelter-in-place order for California, amid a growing number of deaths (31); the number of cases is at 7,899.
March 27, 2020: Kern County reports eight new coronavirus infections, bringing the total cases in the county to 40. Kern also reports its first death, according to county public health officials. Nearly 1,000 tests for the virus are pending results, according to data from the health department.
March 31, 2020: The county is facing more than 100 cases of COVID-19. The most recent numbers show 101 people in Kern tested positive for the disease, a number that includes three nonresidents, according to the county health department. That number represents a doubling in cases in two days; on March 29, total cases stood at 51.
April 14, 2020: Newsom charts a path to reopening for the state.
May 1, 2020:County public health officials confirm a COVID-19 outbreak at a Bakersfield nursing home that infects 16 residents and 25 staff members. Its unclear whether any of the 41 living or working at the 184-bed Kingston Healthcare Center, located at 329 Real Road, have required hospitalization or died. The outbreak is the first publicly confirmed in Kern County, where public health officials have released relatively few details about local COVID-19 cases.
May 4, 2020: The county health department begins providing more detailed information on COVID-19 cases, including the ethnic breakdown and sex of those with the virus, and the number of cases in each ZIP code in the county.
May 9, 2020: The nations jobless rate hits its highest figure since the Great Depression (14.5 percent), with more than 20.5 million out of work.
June 1, 2020:County officials worry about a coronavirus surge, as the number of reported cases over the last several days increases and crowds of protesters take to the streets in close proximity to one another. While the county health department reported an average of 43 cases per day the week prior, the past two days see Kerns total increase by 177, more than double the average.
June 17, 2020: In three months since the first COVID-19 case was announced in Kern, 57 people have died and 3,522 cases are confirmed locally. Close to 43,000 tests for the virus have been performed.
June 19, 2020: The day after Newsom announces masks are required in most public spaces, Kern County officials remain in the dark about how such an order would be enforced.
July 7, 2020: Two Bakersfield hospitals temporarily stop offering elective medical procedures in order to remain responsive to more urgent cases, as COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to rise and push local medical centers toward their limits.
July 17, 2020: Newsom announces plans for how schools in California can return to in-person learning. But the requirements mean most K-12 campuses will be distance learning for the upcoming school year.
July 19, 2020: Medical facilities in Kern County are pushed to the limit as more and more residents contract COVID-19. Kern Medical CEO Russell Judd says all local hospitals are reaching maximum capacity and beginning to implement surge plans.
Aug. 21, 2020: As a wave of evictions threatens to sweep over Bakersfield and Kern County, local leaders prepare to devote millions in federal coronavirus relief funds to rental assistance. Local advocates, however, worry the funds may not be enough to prevent many who have lost income amid the pandemic from ending up on the streets.
Sept. 22, 2020: The nations death toll surpasses 200,000.
Oct. 2, 2020: Trucks, vans and trailers wait in a long line at CityServe Kern County's F Street location to load up more than 1,200 boxes that had arrived from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farmers to Families Food Box Program. The program distributes millions of meals during the pandemic.
Nov. 18, 2020: State workplace regulators issue one of the largest fines yet for failing to protect employees from COVID-19 on the job for a Bakersfield nursing home where nearly 200 staff and residents were infected with the coronavirus. Kingston Healthcare Center is fined $92,500 as a result of numerous violations detailed in a 23-page citation report issued the previous month by Cal/OSHA, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
Dec. 9, 2020: More than 1,000 new COVID-19 infections are reported by the county health department for the second day in a row, as well as six new deaths, bringing the number of cases in Kern to 47,411 and the total number of deaths to 463.
Jan. 28, 2020: Kern County surpasses 92,000 cases of COVID-19, which means 1 in 10 county residents has tested positive for the virus. That puts Kern among the most impacted counties in the state in terms of the percentage of people infected with the virus, just behind San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
Feb. 22, 2021: Kern County and the Central Valley are to receive larger portions of the COVID-19 vaccine on an ongoing basis, Newsom announces during a stop in Arvin. Moving forward, Kern is expected to receive 78 percent more vaccines than it has been, while the Central Valley as a whole is expected to receive 58 percent more. That equates to 14,850 vaccine doses arriving in Kern by the end of the week.
March 12, 2021:The county health department announces an expansion of the COVID-19 vaccines availability to include individuals with certain health conditions and those living or working in environments that put them at high risk of contracting COVID-19.
April 8, 2021: The county health department announces it will begin tracking COVID-19 variants on its online dashboard that monitors the viruss progression.
June 16, 2021: Newsom stops at In Shape, a fully reopened gym in Bakersfield, to promote "California Roars Back," the reopening plan, while also advocating for measures to keep Californians healthy, such as offering tickets to Six Flags Magic Mountain for vaccinated residents.
July 1, 2021: As rising levels of a more contagious coronavirus variant cause concern in neighboring counties, only one case of the delta variant is identified in Kern.
Aug. 7, 2021: Kern County hospitals see a dramatic increase in COVID-19 patients over the past month, leading some health officials to worry a third surge may soon overwhelm local resources.
Aug. 13, 2021: Students in Wasco Union Elementary School District have been in class for two weeks; in that time, a dozen students test positive for COVID, and 70 are sent home to quarantine because of a possible exposure under current health guidelines.
Aug. 24, 2021: Local hospital executives worry they might not be able to staff enough beds to meet official projections that COVID-19 cases in Kern County will continue rising through early October. On Sept. 3, hospitalizations exceed the peak of the first wave, with the numbers expected to rise.
Oct. 18, 2021: Local parents protesting Newsoms student COVID-19 vaccine mandate participate in a statewide walkout by keeping their students out of school.
Nov. 3, 2021: The county health department recommends that all eligible residents get a booster shot to avoid another COVID-19 surge that could surpass the most recent peak that strained local hospitals.
Dec. 5, 2021: The emergence of omicron, a new variant of concern, shines a spotlight on the way that coronavirus cases are sequenced.
Jan. 3, 2022: Kern County Superintendent of Schools spokesman Robert Meszaros confirms that hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 rapid tests are being delivered after the KCSOS receives an expected shipment.
Jan. 21, 2022:The county health department reports 2,351 new coronavirus cases and no new deaths. This number represents the highest single-day total of the pandemic as the omicron surge appears to peak in Kern. Less than a week later, Kern would see another grim milestone: On Jan. 27, the health department announces 17 new COVID deaths, bringing the tally of COVID deaths in Kern County past 2,000 (2,005).
Feb. 17, 2022: About half of eligible Americans have received booster shots, with nearly 80 million confirmed infections overall and many more infections that have never been reported. One influential model uses those factors and others to estimate that 73 percent of Americans are, for now, immune to omicron, the dominant variant, and that could rise to 80 percent by mid-March. California becomes the first state to formally shift to an endemic approach to the coronavirus with Newsom's announcement of a plan that emphasizes prevention and quick reaction to outbreaks over mandated masking and business shutdowns.
Feb. 24, 2022: The Biden administration announces plans to significantly loosen federal mask-wearing guidelines to protect against COVID-19 transmission, meaning most Americans will no longer be advised to wear masks in indoor public settings.
March 4, 2022: New York City and Los Angeles intend to lift some of their strictest COVID-19 prevention measures as officials in big cities around the U.S. push for a return to normalcy after two grueling years of the pandemic.
March 7, 2022:The global death toll from COVID-19 eclipses 6 million underscoring that the pandemic, now entering its third year, is far from over.
March 11, 2022: Newsoms mask mandate in schools expires, as local school officials and others in the education community express optimism about moving in the right direction while also sharing caution amid the ongoing pandemic.
March 15, 2022: Pfizer and its partner BioNTech ask U.S. regulators to authorize an additional booster dose of their COVID-19 vaccine for seniors, saying data from Israel suggests older adults would benefit.
image:Coronaviruses tend to mutate into a fairly harmless virus, according to the opinion of PhD candidate Inger Heimdal following her study of the four common coronaviruses already in existence before the pandemic. view more
Credit: Photo: Geir Otto Johansen / NTNU
When Inger Heimdal started studying the coronavirus in children in 2014, not many people thought the topic sounded particularly exciting.
Coronavirus was considered quite harmless and of little interest to research. That has changed, to say the least.
For two years now, the movel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has ravaged populations the world over. Some researchers believe that the virus will mutate toward less harmless variants.
Heimdal, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, agrees.
When I started my research, there were four corona varieties that werent considered particularly dangerous. Maybe SARS-CoV-2 will become a new member of this group. In that case, it would be really useful to know more about the four older coronavirus variants. A lot of this knowledge might be transferable to SARS-CoV-2 in the near future, says Heimdal.
Heimdal is taking her doctorate in coronavirus infections in children who were admitted to St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim for acute respiratory disease in the period 2006-2017.
Of the 4312 children with respiratory infections hospitalized during the twelve-year study period, the researchers identified 341 cases (8 per cent) with coronavirus.
Although the vast majority of people become only mildly ill with the common coronavirus variants, a few patients become seriously ill and need breathing support and fluid therapy.
The risk turned out to be twice as high for the children who had a combination of coronavirus and respiratory syncytial (RS) virus and for those who only contracted the RS virus
Seriously ill patients often have to stay in hospital for a long time. This demands significant resources from the health care system. We need to know more about the disease burden that coronavirus causes in order to plan for health services in the future, Heimdal said.
One challenge in studying the disease burden of coronavirus is that it often occurs in tandem with other respiratory viruses.
NTNU researchers found other co-occurring viruses mainly RS virus and rhinovirus in 70 per cent of the cases. RS can cause pneumonia in young children, while the cold virus rhinovirus is considered a milder virus.
When Heimdal and her colleagues compared the various respiratory viruses, they discovered something interesting. Among the children who only had coronavirus, one in five developed a serious respiratory infection and required more intense medical treatment.
I think parents of young children have more reason to be concerned about the RS virus than corona.
The risk of serious illness turned out to be twice as high for the children who contracted a combination of coronavirus and RS virus and for those who only had the RS virus. Forty per cent of these children experienced a serious course of the disease.
I think parents of young children have more reason to be worried about the RS virus than coronavirus. In our study, we see that the RS virus causes hospital admissions far more frequently, and among those admitted, a much larger proportion develop a serious disease course, she says.
Is having more viruses advantageous?
Its easy to believe that the more virus variants there are, the worse the disease. But Heimdal found that the proportion of serious illness among children who had both corona and rhinovirus was clearly lower than for those who only had corona.
Could it be an advantage to contract both the rhinovirus and coronavirus?
It actually looks like having both viruses might be advantageous, but I have to emphasize that our model only enables us to study associations. We cant establish a clear causal link. But the find is really interesting, Heimdal says.
Inflicting a potentially harmful virus on a patient isnt ethically justifiable, even though it might suppress other viruses. But it would be exciting to find out what it is about the rhinovirus that reduces disease severity.
Maybe the rhinovirus triggers the immune system to be more at the ready in order to effectively attack more dangerous viruses. Hopefully, research can help us figure out whats happening so that it can be useful in treatment, she says.
According to Heimdal, cell cultures have previously shown that rhinovirus has this effect on SARS-CoV-2, but this is the first time the effect has been detected in patients.
Viruses change all the time, but it is rare for this to mean very much
Theres less room for new variants now that the population is starting to be so well immunized. Viruses change all the time, but its rare for very much to come of it. The coronavirus is also inherently limited in what it can come up with, Heimdal says.
Overall, the degree of immunity in the population is more important than which variant happens to have gained the greatest foothold, she says.
Heimdal believes indications are numerous that SARS-CoV-2 will resemble prior coronavirus variants. For children, this means that a lot of them will be infected annually, but the vast majority will only experience a mild cold.
A handful of kids could have serious enough symptoms to require being hospitalized, but overall in far lower numbers than for the RS virus and rhinovirus.
The PhD candidate's assessment is that the RS virus will probably dominate over SARS-CoV-2, while the combination of coronavirus and rhinovirus may conceivably cause milder symptoms.
Heimdal's dissertation is part of the respiratory project Childhood Airway Infection Research Group in the Childrens Clinic, Department of Medical Microbiology at St. Olavs Hospital and at NTNUs Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine.
The first time the coronavirus was detected in humans was in the 1960s, when two different viruses were identified. A new and dangerous coronavirus SARS-CoV emerged in China in 2002-2003. The ensuing epidemic never reached Scandinavia, and the virus appears to have disappeared. In the wake of the SARS epidemic, two more coronaviruses were detected.
MERS-CoV, the sixth version, appeared in the Middle East in 2012. The disease can cause serious lung disease, but has not spread outside the Middle East.
The seventh coronavirus that we have all become well acquainted with as SARS-CoV-2 , and the resulting disease COVID-19, struck in 2019. The virus spread around the world at breakneck speed.
The four common coronaviruses that recur year after year are the "descendants" of prior pandemics. No one knows for sure when they originated. It is suspected that the Russian flu in 1889 might have been a coronavirus epidemic, says Heimdal.
Reference:
Heimdal, Inger et al., Hospitalized Children With Common Human Coronavirus Clinical Impact of Codetected Respiratory Syncytial Virus and Rhinovirus, The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.March 2022 - Volume 41 - Issue 3 - p e95-e101 doi: 10.1097/INF.0000000000003433
The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal
Data/statistical analysis
People
Hospitalized Children With Common Human Coronavirus Clinical Impact of Codetected Respiratory Syncytial Virus and Rhinovirus
1-Mar-2022
Multiple teams around the world have recently proposed another thing that makes omicron special: The variant may not use the same entry route into cells that earlier versions of the virus use.
There are two major ways the coronavirus can enter cells. Both start with grabbing ACE2. In the direct route, a scissorslike protein called TMPRSS2 snips away part of the spike protein, revealing a portion that allows the virus to fuse with human cells and immediately dump its RNA inside to make new viruses. That is the way all previous versions of the SARS-CoV-2 have entered human cells.
But omicron may take a back door through a compartment inside the cell membrane called an endosome. There, a different scissorslike protein called cathepsin L cleaves the spike protein to allow the virus to dump its payload into the cell.
Omicron doesnt use the TMPRSS2 pathway efficiently and relies more on cathepsin L to get into cells, two groups of researchers independently reported February 1 in Nature. As a result, omicron doesnt fuse as well with cell membranes as delta does, those teams and other preliminary reports suggest.
That could seem like a handicap. But for omicron, it may be a good thing, Liu of Ohio State says. While the virus needs to fuse with cell membranes to get inside and replicate, too much fusibility may lead cells to merge with each other and die, he says. That would leave the virus with nowhere to copy itself.
Omicron may have struck the perfect balance between being fusible enough to enter cells, but not enough to kill its host, he says. This characteristic may also make omicron less likely to cause severe disease.
Once in the endosome, though, the viruses come up against a gang of protein guards called IFTIMs that block entry. But both delta and omicron have that problem licked: They breeze past those backdoor guards, researchers in the United Kingdom reported January 3 at bioRxiv.org.
Still, some researchers are not convinced that omicron uses the endosome back door into cells. In mimics of human airways grown in lab dishes, omicron used the direct route, but may be using a different and still unknown set of scissors than TMPRSS2, Bart Haagmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues reported January 20 at bioRxiv.org.
Haagmans team infected various types of cells with omicron, delta or earlier versions of the coronavirus. In the first couple of days of infection, omicron infected more cells than delta did, and replicated faster, giving omicron a competitive edge.
Omicron was able to infect cells that dont have an endosome back door but do have TMPRSS2. It infects these cells much less efficiently than earlier versions of virus do. In another experiment, a chemical that blocks cutting by TMPRSS2 and other similar scissors proteins stopped omicron from breaking into cells, suggesting that some sort of spike cutter is still needed. Together, those results indicate that omicron uses TMPRSS2 inefficiently and might use different scissors all together, the researchers conclude. Those unknown scissors arent on lung cells, as omicron has a hard time breaking into those cells in lab dishes, the team found. That work is still preliminary, Haagmans stresses, and it is difficult to predict from studies of cells grown in lab dishes how the virus will behave in humans.
Acharyas group sees another possibility: Omicron may not need scissors to trim it before it can enter cells. Some of omicrons mutations may expose the fusion peptide portion of the spike responsible for melding the virus with cells. Its possible that omicron could fuse directly with cells without being snipped, she speculates.
Omicron may use multiple routes for cell entry, depending on which type of cell it is infecting and what host proteins are available, Liu says. Its mixed. Its not one or the other, he says. Using different scissors or entry routes would allow omicron to break into potentially more types of cells than other versions of the virus could crack.
But the entry point may not matter as much as other of omicrons characteristics, Liu says. My take is that the major reason that this [version of the] virus spreads so fast is because it evades antibody protection.
As omicron took over globally, it quickly became obvious that the variant could slip past antibodies and patrolling immune cells. Unvaccinated people remained the most likely to get infected, with 3,230.1 of every 100,000 unvaccinated people developing a case of COVID-19 at the height of the omicron peak on January 8, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But a startling 1,467.31 of every 100,000 fully vaccinated people also got breakthrough infections at that time. And fully vaccinated people who got a booster dose were still being infected at a rate of 1,053.6 for every 100,000 people on January 8. That far exceeds even slippery deltas peak rate of 699.12 of every 100,000 unvaccinated and 140.8 of every 100,000 fully vaccinated people on August 28.
A study of the Moderna vaccines effectiveness conducted at Kaiser Permanente Southern California in December found that two doses of the mRNA vaccine were about 80 percent effective at protecting against delta infection from 14 to 90 days after inoculation. That effectiveness slipped to 68.9 percent for people three to six months out from their second shot. A booster shot raised the effectiveness against delta infection back to nearly 94 percent, though it dipped to 86 percent after two months. Both two and three doses of the vaccine gave better than 99 percent protection against hospitalization from delta, researchers reported February 21 in Nature Medicine.
Contrast those figures with omicron. Two doses of Modernas vaccine were 44 percent effective at preventing omicron infection from 14 to 90 days after getting the shot, quickly dipping to 23.5 effectiveness in the three- to six-month period after getting jabbed. A booster shot brought the effectiveness against omicron infection up to 71.6 percent for about two months, after which it declined to 47.4 percent. Against hospitalization from omicron, two doses were 84.5 percent effective. A booster dose brought effectiveness against hospitalization back above 99 percent.
How did omicron manage to get past the highly effective vaccine? The variant swapped out or is missing some of the spots on the spike protein where antibodies latch on to other variants, multiple studies show. And new data that hasnt yet been vetted by peer-review may suggest other reasons omicron is so sneaky.
First, the variants spike protein has that closed-fist stance that protects its ACE2-grabbing bits from antibodies. It has also changed shape slightly to tuck away other spots where antibodies can bind, helping the protein escape from the immune system, Acharya and colleagues found. For instance, one popular hitching post for antibodies is called the N-terminal domain, but there are so many mutations that, omicron has completely destroyed the N-terminal domain for antibodies. Nothing binds there, she says.
Another evasion tactic: Omicron is especially good at spreading from cell to cell where the immune system cant catch it as easily as when it is outside of cells, Liu and colleagues reported December 20 at bioRxiv.org. Despite not being good at fusing cells together, the variant is nearly 5 times better at cell-to-cell spread than an early version of the virus.
Plus, the same electric charge that helps omicrons receptor binding domain to hold ACE2 may repel antibodies, the New York University researchers found. The team tested a handful of monoclonal antibodies taken from people who had recovered from COVID-19 early in the pandemic. Just like the omicron spike protein, those antibodies all carried positive electrical charges, which may act like a force field keeping antibodies away from the spike protein.
A strategically placed sugar molecule stuck to the receptor binding domain may also obscure the spike protein from immune system attack, researchers at the University of WisconsinMadison reported February 10 at bioRxiv.org.
About the only good news about omicron is that it is less likely than the delta variant to cause severe disease. It is definitely less virulent than delta, says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
But there are challenges to pinpointing just how dangerous omicron may be, Hanage and Harvard colleague Roby Bhattacharyya discussed February 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Hospitals full of COVID-19 patients infected with omicron attest that the variant still has teeth and can cause severe illness or kill people. While vaccines and immunity from prior or breakthrough infections may blunt omicrons edge, its increased infectiousness and slipperiness may offset its reduced nastiness.
Even so, you would definitely rather have 750,000 daily cases of omicron than delta, because delta would be much worse, Hanage says. For instance, the risk of dying from omicron is about 60 percent lower than the risk of death from a delta infection, the United Kingdoms Health Security Agency reported February 11.
One reason for omicrons relative mildness may be that it doesnt replicate as well in lung cells as it does in the airways that feed the lungs, researchers in Hong Kong reported February 1 in Nature. That finding, initially reported in December, has also been confirmed with preliminary work from Haagmans and others.
Another omicron Achilles heel may be that it triggers interferon responses, the frontline of the immune systems antiviral defenses, a study published January 21 in Cell Research found.
Gan of New York University speculates that omicrons positive charge may cause the viral variant to get trapped in negatively charged mucus more easily than previous variants were.
Still, omicron can be dangerous in a number of ways, including landing vulnerable people in the hospital and sickening large numbers of hospital staff at the same time, Hanage says. It is definitely milder, but thats not a reason to chill.
Add to that the fact that a sibling version of omicron called BA.2, which has some different mutations from the original omicron, has now burst on the scene. BA.2 seems to be slightly more infectious than the original version. Though cases of omicron are falling overall, BA.2s proportion of those cases is growing, and some experts warn that it could prolong the omicron outbreak or lead to another wave of infections.
This story was originally published by Science News, a nonprofit independent news organization.
The BA.2 variant of COVID-19, also known as stealth omicron, has become the dominant variant of the coronavirus around the world, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The omicron subvariant now accounts for 75% of coronavirus cases globally.
This is the most transmissible variant we have seen of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to date, said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHOs COVID-19 lead.
The BA.2 variant has driven a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases in several countries around the world over the past few weeks, including China, Australia and much of Europe.
These increases are occurring despite reductions in testing in some countries, which means the cases were seeing are just the tip of the iceberg, said WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Will the United States see a spike in COVID-19 from the BA.2 variant of omicron?
BA.2 has yet to become dominant in the U.S. It currently accounts for about 23% of COVID-19 cases nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The fact that we saw such a huge spike from BA.1, the other omicron subvariant, just a couple of months ago may protect us from another massive surge, experts say. One recent model estimated 73% of Americans had immunity to the omicron variant because so many were exposed between December and February.
Still, that would mean about 27% of Americans are not immune nearly 90 million people.
Those who havent gotten a COVID booster shot and people over 65 are especially vulnerable.
Its that group thats most problematic when it comes to the severe critical and fatal disease. It doesnt mean that younger folks dont wind up in the hospital at times; its just not at the same rate, Jeffrey Shaman, of Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Public Health, told CNN.
Pfizer is seeking authorization to offer a fourth shot of its vaccine to seniors to boost their protection.
In the meantime, the CDC advises everyone stay up to date on their COVID vaccine. Whether or not youre up to date depends on your age, health conditions, the type of COVID shot you got, and how long its been since your last dose.
As long as the virus continued to circulate, it will continue to spawn new variants some of which could prove more contagious, more immune-evasive, or more deadly.
The virus will pick up pockets of susceptibility and will survive in those pockets for months and months until another pocket of susceptibility opens up, said Dr. Michael Ryan, a WHO executive director. This is how viruses work. They establish themselves within a community and theyll move quickly to the next community if its unprotected.
New coronavirus surges are now under way in Western Europe and Asia as the BA.2 subvariant proves that it is more contagious than its cousin Omicron. Germany, France and the United Kingdom, all countries with vaccination rates similar to those in the United States, have seen significant increases in coronavirus activity in the first few weeks of March.
So far, Americas overall coronavirus numbers are still dropping, but many say they expect that to change soon.
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Experts such as Justin Meyer, an evolutionary biologist at UC San Diego who has studied the early origins of SARS-COV-2, and many other viruses, said there is no reason to think it will stay that way. Previous variants have tended to rise first in Europe before taking off in the continental U.S.
We have seen all of these steps happen in the past few weeks, and I think soon cases in the U.S. will begin to increase, just like they did for the Delta and Omicron waves, Meyer said.
This time around, those who know where to look are likely to detect the next surge before local case numbers spike.
San Diego, through a collaborative project run by researchers at UC San Diego, has more than a year of experience analyzing wastewater samples drawn from a few key locations across the region, with the longest-running public effort outside the university campus itself regularly testing effluent collected from a sewage plant in Point Loma. The county health department has also allocated $4.6 million to the Safer at School Early Alert System, which includes sampling equipment at some public schools.
For the Delta and Omicron waves, the amount of virus particles present in those samples tracked closely with local case rates. But the amount of virus detected in samples termed the viral load increased a week or more before the number of positive test results jumped.
Wastewater, then, appears to be a kind of early warning system for a return to higher levels of coronavirus activity.
Some are starting to view wastewater statistics as the new trigger for changing the pandemic response, with UC San Diego Health announcing last week that the metric will be the most closely watched in its new normal operations plan that takes effect Monday.
With the number of viral copies detected in the regions most recent wastewater sample on March 8 at 1.2 million, down precipitously from the peak of 47.6 million on Jan. 9, the university will operate under the assumption that transmission is currently low.
Relying mainly on positive test results to gauge the pandemics current pace, noted Dr. Christopher Longhurst, the health systems medical director, can provide an incomplete picture, given that not everyone in the community has equal access to testing. And with home testing now significantly more available and popular than it was in previous years, many positive results are never sent to public health departments for inclusion in regular coronavirus reporting.
For us here in San Diego, where we do have very good wastewater testing, there is no reason for us not to prioritize wastewater, from my standpoint, Longhurst said in an interview last week.
But that perspective is not necessarily universal.
Scripps Health, Sharp HealthCare and Kaiser Permanente San Diego, the regions three largest health care systems, said in statements last week that they are not yet ready to declare that viral load detected in wastewater will be the key sentinel indicator upon which their pandemic responses turn.
But all also said they are already using the information, but case rates are still likely to be a main factor in deciding whether to relax or increase COVID-related precautions such as whether to test patients before surgeries, allow indoor dining in cafeterias or congregating in shared spaces such as waiting rooms.
Dr. Ghazala Sharieff, chief medical officer of acute care and clinical excellence at Scripps Health, said that Scripps is still working on a full operational plan that will dictate when the organizations pandemic posture should change. Scripps, she said, is not yet ready to pull back on inpatient coronavirus testing and other factors.
The main trigger for rolling back current restrictions, such as those requiring no more than two visitors per patient, she said, is less than 1 percent of tests coming back positive among Scripps patients. Currently, the positivity rate for all Scripps patients, she said, stands at about 2.6 percent.
Scripps, Sharieff said, did not want to pull back on its COVID-19 precautions too quickly, given the large number of patients it has served in the recent surge.
When you see what weve seen, there is no rush to relax, Sharieff said.
Wastewater, she said, will be part of deciding when restrictions might need to change, but the approach is likely to take into account many factors.
Statewide, there seems to be a significant move toward wastewater monitoring. Californias recently released SMARTER plan, which is intended to provide a guide for maintaining readiness when viral activity drops but does not entirely disappear, calls for maintaining wastewater surveillance in all regions and sequencing at least 10 percent of positive cases to determine what variants are moving through communities.
In an emailed response, the California Department of Public Health clarified that wastewater is to complement traditional case surveillance for COVID-19 already in place in each county.
CDPH plans to expand wastewater surveillance, including through partnerships, to have representation from all regions of California, including areas that currently do not have wastewater surveillance, the department said.
Meanwhile, case rates still show that the world is not finished with this virus.
Real-time statistics compiled by Our World in Data, a nonprofit information analysis collaborative run by researchers at the University of Oxford, show that Germany, France and the United Kingdom saw local coronavirus activity increase by an average of 625 cases per million residents from March 1 through St. Patricks Day. Numbers have not yet turned decisively upward in the United States. According the the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the seven-day average of cases fell to 30,040 Wednesday compared to 55,125 on March 1.
What kind of impact would a new surge have locally? The fact that so many got sick during the recent holiday surge will definitely play a role because BA.2 is so similar to its predecessor.
Given how many people were infected by (Omicron), the U.S. population should have a lot of protection and hospitalizations will likely be reduced compared to the first Omicron wave, Meyer said. That being said, its important to get vaccinated and boosted to maintain high levels of protection.
The NHS in England will on Monday start giving a second booster vaccine to millions of people who are at higher risk from Covid-19 to help combat the latest resurgence in infections.
Over-75s, care home residents and those who are immunocompromised 5 million in all will be contacted by the NHS and then be able to book an appointment online or by calling 119.
The new rollout of booster jabs comes after the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised the government last month that those three at-risk groups should be offered a top-up because the immunity from their first booster was waning.
Cases of Covid are rising again, with 90,349 cases recorded on Friday across the UK, according to official figures, more than double the 39,000 seen on 1 March. However, the true number of infections is higher. The Office for National Statistics estimates that one in 20 people in England had Covid in the week up to 12 March.
The number of people in UK hospitals with Covid had risen to 14,671 by last Thursday.
Experts believe the increase is linked to people spending more time at their work premises, greater socialisation in bars and other venues and the lifting of restrictions.
Provision of the second boosters began in Scotland on 7 March and in Wales last week. England will follow suit from Monday when several hundred sites including high street pharmacies, vaccination centres and hospitals start delivering the jabs.
Dr Nikki Kanani, a GP who is the deputy lead for the NHS vaccination programme, said: Sadly, we are still seeing large numbers of people seriously unwell in hospital with Covid, so it remains vital that those most at risk come forward when they are invited to do so.
Ruth Rankine, the director of primary care at the NHS Confederation, which represents groups of GP surgeries, also urged those who are eligible to get their top-up. As we learn to live with Covid-19, and in the face of the new dominant BA.2 variant, we must use all the tools in our arsenal, of which vaccination has been the most important, she said.
When the JCVI recommended the spring booster programme last month to protect the most vulnerable, the committee said it would also set out advice on an autumn top-up campaign, but gave no details.
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, hinted last week that it would encompass many more people than those covered by the spring campaign. [The JCVIs] most recent advice is that they think that towards the end of this year, maybe in the autumn, there will be a need to give a lot more people a boost, he said.
HAGERSTOWN, Md. As dusk settled over the racetrack on the edge of town, a truck driver stood on a trailer being used as a makeshift stage and held forth on the sins of the politicians in the nations capital, an hour and a halfs drive southeast.
Lock them up! a man yelled from the crowd of several hundred.
Its all or nothing! called out another, waving a large American flag.
Tracy Graham, a Mary Kay consultant from Suffolk, Va., held her own flag neatly folded in her hands. She had driven five hours to the Hagerstown Speedway to show her support for the Peoples Convoy, a demonstration against Covid-19 vaccine mandates modeled on the one that occupied Canadas capital city of Ottawa for weeks.
But for Mrs. Graham, a Republican who is active in local politics, the American convoy was about far more than Covid restrictions. Mask and vaccine mandates were just one example of how our freedoms have been coming down brick by brick over time, she said. Shed asked the truckers to sign her flag and was thinking about framing it when she returned home. This is a part of history, she said.
Historical and biblical allusions are tossed around loosely at the convoys speedway headquarters. Organizers have compared the convoys weathering of a snowstorm last weekend to the Continental Armys winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pa., and their caravans around the Washington Beltway, which they are circuiting daily, to the Israelites marches around Jericho.
But whether the convoy can match its own aspirations remains uncertain. The 100 or so trucks plus an entourage of pickups, cars and camper vans that head off toward Washington daily have neither matched the scale of the Canadians city-paralyzing demonstration, which drew thousands of trucks at its peak, nor summoned the same media attention.
For the moment, the protest is perhaps most notable as a window onto the evolution of the American right in the wake of Donald J. Trumps presidency, and one that Republican politicians are watching. Although organizers insist that their demonstration is nonpartisan and narrowly focused on Covid restrictions, in practice, it is animated by a broad, familiar array of conservative and right-wing issues and grievances. Complaints about schools mix with far-right conspiracy theories and refusal to accept the 2020 election results.
This worldview is increasingly incorporating ideas from the anti-vaccine movement, some of them preceding the Covid outbreak, even as the virus has receded and Covid restrictions have eased.
This week, one side of the stage was piled with books written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist; while near the other, a vendor sold stickers saying WHEN I DIE DONT LET ME VOTE DEMOCRAT. On Wednesday evening, Dr. Paul Alexander, a former official in Mr. Trumps Health and Human Services Department who has become a prominent personality in the anti-mandate movement, called for President Biden to pardon the defendants facing charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.
On Friday, organizers yielded the microphone briefly to a motorcyclist in leather chaps, who exhorted the mostly white crowd to strip the Black Lives Matter slogan from a street near the White House where it has been painted in giant letters. Were going to take it back, he declared.
Banners with symbols of the Three Percenters, an armed extremist movement, have been flown from some trucks in the convoy. Two young men in the attire of the Proud Boys, the far-right organization, were milling around the camp on a recent morning.
Asked in interviews what had drawn them to the protest, demonstrators spoke of ending a national emergency order Mr. Biden had extended in February, as well as a handful of remaining federal restrictions vaccine requirements for military service members, for instance, and mask requirements on airplanes.
But most of the dozen demonstrators interviewed also enumerated other motivations, from concern over gun rights and abortion to the Trump-aligned QAnon conspiracy theory. Not all of them identified as Republicans, but all who disclosed how they voted in 2020 had supported Mr. Trump, and said they believed or at least suspected that the election had been rigged against him.
Well be satisfied when Bidens gone, when Harris is gone and Pelosis gone, Curt Martin, a 73-year-old truck driver from upstate New York, said. When theyre gone, well be happy. Well go home. But not until then.
Besides an end to the emergency order, the convoy is calling for an investigation into Covid-19s origins and the federal response, and is encouraging state-level protests against local restrictions.
We are still looking for accountability, Brian Brase, a convoy organizer and its most visible spokesman, said.
These are narrower aims than the Canadian protest, befitting a country where there are relatively few Covid mandates left to protest against. In the United States, unlike Canada, federal vaccine mandates for private employers were never implemented and few state-level Covid restrictions remain.
When the convoy first arrived after a cross-country trip from California on March 4, its organizers avoided trying to shut down Washington as the Canadian demonstrators had Ottawa, opting instead for relatively orderly laps around the Beltway. When these failed to make any great impression, drivers began making forays into the citys heart, with noisy excursions down residential streets, drawing the attention of law enforcement and, increasingly, angering residents.
Meanwhile, some Republican politicians and candidates have come to pay their respects at the speedway camp, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator and candidate for governor who chartered buses to Mr. Trumps Jan. 6 rally preceding the storming of the Capitol. At least nine other Republican senators and congressmen have met with the organizers during their visits to Capitol Hill.
Some of these meetings were arranged by Axiom Strategies, a Republican consulting firm whose principals have worked for Mr. Cruz and Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and offered its services pro bono to connect the convoy with Republican politicians.
This is one of the major political movements in America right now, said Matt Wolking, Axioms vice president for communications.
Wolking and other Republican strategists argue that Covid restrictions remain a Democratic vulnerability in 2022, despite the few policies still in place. The Biden administrations vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers was blocked by the Supreme Court in January, and in early February, Democratic governors rushed to repeal their states indoor mask mandates, leaving only Hawaii with such a mandate in place. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has since eased mask guidelines as the spike in infections from the Omicron variant has largely abated.
I think the voters have moved on, said Brian Stryker, a partner at Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm. The Republicans very much will look like they are looking backward and talking about something voters dont really care about.
Convoy organizers insist they will continue demonstrating until their demands are met, and the Hagerstown encampment has taken on an air of increasing permanence. There have been barbecues, campfires and, on Wednesday morning, a wedding.
Along the gravel entrance road to the racetrack, Sherrie Campbell, a retired truck driver from Dallas, stood alongside her black Chevy Silverado, the exterior of which was painted with slogans related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory about the existence of a global pedophilic cabal that includes Democratic leaders. References to QAnon have appeared on a number of convoy vehicles. One truck pulled a trailer decorated with an immense American-flag-patterned skull topped by Mr. Trumps distinctive hair, alongside the phrase, Q Sent Me.
Since arriving in Hagerstown, Ms. Campbell has been sleeping in the back seat of her trucks extended cab, on a bedroll covered with an American flag-patterned bedspread. She said she would be staying with the convoy until it had achieved the aim of getting our freedom back.
People show up here because this is kind of the last stand of hope, said Tyler Lee, 34, a real estate investor who is running for Congress as a Republican in a heavily Democratic congressional district in North Carolina. Mr. Lee had driven from Charlotte, N.C., to meet the convoy in Adelanto, Calif., in February and traveled with it ever since.
He gave Mr. Cruz credit for his visit to the convoy site. But he thought politicians should spend more time at the camp, perhaps even spend the night as he himself did.
You can get a real pulse of what is going on in America, he said.
As the speedway occupation seemed to stretch ahead indefinitely, however, Mr. Lee was eyeing the calendar. His primary, on May 17, was coming up soon.
Ive committed to these guys, he said. Still, Im taking it day by day, he said. Because I do have a campaign to run.
