Opinion
By Paul Vallas
Published Jan. 13, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET
Despite undeniable evidence that they worked against returning students to classrooms during the Covid pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers claims they encouraged in-class learning. They did not -- and American students suffered because of this. Christopher Sadowski
After holding schools hostage during the heights of the pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers is now trying to rewrite history, desperately scrambling to deflect blame for the alarming decline in educational standards.
The Programme for International Student Assessment recently released a report that found US student test scores are down 13 points compared to where they were in 2018. Declines in math were among the lowest ever measured.
Instead of addressing students declining ability to compete in a global marketplace and committing to getting them back on track, AFT President Randi Weingarten shamelessly asserted a total lie that in-person learning is where kids do best, which is why educators and their unions worked so hard to reopen US schools for safe in-person learning beginning back in April 2020.
In what universe did the national teacher unions work tirelessly to reopen schools?
This is the teachers union leaderships dubious playbook at its best. By downplaying the role teachers unions played in keeping students at home, they deny the hurt they caused so many families, struggling students, and teachers who wanted more for their classrooms.
In the fall of 2020, Weingarten labeled attempts to reopen schools as reckless, callous, cruel and even threatened a strike, ominously declaring nothing is off the table.
The Chicago Teachers Union unabashedly joined the chorus, attributing the push to reopen schools to sexism, racism and misogyny. They even walked out for five days in 2022 and threatened to walk out in 2021 to protest in-person learning. How convenient for them to now create an alternate history.
The unions purported concern for the safety of the school community contradicts their actions in keeping schools close. The unions ignored the devastating effects on academic, social, and physical health from remote learning, which disproportionately harmed poor children and the children of color they claimed to champion.
The COVID-19 crisis laid bare the inadequacies of the traditional public education system as hindered by bureaucracy, outdated traditions, collective bargaining agreements, and unwarranted union interference. There is a reason US reading scores have been plummeting since 2018 and math scores have declined since peaking in 2009 on the global assessment.
Rather than adapting and innovating in real time, traditional education institutions failed miserably. They shamelessly exploited the COVID pandemic, securing an unprecedented $190 billion-plus from the federal government for school district spending. In Chicago, while school campuses were fully or partially closed for 17 months, they continued collecting local school property taxes and state aid.
Weingarten, AFT, and other teachers unions across the nation havent stopped wreaking havoc since schools reopened.
Theyve advocated for a retreat from high-stakes testing, jeopardizing educational standards and opportunities for students. Chicago Public Schools, mirroring this trend, is transitioning to a soft scoring and assessment system that diminishes the focus on student outcomes, echoing a disturbing return to the era of inflated grades, social promotion, and the resulting student decline such policies inevitably deliver.
More recently, teachers unions have worked overtime to oppose school choice, including public school choice and charter schools. Weingarten has gone as far as to compare school choice advocates to segregationists.
Her colleague, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis-Gates, characterized demands for greater school choice as the encroachment of fascists, all while sending her child to a private Catholic school.
Teacher unions have reason to fear competition from charter and private schools. Stanfords Center for Research on Education Outcomes tracked charter school outcomes over 15 years, tracking some 2 million charter students nationally, to conclude: Charter schools produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population. Moreover, Black and Hispanic students in charter schools advance more than their [traditional public school] peers by large margins in both math and reading.
If American students are to compete on a global scale, the evidence is pointing more and more toward private and charter schools leading the way.
Instead of rising to the challenge, teachers unions have resorted to squashing their threats and changing the rules. Putting their own needs first, they demonstrate a blatant disregard for the well-being and prospects of the very students they claim to champion.
In the face of the damning national and international report cards, Weingarten and the teachers unions find themselves with a lot of explaining to do. Their obstinate refusal to acknowledge systemic COVID-19 failures and their relentless efforts to deflect blame only compound the crisis facing the education system.
The time for accountability and genuine commitment to students well-being is long overdue.
Paul Vallas is a policy advisor for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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The curves on some COVID-19 graphs are looking quite steep, again.
Reported levels of the virus in U.S. wastewater are higher than they have been since the first omicron wave, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though severe outcomes still remain rarer than in earlier pandemic winters.
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We are seeing rates are going up across the country, said Amy Kirby, program lead for the CDCs National Wastewater Surveillance System. The program now categorizes every state with available data at high or very high viral activity.
The surge might reach its peak this week or soon after, modelers predict, with high levels of transmission expected for at least another month beyond that.
Hospitalizations and deaths have remained far lower than in previous years. There were around 35,000 hospitalizations reported in the last week of December down from 44,000 a year earlier and 1,600 weekly deaths as of early December, down from 3,000. (At the same time in 2020, there were around 100,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths each week.)
Many of the metrics used early in the pandemic have become much less useful indicators of how widely the virus is spreading, especially since federal officials stopped more comprehensive data tracking efforts when they declared an end to the public health emergency last spring. Higher population-wide immunity has meant fewer hospitalizations even with high virus spread, and the sharp decline of COVID test results reported to authorities has made case counts far less relevant.
Wastewater testing remains one of the few reliable instruments still available to monitor the virus. It can signal the start of a surge before hospitalizations begin to rise, and it includes even people who dont know they have COVID. For many who remain at higher risk from the virus like those who are older, immunocompromised or already have a serious illness its become a crucial tool helping them understand when to be particularly careful.
But its an imperfect metric, useful primarily for identifying if theres an acceleration of virus spread, not for telling you exactly how much virus is circulating.
The data is often reported as normalized viral copies per milliliter or per gram, a number that is nearly impossible to translate into precise case counts, experts say. Its also hard to know how comparable two different surges are: A peak in the data may not mean exactly the same thing this year as it did last year.
Thats why many scientists who study the data will say only that it shows the nation is in the middle of a large wave, not whether the surge this winter is bigger than previous ones.
Wastewater testing works at all because everybody poops, said David OConnor, a virus expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Samples of wastewater are captured at or on the way to treatment plants and tested for viral RNA in a lab. But no two samples are perfectly comparable. The amount of RNA in the sample will fluctuate depending on many factors, including the local population at any given time think of a holiday influx into Miami or a college town emptying out for summer and how much other material, such as industrial waste, is in the system.
What experts really want to know, said Marisa Eisenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan who runs a wastewater monitoring lab for five sites, is how much virus there is relative to the number of people around the wastewater equivalent of the per capita case count.
Some labs normalize the data that is, they adjust the denominator by looking at the number of gallons flowing through the plant, Eisenberg said. But many sites use something called pepper mild mottle virus, a virus that infects pepper plants.
People have studied this in human sewage and found we shed pretty consistent levels of this pepper virus, she said. So thats a measurement of how many people went to the bathroom in the sewer shed today.
Once Eisenbergs team normalizes the results, it sends data to the state and to the CDC, which collects information from sites across the country that together account for about 40% of the U.S. population.
The CDC then aggregates its data and publishes state, regional and national trends. (Two companies that analyze wastewater, Verily Life Sciences and Biobot Analytics, also aggregate data from hundreds of sites and offer national and local pictures of virus spread.)
But those nationwide estimates can be tricky.
The sample population the CDC looks at largely excludes people with septic tanks and cities with no wastewater testing. There can be data lapses, as when the CDC switched contractors last year. Existing sites can stop testing, and new sites start up, as the network changes and expands.
And while Biobot and Verily can use the same methodology and normalization across all their sites, the CDC has to determine trends from data that arrives from different sites with a variety of methodologies.
Finally, there are changes to the virus itself that could make comparisons over time more difficult. Scientists who track those changes say there are hints that this latest variant, JN.1, may be able to better replicate in the gut.
Its still just a hypothesis, OConnor said. But its possible the virus is a little more cozy in the gut than it used to be, he said. If the hypothesis proves correct, it could mean that infected people shed more viral copies than they used to. In the wastewater data, the same number of infections could look like a lot more COVID.
All of that together creates significant uncertainty about how comparable the data is from year to year.
Michael Mina, a public health researcher and chief science officer for eMed, estimates the real amount of COVID spreading could be quite a bit higher or lower than this time last year. But theres no doubt that theres a lot of virus, he said. And far more now than just a few months ago.
Many experts who study this data recommend dropping any notion of precision and just squinting a little at the lines recent trajectory. And look at your citys wastewater if possible, since data for a single site tends to be more reliable over time than a national estimate.
If you have vulnerable people in your community or family, you want to be particularly aware when cases are going up, and take more precautions, Mina said. And when cases are going down or at a lull, relax those precautions.
Those precautions include wearing a high-quality mask, getting vaccinated, testing and staying home if sick and if someone at high risk is infected, taking Paxlovid.
Even in this new pandemic phase, people are still dying and can still get long COVID, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead on COVID for the World Health Organization. While the crisis of COVID is over, the threat is not, she said.
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A sharp uptick in emergency room visits and hospitalizations for COVID-19, influenza and RSV began in mid-December, and a COVID variant called JN.1 is rapidly spreading.. Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, joins CBS News with the data and what to know about the variant.
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GENEVA The head of the U.N. health agency said Wednesday holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly 10,000 deaths were reported in December, while hospital admissions during the month jumped 42% in nearly 50 countriesmostly in Europe and the Americasthat shared such trend information.
"Although 10,000 deaths a month is far less than the peak of the pandemic, this level of preventable deaths is not acceptable," the World Health Organization director-general told reporters from its headquarters in Geneva.
He said it was certain that cases were on the rise in other places that haven't been reporting, calling on governments to keep up surveillance and provide continued access to treatments and vaccines.
MORE: Is It Dangerous to Keep Getting COVID-19?
Tedros said the JN.1 variant was now the most prominent in the world. It is an Omicron variant, so current vaccines should still provide some protection.
Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead at WHO for COVID-19, cited an increase in respiratory diseases across the globe due to the coronavirus but also flu, rhinovirus and pneumonia.
We expect those trends to continue into January through the winter months in the northern hemisphere, she said, while noting increases in COVID-19 in the southern hemispherewhere it's now summer.
While bouts of coughs, sniffling, fever, and fatigue in the winter are nothing new, Van Kerkhove said this year in particular, "we are seeing co-circulation of many different types of pathogens.
WHO officials recommend that people get vaccinated when possible, wear masks, and make sure indoor areas are well ventilated.
The vaccines may not stop you being infected, but the vaccines are certainly reducing significantly your chance of being hospitalized or dying, said Dr. Michael Ryan, head of emergencies at WHO.
Getting COVID-19 today is much less scary and more common than it was three years ago. By now, many people have had it not just once, but two, three, or even more times. Most of the time, repeat infections aren't as severe as they were the first time, leading to a sense of complacency about getting COVID-19 over and over.
But reinfections aren't harmless. As cases continue to rise and more variants arrive on the scene, infectious-disease experts are warning that repeat infections could have cumulative, lasting effects.
There is some early evidence starting to show that if you had COVID-19, there can be all sorts of problems after getting infected and reinfected, says Dr. Robert Murphy, professor of medicine and executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwesterns Feinberg School of Medicine. We are just at the beginning of learning about them.
Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, studies Long COVID: a condition marked by health effects that linger after infection. Reinfection remains consequential, he says.
In a paper published in Nature Medicine in 2022, he found that people who had gotten COVID-19 at least twice experienced higher rates of short- and long-term health effects, including heart, lung, and brain issues, compared to those who were only infected once.
But why? Dr. Davey Smith, a virologist and head of infectious diseases at University of California San Diego, says that certain characteristicssuch as older agemay make people more vulnerable to complications after repeat bouts. The older you get, the worse you do with viruses in general, but specifically with SARS-CoV-2, he says. Every time you get COVID-19 again and again, you increase the likelihood of having a worse infection just based on age."
Underlying health conditions that people may not necessarily be aware oflike prediabetes or increased inflammationcould also put them at higher risk after each infection. For somebody who is already on the edge of developing diabetes and then gets COVID-19, that could damage the pancreas and the endocrine system enough to change things, Smith says. Similarly, having high rates of inflammation before COVID-19 could raise the risk of heart events such as stroke or a heart attack after an infection.
Regardless of a person's health status, each COVID-19 infection can raise the risk of developing blood clots, which can travel to the brain or lungs. Thats why Smith believes anyone who is eligible for antiviral drugs such as Paxlovid should take them, since controlling the virus as quickly as possible can reduce any potential long-term or lingering effects an infection can have on the body.
At this point, many people view COVID-19 as relatively benign. But even if you've already recovered from a mild case, there's no guarantee that next time will go as smoothly. "Just because you did okay with it last year doesnt mean youll do okay with it this year, Smith says.
There is a mischaracterization in the public understanding that you can get an acute infection with fever, cough, malaise, and fatigue, get over it after a few days or a week or so, then bounce back, and its gone, says Al-Aly. The data are showing that [some] people still display increased risk of problems even two years after an infection.
Thats what he found in his study. People who had multiple infections were three times more likely to be hospitalized for their infection up to six months later than those who only got COVID-19 once, and were also more likely to have problems with clotting, gastrointestinal disorders, kidney, and mental-health symptoms. The risks appeared to increase the more infections people experienced.
Understanding why SARS-CoV-2 has a uniquely lasting effect on the body remains a challenge. Historically, when the immune system meets a new pathogen like a virus, it generates novel defenses and remembers the intruder, so it has a head start if the virus returns. Thats certainly the case with SARS-CoV-2which is why vaccines work, and why getting reinfected generally leads to milder symptoms.
But there is also growing evidence that in some people, getting COVID-19 the first time may compromise the immune response in a way that makes the body less likely to respond effectively the next time it sees the virus. That could leave certain organs and body systems, such as the brain, weaker for months after infectionand subsequent ones. Its the balance of these two opposing forcesthe immune system learning from the past and knowing how to deal with a virus and do a better job the second and third time around, and the idea that a first encounter with a virus might alter the immune system in some way that it becomes less efficientthat could explain why some people get Long COVID, says Al-Aly.
Data also continue to show that even vaccinated people can get Long COVIDalthough the risk may be lowersince the protection provided by vaccines wanes over time, just as it does from infections. Vaccines are therefore a strong but not absolute barrier to the virus.
Each time you get hit, it does impact your body, so lets try not to get it too many times, says Smith. Thats easier said than done, since after three years, people are tired of taking precautions such as wearing masks and avoiding crowded public spaces. Weve lost the public-health battle; there is no appetite for public masking or stringent public health measures, says Al-Aly.
That means other strategies need to become available, including universal vaccines that can protect against multiple variants and nasal spray vaccines that stand guard at the nose, which is where SARS-CoV-2 generally enters. Researchers are currently testing these next generation shots, so while the good news is that these technologies do exist, they need to be accelerated and brought to market as soon as possible to protect the public, says Al-Aly.
In the meantime, Smith says its important for people to understand that they still need to do everything they can to avoid getting COVID-19. That means staying up to date with vaccinations and taking some basic precautions, such as wearing high-quality masks indoors when cases are high, especially in crowded places and on public transportation.
I wish we lived in a world where getting repeat infections doesnt matter," says Al-Aly, "but the reality is thats not the case."
It's winter, that cozy season that brings crackling fireplaces, indoor gatherings and a wave of respiratory illness. Nearly four years since the pandemic emerged, people are growing weary of dealing with it, but the virus is not done with us.
Nationally, a sharp uptick in emergency room visits and hospitalizations for COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, began in mid-December and appears to be gaining momentum.
Here are a few things to know this time around:
click to expand
The COVID virus is continually changing, and a recent version is rapidly climbing the charts. Even though it appeared only in September, the variant known as JN.1, a descendant of omicron, is rapidly spreading, representing between 39% to half of the cases, according to pre-holiday stats from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lab data indicates that the updated vaccines, as well as existing COVID rapid tests and medical treatments, are effective with this latest iteration. More good news is that it "does not appear to pose additional risks to public health beyond that of other recent variants," according to the CDC. Even so, new COVID hospitalizations 34,798 for the week that ended Dec. 30 are trending upward, although rates are still substantially lower than last December's tally. It's early in the season, though. Levels of virus in wastewater one indicator of how infections are spreading are "very high," exceeding the levels seen this time last year.
And don't forget, other nasty bugs are going around. More than 20,000 people were hospitalized for influenza the week ending Dec. 30, and the CDC reports that RSV remains elevated in many areas.
"The numbers so far are definitely going in the not-so-good direction," said Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of the research and development service at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "We're likely to see a big uptick in January now that everyone is back home from the holidays."
Certainly, compared with the first COVID winter, things are better now. Far fewer people are dying or becoming seriously ill, with vaccines and prior infections providing some immunity and reducing severity of illness. Even compared with last winter, when omicron was surging, the situation is better. New hospitalizations, for example, are about one-third of what they were around the 2022 holidays. Weekly deaths dropped slightly the last week of December to 839 and are also substantially below levels from a year ago.
"The ratio of mild disease to serious clearly has changed," said William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
Even so, the definition of "mild" is broad, basically referring to anything short of being sick enough to be hospitalized.
While some patients may have no more than the sniffles, others experiencing "mild" COVID can be "miserable for three to five days," Schaffner said.
"Am I going to be really sick? Do I have to mask up again?" It is important to know the basics.
For starters, symptoms of the COVID variants currently circulating will likely be familiar such as a runny nose, sore throat, cough, fatigue, fever, and muscle aches.
So if you feel ill, stay home, said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "It can make a big difference."
Dust off those at-home COVID test kits, check the extended expiration dates on the FDA website, and throw away the ones that have aged out. Tests can be bought at most pharmacies and, if you haven't ordered yours yet, free test kits are still available through a federal program at COVID.gov.
Test more than once, especially if your symptoms are mild. The at-home rapid tests may not detect COVID infection in the first couple of days, according to the FDA, which recommends using "multiple tests over a certain time period, such as two to three days."
With all three viruses, those most at risk include the very young, older adults, pregnant people, and those with compromised immune systems or underlying diseases, including cancer or heart problems. But those without high-risk factors can also be adversely affected.
While mask-wearing has dropped in most places, you may start to see more people wearing them in public spaces, including stores, public transit, or entertainment venues.
Although a federal mask mandate is unlikely, health officials and hospitals in at least four states California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York have again told staff and patients to don masks. Such requirements were loosened last year when the public health emergency officially ended.
Such policies are advanced through county-level directives. The CDC data indicates that, nationally, about 46.7% of counties are seeing moderate to high hospital admission rates of COVID.
"We are not going to see widespread mask mandates as our population will not find that acceptable," Schaffner noted. "That said, on an individual basis, mask-wearing is a very intelligent and reasonable thing to do as an additional layer of protection."
The N95, KN95, and KF94 masks are the most protective. Cloth and paper are not as effective.
And, finally, if you haven't yet been vaccinated with an updated COVID vaccine or gotten a flu shot, it's not too late. There are also new vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to protect against RSV recommended for certain populations, which include older adults, pregnant people, and young children.
Generally, flu peaks in midwinter and runs into spring. COVID, while not technically seasonal, has higher rates in winter as people crowd together indoors.
"If you haven't received vaccines," Schaffner said, "we urge you to get them and don't linger."
People who have dodged COVID entirely are in the minority.
At the same time, repeat infections are common. Fifteen percent of respondents to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they'd had COVID two or three times. A Canadian survey released in December found 1 in 5 residents said they had gotten COVID more than once as of last June.
Aside from the drag of being sick and missing work or school for days, debate continues over whether repeat infections pose smaller or larger risks of serious health effects. There are no definitive answers, although experts continue to study the issue.
Two research efforts suggest repeat infections may increase a person's chances of developing serious illness or even long COVID which is defined various ways but generally means having one or more effects lingering for a month or more following infection. The precise percentage of cases and underlying factors of long COVID and why people get it are among the many unanswered questions about the condition. However, there is a growing consensus among researchers that vaccination is protective.
Still, the VA's Al-Aly said a study he co-authored that was published in November 2022 found that getting COVID more than once raises an "additional risk of problems in the acute phase, be it hospitalization or even dying," and makes a person two times as likely to experience long COVID symptoms.
The Canadian survey also found a higher risk of long COVID among those who self-reported two or more infections. Both studies have their limitations: Most of the 6 million in the VA database were male and older, and the data studied came from the first two years of the pandemic, so some of it reflected illnesses from before vaccines became available. The Canadian survey, although more recent, relied on self-reporting of infections and conditions, which may not be accurate.
Still, Al-Aly and other experts say taking preventive steps, such as getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in higher-risk situations, can hedge your bets.
"Even if in a prior infection you dodged the bullet of long COVID," Al-Aly said, "it doesn't' mean you will dodge the bullet every single time."
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
The head of the U.N. health agency says holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month
January 10, 2024, 12:10 PM ET
2 min read
GENEVA -- The head of the U.N. health agency said Wednesday holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly 10,000 deaths were reported in December, while hospital admissions during the month jumped 42% in nearly 50 countries mostly in Europe and the Americas that shared such trend information.
"Although 10,000 deaths a month is far less than the peak of the pandemic, this level of preventable deaths is not acceptable," the World Health Organization director-general told reporters from its headquarters in Geneva.
He said it was certain that cases were on the rise in other places that haven't been reporting, calling on governments to keep up surveillance and provide continued access to treatments and vaccines.
Tedros said the JN.1 variant was now the most prominent in the world. It is an omicron variant, so current vaccines should still provide some protection.
Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead at WHO for COVID-19, cited an increase in respiratory diseases across the globe due to the coronavirus but also flu, rhinovirus and pneumonia.
We expect those trends to continue into January through the winter months in the northern hemisphere, she said, while noting increases in COVID-19 in the southern hemisphere where it's now summer.
While bouts of coughs, sniffling, fever and fatigue in the winter are nothing new, Van Kerkhove said this year in particular, "we are seeing co-circulation of many different types of pathogens.
WHO officials recommend that people get vaccinated when possible, wear masks, and make sure indoor areas are well ventilated.
The vaccines may not stop you being infected, but the vaccines are certainly reducing significantly your chance of being hospitalized or dying, said Dr. Michael Ryan, head of emergencies at WHO.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Geneva, Jan 13: Public health risks resulting from the Covid-19 virus remain high globally, with the virus circulating in all countries, a senior expert from the World Health Organization (WHO) said here.
According to estimates based on wastewater analysis, the actual circulation of Covid-19 is two to 19 times higher than the number of reported cases, Maria van Kerkhove, the interim director of WHO responsible for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told a special briefing in Geneva.
She also expressed concerns regarding the emergence of post-Covid conditions (also called "long Covid") affecting multiple organs.
While there has been a drastic reduction in Covid-related deaths since the peak, around 10,000 deaths per month are still reported from 50 countries.
Van Kerkhove expressed concerns about the evolving nature of the virus, with the Covid-19 JN.1 variant representing around 57 percent of global sequences analysed by the WHO.
FILE - Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks to journalists during a press conference at the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday April 6, 2023. The head of the U.N. health agency says holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)
GENEVA (AP) The head of the U.N. health agency said Wednesday holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly 10,000 deaths were reported in December, while hospital admissions during the month jumped 42% in nearly 50 countries mostly in Europe and the Americas that shared such trend information.
Although 10,000 deaths a month is far less than the peak of the pandemic, this level of preventable deaths is not acceptable, the World Health Organization director-general told reporters from its headquarters in Geneva.
He said it was certain that cases were on the rise in other places that havent been reporting, calling on governments to keep up surveillance and provide continued access to treatments and vaccines.
Tedros said the JN.1 variant was now the most prominent in the world. It is an omicron variant, so current vaccines should still provide some protection.
Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead at WHO for COVID-19, cited an increase in respiratory diseases across the globe due to the coronavirus but also flu, rhinovirus and pneumonia.
We expect those trends to continue into January through the winter months in the northern hemisphere, she said, while noting increases in COVID-19 in the southern hemisphere where its now summer.
While bouts of coughs, sniffling, fever and fatigue in the winter are nothing new, Van Kerkhove said this year in particular, we are seeing co-circulation of many different types of pathogens.
WHO officials recommend that people get vaccinated when possible, wear masks, and make sure indoor areas are well ventilated.
The vaccines may not stop you being infected, but the vaccines are certainly reducing significantly your chance of being hospitalized or dying, said Dr. Michael Ryan, head of emergencies at WHO.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
