Illustration: Elena Scotti (Photos: Shutterstock)
I sometimes think back to a phone call with a friend in the spring of 2020. Cases were down and pundits were optimistic: it seemed genuinely possible that, by mid-summer, all this would finally be over. These last two months, I said to my friendwill they seem, from summers vantage, like a weird dream? When, three months hence, the bars were thronged and the mask factories wound down, what would we do with the memory of spring? To which my friend said something like: who knows, hard to say. And then we talked about something else. And then the pandemic continued for another eighteen months. And now here we are, and its still the pandemic, and while things are infinitely better than they were a year ago, the fact is that were still wearing masks on the subway. So: when, exactly, can we definitely claim tove licked this thing? What metrics, what facts on the ground, will determine when we can fully return to normal? For this weeks Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Associate Professor, Epidemiology, University of Michigan
The uncertainty is really too large to put any kind of specific date on it, although its pretty clear that we still have a long way to go. In terms of how it endsas much as I would love to see us reach COVID zero, at this point I would expect were headed toward endemic, probably seasonal transmission, where most people have been vaccinated or have some degree of immunity due to previous infection and so infections tend to be less severe. This makes sticking with prevention strategies like masking and getting vaccinated (and expanding global vaccine access!) so important to reducing transmission and strain on healthcare systems, to minimize the toll of deaths and severe outcomes incurred on the way to Covid-19 becoming endemic.
When it comes to criteria, Id expect the pandemic to be thought of as over when cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to Covid-19 are consistently down to relatively low, manageable levels. In terms of numbers, it will probably vary from country to country, but one might see something similar to what we would normally see from flu, which causes an estimated 12,000-61,000 deaths per year in the US (compared to the 375,000 deaths caused by COVID-19 in the US in 2020, and around 295,000 more so far in 2021).
Its important to underscore that different places will probably reach the end of the pandemic at different times (based on vaccine access/uptake, social distancing and other mitigation measures, etc.), and that even when the pandemic is over, we will still have to grapple with many of its longer term effectswhether thats Long Covid, mental health impacts, issues of misinformation and mistrust, or economic aftereffects.
Emergency Physician and Public Health Professor at George Washington University, and the author of Lifelines: A Doctors Journey in the Fight for Public Health
I dont think we, as a society, have defined what it would mean for the pandemic to be over. Will it be over when there are no more cases of Covid-19? Will it be over when the levels of hospitalization are such that we no longer worry about overwhelming our healthcare system? Will it be over when the number of deaths falls below a certain number? Regardless, I think most people would agree that we are nowhere near the threshold below which Covid-19, the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes, is no longer an urgent concern. I dont think were going to attain that level of stability any time soon. Certainly, its not going to happen while young children are still ineligible for the vaccine; nor while, around the world there are many, including the most vulnerable among us, who do not have access to the vaccine. At some point, we will have to reach a new understanding of what it might mean for this pandemic to reach a steady state, where its no longer top of mind in every one of our decisions. But were nowhere near that point now.
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Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security whose expertise is in infectious diseases, critical care (ICU) and emergency medicine
That pandemic will be over in a global sense when most nations of the world are able to treat Covid-19 like other respiratory viruses they deal with year in and year out. SARS-CoV2 is an efficiently spreading respiratory virus with a wide spectrum of symptoms that circulates in an animal hostit cannot be eliminated or eradicated. The goal is to remove its ability to cause widespread levels of severe disease, hospitalization, and death. This is best achieved by vaccinating those at highest risk for complications so cases are decoupled from hospitalizations but there will always be a baseline level of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. Natural immunity post-infection also plays a significant role as well but is not the optimal way to tame the virus. The pandemic will eventually transition to a state of endemicity and the post-pandemic world will be one in which Covid-19 still exists but in a much more manageable setting.
Professor and Chair of Epidemiology at UC Berkeley
The honest answer is that no one can know for certain, partly because of the unknown future regarding variants that can escape vaccine-induced protection, and partly because it remains unclear when we will get a higher proportion of the worlds population vaccinated. But the future is most likely one in which SARS-CoV-2 regularly circulates in the human population and becomes more of an endemic infection/disease, with perhaps a seasonal pattern a la influenza. I think that scenario wont be with us for at least another 12-18 months.
Dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health and Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University
The job of producing enough vaccine, and getting it into everybodys arms, while outpacing the virus ability to mutateits not a quick one. I think it will be at least a year until the pandemic ends, and thats being extremely optimistic. The inequities involved in vaccine production, and the degree of resistance were seeing to vaccination, means it could be a couple of years before this actually concludes.
Its humbling. In the first place, our knowledge of coronaviruses simply wasnt as good as it should have been. We did not predict how rapidly this could mutate. Meanwhile, our knowledge of human behavior was, as were learning, imperfect. We did not foresee the levels of miscommunication wed be faced with, nor the lack of scientific literacy. People know that some of the vaccines use mRNA but if you dont know enough about genetics or the science involved that can just end up being scary rather than reassuring. People start going off onto tangentswell, what does that do to you?without understanding how genetics work. Its understandable to me that people have those concerns or fears, but this is leading to a tremendous amount of vaccine hesitancy. That is too bad because the science tells us that mRNA doesnt alter the bodys DNA in any way.
Then of course theres the problem with developing a vaccine for children, which has turned out to be more daunting than I, as a pediatrician, ever thought it could be. The virus is still circulating among kids, and thats keeping this pandemic alive, because as long as kids are circulating the virus, were going to see more breakthrough infections in the adults around them.
Well know this pandemic is over when were no longer observing excessive rates of death due to Covid on a daily basisin the whole world, not just the US. The one thing we know is that this pandemic will not be over as long as Covid is circulating somewhere in the world. That doesnt mean we have to eliminate every case. What we might end up with is a situation wherethrough immunity of the population, or mutation, or (more likely) boththe virus ends up being more like the cold or the annual influenza, where we certainly have to pay attention to it, perhaps as a seasonal transmission every winter, and have to vaccinate people every year, but we no longer have these very high rates of mortality.
Do you have a question for Giz Asks? Email us at tipbox@gizmodo.com.
Boston MarathonRunners make their way to the finish line down Boylston Street during the 125th Boston Marathon. Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
The Boston Athletic Association required all participants in the 2021 Boston Marathon to be either fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or test negative ahead of the race Monday and it appears the vast majority chose the first option.
BAA CEO Tom Grilk said Monday on WBZ that 93 percent of the runners Monday have been vaccinated, and almost all the others tested negative for COVID-19. According to Grilk, 0.3 percent of those tested had positive results, barring them from the race.
Grilks comments suggest roughly 1,400 of the 20,000-person field were not vaccinated, and that only a handful of participants were denied entry due to positive results (those disqualified for a positive COVID-19 test get their entry fee refunded).
According to the BAAs website, 95 percent of marathon volunteers have also been vaccinated, including 100 percent of medical volunteers.
The vaccination requirement was just one of several safety protocols implemented to ensure the first in-person Boston Marathon of the pandemic felt safe to participants, spectators, and local residents, according to Grilk. The field was also pared down by more than a third to 20,000 participants, and organizers instituted a rolling start to limit mingling and crowding.
Grilk said Monday that social distancing was their core COVID-19 mitigation focus.
It is safer, Grilk said, adding that it also looks safer.
We wanted people who live around here to have the sense that their welfare was as much in our minds as anybody elses, he said.
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Oct 6 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc has been accused of violating Colorado state law by failing to pay warehouse workers for time spent undergoing COVID-19 screenings before clocking in at work.
Jennifer Vincenzetti, who worked at two Amazon warehouses in Colorado Springs, filed a proposed class action in Colorado federal court on Tuesday claiming the company made workers wait in long lines to answer questions and have their temperatures checked.
Seattle-based Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The proposed class includes more than 10,000 people at five Colorado warehouses.
"Amazon appears fine making efforts to keep its workers safe, so long as the workers are the ones footing the bill," David Seligman of nonprofit Towards Justice, which brought the suit, said in a statement.
The complaint says that beginning in March 2020 Amazon required employees at Colorado warehouses to arrive early, wait in lines outside the facilities, and then answer questions and check their temperature once they were inside. The process generally took 20 to 60 minutes, according to the lawsuit.
That time is compensable under Colorado law, which says workers must be paid when they are required to be on their employer's premises or on duty, according to the suit.
Amazon has argued in a similar lawsuit in California federal court that because the screenings primarily benefit workers, they do not amount to compensable time under federal wage law.
Walmart has raised the same defense in a proposed class action in Arizona federal court claiming the retail giant's failure to pay employees for time spent in COVID screenings violated state law.
Reporting by Daniel Wiessner;Editing by Noeleen Walder
Dan Wiessner (@danwiessner) reports on labor and employment and immigration law, including litigation and policy making. He can be reached at daniel.wiessner@thomsonreuters.com.
As the virus spread, more mutations sprang up, giving rise to even more transmissible variants. First came Alpha, which was about 50 percent more infectious than the original virus, and soon Delta, which was, in turn, roughly 50 percent more infectious than Alpha.
Now were basically in a Delta pandemic, said Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University. So another surge, another spread of a slightly better variant.
Although some experts were surprised to see the hyperinfectious variant, which has more than a dozen notable mutations, emerge so quickly, the appearance of more transmissible variants is textbook viral evolution.
Its hard to imagine that the virus is going to pop into a new species perfectly formed for that species, said Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. Its bound to do some adaptation.
But scientists dont expect this process to continue forever.
There are likely to be some basic biological limits on just how infectious a particular virus can become, based on its intrinsic properties. Viruses that are well adapted to humans, such as measles and the seasonal influenza, are not constantly becoming more infectious, Dr. Bloom noted.
It is not entirely clear what the constraints on transmissibility are, he added, but at the very least, the new coronavirus cannot replicate infinitely fast or travel infinitely far.
Transmission requires one person to somehow exhale or cough or breathe out the virus, and it to land in someone elses airway and infect them, Dr. Bloom said. There are just limits to that process. Its never going to be the case that Im sitting here in my office, and Im giving it to someone on the other side of Seattle, right?
There are twelve hundred different mutations between the genomes of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2scattered variations that demonstrate the messiness of evolution. The number and distribution of these mutations are too large for RaTG13 to be the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2; they split from a common ancestor at least twenty years ago. But its genetic proximity means we should look for the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 in locations where relatives like RaTG13 are found, Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me in September. At this point, the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are known to have existed in two locations: bat caves in Yunnan, and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Geography aside, the nature of the experiments undertaken by the W.I.V. and its partners has raised concerns. In 2015, Shi was a co-author on a groundbreaking study, in Nature, with Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina. Through the use of pioneering genetic technology, Baric examined which viral structures could give a coronavirus the ability to infect humans. The work involved synthesizing what is known as a chimeric virus, named for the mythical beast with its parts taken from various animals; in this case, a modified clone of SARS was combined with a spike protein taken from one of the bat coronaviruses that Shi had discovered in Yunnan.
Their research took place during a fraught time for virologists. Four years earlier, a Dutch scientist named Ron Fouchier decided to see if he could make the lethal avian influenza virus, H5N1, more transmissible. After failing to genetically rengineer the virus, Fouchier turned to a classic method: he passaged the virus through live ferrets repeatedly, forcing the virus to evolve in its new host. After ten rounds, the virus was airborne. He had created a pandemic-ready pathogen in his lab.
The experiment, which constituted a type of research known as gain-of-function, provoked alarm. There were high-level meetings, op-eds, and reports decrying such work as far riskier than it was valuable. In 2014, President Barack Obama mandated a pause on gain-of-function studies involving influenza, SARS, and MERS, until a new regulatory process could be created. Baric, however, was in the middle of his chimeric-virus experiment. He petitioned the N.I.H. biosecurity board, which granted him, and other researchers, an exemption from the pause.
When Baric tested the chimeric virus in a culture of human airway cells, its spike protein proved able to bind to the cell receptor ACE2, suggesting that the virus was now poised to jump species. In live mice, it caused disease. Given this unexpected outcome, Baric concluded, scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.
That didnt happen. Barics experiments, which the N.I.H. had determined were not gain-of-function, continued at the University of North Carolina. Shis lab developed its own platform for creating chimeric viruses. She crossed another bat coronavirus from Yunnannamed WIV1with clones of different novel spike proteins, and tested the creation in humanized mice. The viruses quickly replicated. One made the mice emaciated, a sign of severe pathogenesis. What made this work especially risky was that WIV1 was already known to be potentially dangerous to humans. Baric himself had made this clear in a 2016 study titled SARS-Like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence.
Some of these experiments at the W.I.V. were funded by the U.S. government, according to Shis published papers, as well as N.I.H.-funded grant applications and progress reports obtained by the Intercept. In 2014, N.I.H. had awarded a New-York-based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance a five-year, $3.7-million grant, a portion of whichroughly six hundred thousand dollarswent to the W.I.V. Fauci and the N.I.H. have maintained that the W.I.V.s work, like Barics, did not qualify as gain-of-function research, and so did not violate the Obama-era pause. (The Trump Administration lifted the pause in 2017, after three years of workshops and deliberations across multiple agencies resulted in a new regulatory process.) Dont mislead people by saying we havent taken this seriously for years, Fauci told me, his voice rising. According to our definition, it was not gain-of-function, period. If you dont like the definition, lets change the definition.
In recent months, skeptics of natural origins have pointed to the fact that Shi was running her chimeric-virus experiments in a Biosafety Level 2 lab, which, compared to Biosafety Level 3, doesnt require the same precautions, such as full P.P.E., medical surveillance for researchers, mandatory biosafety cabinets, controlled airflow, and two sets of self-closing, locking doors. (Shi did conduct live-animal experiments in a BSL-3 lab at a separate facility.) Because they were working with novel bat viruses rather than viruses known to infect humans directly, the low biosecurity setting was in accordance with Chinese laws. But Susan Weiss, a coronavirus expert at the University of Pennsylvanias medical school, who co-authored a recent paper with Andersen and others that outlines the evidence for a natural origin, was surprised when I told her that they had been working in BSL-2. Thats not a good idea, she said.
Still, none of Shis documented work on chimeric viruses resulted in the creation of SARS-CoV-2. (If youre trying to say that that particular experiment could have led to SARS-CoV-2, thats completely impossible, Fauci said.) The chimeric viruses that the W.I.V. engineered are far from SARS-CoV-2 on the coronavirus family tree. According to Shi, the W.I.V. has only isolated and grown in culture three novel coronaviruses out of their nineteen thousand samples. What this chapter of her work demonstrates, however, is a high tolerance for risk. They were essentially playing Russian roulette with the virus that the worlds expert had labelled poised for human emergence, David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford, said. Its the willingness to manipulate them without due concern.
In January, the World Health Organization sent a team of international scientists to Wuhan to conduct the first phase of a search for SARS-CoV-2s origins. The groups report, published in March, ranked a zoonotic spilloverfrom a bat, through an intermediate animal, to a humanas the most likely origin pathway. They ruled a lab incident as extremely unlikely, dedicating just three of more than a hundred pages in the primary report to the theory. As Andersen frequently says when surveying the evidence, Anything is possible, but Im interested in whats plausible.
First, a natural origin has historic precedence. SARS spilled over from bats to civets at an urban market in November, 2002. MERS, which emerged in Saudi Arabia, in 2012, went from bats to camels to people. The civet was identified as the most probable source of SARS within four months of the outbreak; camels were identified within nine months of MERS. And yet, SARS-CoV-2s intermediate animalamong the only things, at this point, that could definitively prove that it did not originate in the Wuhan labshas not been found. Such a discovery is becoming less likely, too. As members of the W.H.O. mission wrote in an August letter to Nature, The window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China.
One member of the W.H.O. team was Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which is dedicated to mitigating the emergence of infectious diseases. Since the first SARS outbreak, he has been one of the W.I.V.s closest partners, facilitating the N.I.H. subcontracts and working extensively with Shi and her team in the field. He has unwaveringly vouched for Shi, and led the charge to call any suggestion of a lab accident a conspiracy theory. The problem with this lab-release hypothesis, he told me, is that it depends on a critical thing: that the virus was in the lab before it got out. But I know that that virus was not in the lab.
Daszak, a widely published disease ecologist, also knows that the diversity of viruses in nature is nearly limitless. Most recently, he and other EcoHealth scientists built a model analyzing how frequently coronaviruses might spill over from bats to people across southern China and southeast Asia. They overlaid the habitats of all twenty-three bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses with maps of human populations. Based on bat-human contact and antibody data, they estimated that roughly four hundred thousand people could be infected with SARS-related coronaviruses annually. People are getting exposed to them every year, Daszak told me. They may not know it. They may even get sick and die.
In other words, spillovers happen far more often than anyone realizes. People are exposed to bats when they shelter in caves, harvest bat guanothe worlds best fertilizerand hunt, butcher, and eat bats, which is a well-documented practice in various pockets across the region. These small villages are at the edge of disappearing forests, Kendra Phelps, a bat biologist with the EcoHealth Alliance and a co-author on the recent study, told me. Inside that forest is densely packed wildlife, which is super stressed by things like encroaching palm oil and rice monocultures. Stressed animals (just like us) are more likely to get sick and shed virus.
In their struggle to convince holdouts to get vaccinated against Covid, governments around the world are embracing vaccine mandates.
The push to get people vaccinated has largely shifted from offering incentives, like cash payouts or free drinks, to issuing mandates and restricting the access of the unvaccinated to many venues and activities.
Care to sip an espresso indoors at a cafe in Paris? You will need to provide proof of vaccination or a fresh negative coronavirus test, for which unvaccinated people will have to pay beginning on Oct. 15.
Want to work in settings like offices, factories, shops and restaurants in Italy? Starting later this month, you will need to have recently recovered from Covid-19, provide proof of having received at least one dose of a vaccine, or get a coronavirus test every two days. In areas of high coronavirus transmission in Greece, live music is returning indoors to restaurants and bars for a two-week trial, but the unvaccinated will not be admitted.
Italian and French officials announced their measures in July. Greece announced its shift last week. In early August, New York became the first U.S. city to require proof of vaccination for indoor dining, gyms and movie theaters.
Since then, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities have announced their own vaccine requirements to engage in public activities.
As the latest wave of infections has begun to wane around much of the U.S., President Bidens administration has increasingly turned to mandates, drawing fire in the process from many Republican leaders who perceive them as government overreach. On Thursday, he urged private employers to impose mandates of their own as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration works out the details of a vaccine or testing requirement for companies with more than 100 employers.
Vaccine mandates have sparked resentment and refusal to comply from the unvaccinated.
Frances restrictions spurred large protests this summer, but those protests have mostly cooled, and as of Oct. 7, 67 percent of the population was fully vaccinated, more than double the level from early July, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. An additional 8.3 percent were partly vaccinated as of Oct. 7.
Vaccine requirements remain politically toxic in some parts of the United States. Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have enacted rules that penalize businesses that require proof of vaccination and prohibit local governments from mandating such requirements.
On Monday, Mr. Abbott signed an executive order that broadened a previous ban on vaccine mandates by barring private companies from imposing them.
The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced, the governor said in a statement.
The A.C.L.U., on the other hand, has defended vaccine mandates, saying they protect the civil liberties the organization defends.
They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of color hit hard by the disease, David Cole, the national legal director of the A.C.L.U., and Daniel Mach, director of its program on freedom of religion and belief, wrote in a New York Times editorial in September.
Some organizations that encourage vaccinations feel that mandates could be counterproductive, like the Wyoming Hospital Association. Eric Boley, the associations president, said that vaccination was critical, especially for health workers, but that mandates could drive away staff that Wyomings hospitals urgently need.
"We still have a couple of months to go until this Delta wave sweeps across the country in a regionalized fashion and we are sort of done with it," said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the US Food and Drug Administration.
"You're starting to see an uptick in cases in the colder parts of the country and, as people are driven indoors without masks on, you'll start to see cases pick up," he said.
Still, an average of about 1,500 people died every day in the last week of Covid-19, according to JHU data.
Much of the national improvement can be attributed to southern states coming out of the worst of the variant surge, Gottlieb told CNN. But not all regions are faring so well. Numbers are ticking up in the West and Midwest, and it is still unclear how heavy the impact will be in the Northeast, he said.
Gottlieb has predicted the worst of it will be over for much of the country around Thanksgiving and that prevalence levels will decline around Christmas, but not all health officials are so certain.
"I'm not sure that we can predict at this time that we're not going to see a winter surge," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "I really think it's too early for us to celebrate and say that the worst is behind us."
Before that celebration, the US needs to keep the trajectory of cases, hospitalizations and deaths going down, a feat that depends on vaccinating more people, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday.
"We have about 68 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not yet vaccinated," said the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "We need the overwhelming proportion of those unvaccinated people to be vaccinated and then we can be quite confident that if we can do that, you will not see a resurgence."
"This really depends upon us and our ability to rise to the occasion and get people vaccinated," Fauci said.
Vaccines are key to accelerating through the pandemic
Vaccines, in addition to other tools like testing, are what will help bring the Covid-19 pandemic into its endemic stage in the US, Gottlieb said Monday.
When a virus becomes endemic, it poses a persistent risk of infection but is not causing large numbers of cases with severe disease and death.
"The reason why we're going to get through this and the reason why we're going to accelerate our way through this pandemic to an endemic phase with this virus is because of the vaccine," he told CNN's Chris Cuomo.
"If you look at past pandemics, they've lasted upwards of five years. This pandemic probably won't last that long for the West," he said.
Gottlieb said treatments and testing are also important, but vaccines are "a key part" of fighting the pandemic.
"The fact that we could build a wall of immunity through vaccination, and not just mass-infecting the population, is going to be how we accelerate our way out of the pandemic into an endemic phase with this virus where we can hopefully keep it at bay," Gottlieb said.
Meanwhile, Pfizer and BioNTech said last week they are seeking an emergency use authorization for a vaccine for children as young as 5 years old.
If approved, the increased accessibility will benefit the health of young children and the communities they occupy, experts said.
"We will really depend on kids, younger kids, getting vaccinated in order to increase the overall immune protection," Wen said.
Vaccine mandates work, Fauci says
As part of the drive to increase vaccinations, many health experts are calling for mandates in schools, workplaces and businesses.
Fauci told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the federal government is trying to persuade people to get vaccinated on their own, but some may need to be required to do so.
"We've obviously been trying very hard," Fauci said. "We try to get trusted messengers out there and try and get this away from being an ideological or political statement, get back into the realm of pure public health, and try to convince people," Fauci said.
"I mean, we don't like to be telling people what they need to do with regard to vaccines. But we know that mandates work."
But while many institutions have made the decision to mandate vaccines for their students, employees and clients, some states leaders are less inclined.
On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting any entities from requiring individuals to get vaccinated.
"The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced," said Abbott.
CNN's Virginia Langmaid, Jamie Gumbrecht, Maggie Fox and Jennifer Selva contributed to this report.
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 238.2 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths stands at more than 4.85 million. More than 6.54 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.
Merck has applied for US emergency use authorization for its oral antiviral medication. If approved, it would be become the first such drug approved for use against COVID-19.
New Zealand expects to administer a record 100,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses in a single day during a mass immunization drive on 16 October, as the country seeks to accelerate inoculations.
A European study has found an elevated risk of a life-threatening blood clot in patients with mild or moderate COVID-19. The clot, called venous thromboembolism, had previously been associated with severe COVID-19.
Delaying England's first COVID-19 lockdown was a serious error based on groupthink that went unchallenged, a joint report from the Parliamentary health and science committees has said.
Thailand is set to end COVID-19 quarantine rules for vaccinated visitors from 10 low-risk countries from 1 November, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said Monday.
Turkey has reported its highest one-day rise in new confirmed COVID-19 cases since 30 April, with 30,563 logged on Monday.
Sydney's COVID-19 cases have fallen to the lowest level in two months.
Developing nations and UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres have called for a fairer distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people in selected countries.
Image: Our World in Data
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended that immunocompromised people be given an additional dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, due to their higher risk of breakthrough infections after standard immunization.
WHO Vaccine Director Kate O'Brien, referring to people with lower immunity due to other conditions, told a news briefing: "The recommendation is for a third vaccination, an additional vaccination in the primary series, and again that is based on the evidence showing that the immunogenicity and evidence on breakthrough infections is highly disproportionately represented by those people."
The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts of Immunization also recommended that people over 60 receive an additional dose of the shots made by Chinese vaccine makers Sinopharm and Sinovac.
AstraZeneca's antibody cocktail against COVID-19, which had previously shown success at preventing infection, has also been shown to save lives and prevent severe disease when given as a treatment within a week of the onset of symptoms.
The drug, which is a combination of two different antibodies, reduced the risk of severe COVID-19 or death by 50% in non-hospitalized patients who have had symptoms for seven days or less.
It joins a number of other treatments that have been shown to prevent deterioration in patients with mild disease when given soon after diagnosis.
AstraZeneca's Mene Pangalos said in a media call that the treatment results would mainly underscore the potential future use as a non-vaccine prevention option.
"If and when this is approved it will be used in the treatment setting as well. But the real differentiator for this antibody is going to be in the prophylactic setting," he said.
Written by
Joe Myers, Writer, Formative Content
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Russias daily coronavirus infections and deaths are hovering near all-time highs amid a lagging vaccination rate and the Kremlins reluctance to toughen restrictions
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press
October 11, 2021, 6:07 PM
4 min read
MOSCOW -- Russias daily coronavirus infections and deaths hovered near all-time highs Monday amid sluggish vaccination rates and the Kremlin's reluctance to toughen restrictions.
Russia's state coronavirus task force reported 29,409 new confirmed cases the highest number this year and just slightly lower than the pandemic record reached in December.
After registering the highest daily death toll since the start of the pandemic at 968 over the weekend, Russia reported 957 new deaths on Monday.
Russia already has Europes highest death toll in the pandemic more than 217,000, according to a government task force. The state statistics agency, which uses a different way of counting including when the virus wasnt considered the main cause of death, has reported about 418,000 deaths of people with COVID-19.
A sharp rise in infections and deaths began last month with the government attributing it to a slow vaccination rate. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said Friday that 47.8 million Russians, or almost 33% of its nearly 146 million people, had received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, and 42.4 million, or about 29%, were fully vaccinated.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov voiced concerns about the surge in infections and deaths and noted that hospitals in some regions are close to capacity.
The vaccination level we have is too low, impermissibly low, Peskov said in a conference call with reporters. That is why we have mortality numbers that are so high. We are using every opportunity to make a simple call on all citizens go ahead and get the shot."
While deploring Russia's lagging pace of vaccinations, Peskov rejected the idea of imposing fines on those who fail to get the vaccine and emphasized that its up to regional authorities to decide whether to tighten local coronavirus restrictions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has been vaccinated with domestically-designed Sputnik V vaccine and he spent two weeks in self-isolation last month after some of his close aides tested positive for COVID-19.
Putin later hailed the efficiency of Sputnik V, saying that he didn't contract the virus even though he worked closely for an entire day with an aide who got infected.
Speaking Monday during a call with top officials, Putin had an occasional cough. When an obsequious speaker of the upper house of parliament enquired about his condition during a later video call, the 69-year-old Russian leader said he was feeling fine.
Don't worry, everything is fine, Putin said. I undergo tests practically on daily basis and not just for COVID-19 but other infections as well. It was simply cold outside and I moved a bit more energetically, there is nothing horrible.
Some Russian regions have limited attendance at large public events and restricted access to theaters, restaurants and other places to people who have been vaccinated, recently recovered from COVID-19 or tested negative in the previous 72 hours.
However, life remains largely normal in Moscow, St. Petersburg and many other Russian cities, with businesses operating as usual and mask mandates loosely enforced. On Monday, authorities in Moscow announced the expansion of free coronavirus tests in shopping malls, saying it should help stem contagion.
Overall, Russias coronavirus task force has registered over 7.8 million confirmed cases and 217,372 deaths. However, reports by Russias state statistical service Rosstat that tally coronavirus-linked deaths retroactively reveal significantly higher mortality numbers.
Rosstat on Friday said coronavirus mortality data showed more than 254,000 deaths of people with COVID-19 in the first eight months of this year compared to over 163,000 deaths of virus patients for all of 2020.
Unlike the coronavirus task force, which that only counts deaths where COVID-19 was the main cause, Rosstat also tallies those who had COVID-19 but died of other causes, and those for whom the virus was suspected but not confirmed.
Follow AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
Coronavirus infections and hospitalizations are continuing to drop after a spike in summer cases fueled by the highly contagious delta variant of the virus.
The number of patients who are hospitalized for COVID-19 in North Texas has fallen by approximately half since the most recent peak about six weeks ago. The statewide decrease also is roughly 50% in that period.
The latest model from researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center forecasts a continued decline locally.
In Dallas County, the forecast predicts about 400 new daily infections Oct. 28, along with 300 hospitalized coronavirus patients both numbers roughly a 50% drop from their current levels. An even steeper drop is expected in Tarrant County, to about 300 daily infections and 280 hospitalizations.
Health experts and local officials continued to stress the importance of getting vaccinated, saying that its the best way to get COVID-19 under control.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins noted that an overwhelming majority of people who have been hospitalized for the coronavirus arent vaccinated.
Please continue to encourage your unvaccinated friends and loved ones to finally take this necessary step to protect themselves and help put an end to this pandemic, Jenkins said in a written statement.
Dallas County reported 88 more COVID-19 deaths and 5,491 new coronavirus cases in the last week.
Of the new cases, 4,331 were confirmed and 1,160 were probable. The numbers bring the countys overall case total to 395,600, including 336,143 confirmed and 59,457 probable. The death toll is 4,774.
The average number of new daily cases in the county for the last two weeks is 811. For the previous 14-day period, the average was 1,177.
The county reported that 546 people were hospitalized with the virus.
According to the state, 1,577,343 people in Dallas County have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 1,350,910 61.9% of the countys population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.
The state reported 52,008 more cases in the last week, including 39,462 confirmed cases and 12,546 probable cases.
The state also reported 1,682 COVID-19 deaths over the last week, raising its toll to 66,467.
The states case total is now 4,123,515, including 3,436,593 confirmed and 686,922 probable.
There are a total of 6,211 hospitalizations in the state, including 1,856 in North Texas.
According to the state, 17,460,226 people in Texas have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 15,097,347 62.7% of the states population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.
Tarrant County reported 114 deaths and 4,643 cases in the last week.
Of the new cases, 3,673 were confirmed and 970 were probable. The numbers bring the countys case total to 353,440, including 293,136 confirmed and 60,304 probable. The death toll is 4,466.
The county reported 608 people were hospitalized with the virus.
According to the state, 1,171,967 people in Tarrant County have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 1,035,813 59.6% of the countys population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.
The state added 26 deaths and 1,577 cases to Collin Countys totals in the last week.
Of the new cases, 1,126 were confirmed and 451 were probable. The numbers bring the countys case total to 126,634, including 103,159 confirmed and 23,475 probable. The death toll is 1,062.
The county reported 210 people were hospitalized with the virus.
According to the state, 685,125 people in Collin County have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 612,331 70.8% of the countys population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.
Denton County reported two deaths and 1,981 cases in the last week.
The numbers bring the countys case total to 103,750, including 75,386 confirmed and 28,364 probable. The death toll is 697.
The county reported that 117 people were hospitalized with the virus.
According to the state, 537,594 people in Denton County have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 486,194 64.8% of the countys population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.
The Texas Department of State Health Services has taken over reporting for these other North Texas counties. In some counties, new data may not be reported every day.
The latest numbers are:
