(The National) India became the country with the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases on Friday after reporting nearly 350,000 new Covid-19 cases.
Only the US has more cases of the disease than India, where more than 700 people died from the coronavirus in the last 24 hours. Half of the deaths occurred in the southern Kerala state, the health ministry said on Friday.
The spike came a day after the government announced the country is in the grip of a third wave driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant. So far, India has confirmed 9,692 cases of Omicron.
Officials said the country’s positive test rate is hovering around 16 per cent, with some states returning 50 per cent positive cases out of the total tested.
Authorities in the coastal Kerala state are battling an unprecedented surge as they introduce measures including banning gatherings and closing schools.
Appears that Omicron BA1 provides no or little immunity to BA2. People could be getting a second covid infection within weeks. The herd immunity approach is collapsing. This is why you don't let pathogens run wild...
The Omicron variant has moved the COVID-19 pandemic into a new phase and could bring it to an end in Europe, the WHO Europe director said Sunday.
Probably the most unfortunate timing ever with info on the new variant. WHO going to keep getting egg on it's face... UK appears to be starting to go back up with cases again...
(Brookhaven National Laboratory) UPTON, NY–A new model that tracks how expelled respiratory particles evolve suggests that drier wintertime indoor air allows virus particles in those exhaled droplets to remain active longer than is possible in moister summertime air. This finding may help explain wintertime increases in transmission of respiratory viruses like flu and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“This research is relevant to understanding COVID-19 and other airborne diseases that are really common, like the flu, as well as future novel viruses,” said Alison Robey, the lead author who conducted this research as an intern working with Laura Fierce, an atmospheric scientist formerly with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, now at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The ability to tease apart the mechanisms causing seasonality can help us figure out which safety controls—like distancing, wearing masks, and increasing/improving ventilation—are needed to reduce transmission risk in different situations.”
The study—published in a special issue of the journal International Communications on Heat and Mass Transfer focused on airborne pathogen transmission—was motivated by the question of whether the COVID-19 virus would follow similar seasonal trends as flu.
Like influenza, the COVID-19 virus is surrounded by an outer envelope and carried in exhaled respiratory droplets when people speak, cough, or sneeze. Scientists have suspected that seasonal variation in case rates is driven, at least in part, by the effects of relative humidity on the respiratory droplets. But the mechanism for this effect is not well understood.
Further Extract:
Previous laboratory measurements suggest that when the relative humidity is low, SARS-CoV-2, like other coronaviruses, decays more slowly. The hypothesis is related to other substances dissolved within the watery respiratory droplets. These dissolved substances are thought to react with the viruses and deactivate them. If the humidity drops enough, the solutes within expelled droplets move to the surface, where they are less likely to deactivate the virus.
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — In Costa Rica, officials are encouraging those infected with the coronavirus to skip voting in upcoming national elections. On the other side of the world, Beijing is locking down residential communities as the country anxiously awaits the start of the Winter Olympics on February 4.
In Latin America and Asia, where the omicron variant is making its latest appearance, some countries are imposing such restrictions while others are loath to place new limits on populations already exhausted by previous constraints.
Omicron quickly swept through the places it first hit, such as South Africa, the U.K. and the United States, pushing daily cases far higher than at any time during the pandemic.
The Americas reported nearly 7.2 million new COVID infections and more than 15,000 COVID-related deaths over the past week, the Pan American Health Organization said Wednesday. Coronavirus infections across the Americas almost doubled between January 1 and January 8, from 3.4 million cases to 6.1 million, PAHO said.
Infections are accelerating in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, and hospitalizations are rising in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, said PAHO Director Carissa Etienne. The Caribbean islands are experiencing their steepest increase in COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, Etienne noted.
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Jan 26, 2022 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
They have all become more infectious. I don’t understand how
I don't have a complete answer, but here are some suggestive and preliminary descriptions regarding the Omicron variant:
(Al Jazeera) A team studying the Omicron variant in Glasgow think they have found the answer as to why this variant is unable to infect the lung cells as much as it does the upper airways. They found an essential protein found on lung cells called TMPRSS2, which usually helped previous SARS-COV-2 variants to gain entry into the lung cells themselves bound less strongly to Omicron, meaning it was more difficult for this variant to get inside and infect lung cells.
The virus enters the cells lining the nose, throat and upper airways in a different way, so although it was found in high quantities in these parts of the airways, the concentration of the virus was lower in lung tissue. This might also partly explain why the Omicron variant is so transmissible, if it is concentrated in high quantities in the upper airways, viruses are more likely to be coughed, sneezed or breathed out from these parts of the airways and infect other people.
(The Guardian) “In essence, it looks to be more able to infect the upper respiratory tract – cells in the throat. So it would multiply in cells there more readily than in cells deep in the lung. This is really preliminary but the studies point in the same direction,” (said Deenan Pillay, professor of virology at University College London).
If the virus replicates more in the throat, that makes it more transmissible, which would help to explain the rapid spread of Omicron. A virus that is good at infecting lung tissue, on the other hand, will be potentially more dangerous but less transmissible.
(Mother Jones) Covid cases have started dropping nationally, and in many states, after the Omicron variant infected millions of people at a rate higher than at any point in the two years of the pandemic.
The New York Times reports this weekend that in recent days the United States was averaging about 720,000 new cases per day, down from 800,000 last week, according to its data tracking system. But even with the drop in hospitalizations and infections, the Times notes, “The threat has by no means passed”:
The United States continues to identify far more infections a day than in any prior surge, and some states in the West, South and Great Plains are still seeing sharp increases. Many hospitals are full. And deaths continue to mount, with more than 2,100 announced most days.
But following a month of extraordinary rates of case growth, blocklong lines at testing centers and military deployments to bolster understaffed I.C.U.s, the declining new-case tallies offered a sense of relief to virus-weary Americans, especially in the Northeast and parts of the Upper Midwest, where the trends were most encouraging. After another round of masking up or hunkering down, some were considering what life might look like if conditions continued to improve.
Edit: The good news obviously being that it might now be in decline, not that it reached the high levels that it did at what might have been its peak.
Last edited by caltrek on Thu Jan 27, 2022 1:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
Covid-19 Deaths in U.S. Hit Highest Level in Nearly a Year
Source: Barrons
Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. are at their highest level in almost a year, surpassing daily averages during the Delta variant’s peak, as the Omicron strain continues to spread in the country.
The seven-day average for newly reported Covid deaths reached 2,166 a day on Monday, up from 1,014 in November, before the Omicron strain was first detected in South Africa, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed.
The daily average of deaths reached 2,293 in Feb. 15, during last winter’s spike in coronavirus cases. That is still below the pandemic peak of an average 3,422 recorded by the CDC on Jan. 13, 2021.
“We’re still losing too many people a day for it to be in any way acceptable,” Jodie Guest, vice chair of the epidemiology department at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told The Wall Street Journal.
To date, more than 871,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the U.S., Johns Hopkins University data showed.
