Featured Headlines
Covid Crisis Threatens Holiday Season as U.S. Hospitals Overflow – Bloomberg
After months of warnings that vaccinations would ward off a Covid-19 disaster, the U.S. is sailing toward a holiday crisis. Cases and hospital admissions are rising amid a season of family gatherings. Most victims have shunned inoculations. The situation is especially dire in the chilly Northeastern states, but doctors in many places report a grimly repetitive cycle of admission, intensive care and death. There are shortages of beds and staff to care for the suffering.
Omicron’s Spread Across Hotel Hall Highlights Transmission Worry – Bloomberg
The omicron variant spread among two fully vaccinated travelers across the hallway of a Hong Kong quarantine hotel, underscoring why the highly mutated coronavirus strain is unnerving health authorities.
We Know a Lot More About Omicron Now – The Atlantic
The flood of Omicron news can be overwhelming. The endless data, anecdotes, and studies are hard enough to synthesize. But what makes the information even harder to parse is that so much evidence (i.e., what people are seeing) is intertwined with opinion (i.e., what people are hoping and fearing). To round up the week’s Omicron news, I wanted to write something that disentangled evidence and opinion, to help people make decisions right now—about travel, and school, and weddings, and funerals, and holidays—even though we’re dealing with lots of imperfect information.
The Omicron strain of the coronavirus was detected in California’s wastewater last month, even before the World Health Organization declared it a “variant of concern,” lab data suggests. In a statement to The Times, the California Department of Public Health said that a sample of wastewater collected in Merced County on Nov. 25 contained a mutation that suggests the Omicron variant was present in California at that time.
Omicron Found in Two People With Booster Shots in Singapore – Bloomberg
Two Singapore residents may have caught the omicron variant even after receiving Covid-19 booster shots, in cases which may shed light on the protection offered by a third dose of vaccine.
The Coronavirus Attacks Fat Tissue, Scientists Find – NYT
The research may help explain why people who are overweight and obese have been at higher risk of severe illness and death from Covid.
Denmark’s Omicron Cases Top a Thousand as Variant Spreads – Bloomberg
Denmark has now recorded more than a thousand cases of the omicron Covid-19 variant after a 60% jump in one day, prompting health authorities to again urge Danes to vaccinate.
Omicron More Transmissible, Not Necessarily Milder – MedPageToday
Omicron has been detected in 57 countries, with more still expected, WHO officials said, with its global spread and large number of mutations causing concern. However, it is too early to draw conclusions, given the lack of data on clinical disease.
What Is The Meaning Of Omicron? – Forbes
From an evolutionary biology point of view, Omicron was to be expected. Coronaviruses in general have adapted to develop a wide variety of strategies to continue their replication and to infect and reinfect multiple species over millions of years.
U.K. Omicron Spread May Be Faster Than in South Africa – Bloomberg
The omicron strain may be spreading faster in England than in South Africa, with U.K. cases of the variant possibly topping 60,000 a day by Christmas, according to epidemiologist John Edmunds.
ast spring, Dr. Michael Osterholm doubled down on his reputation as COVID’s Dr. Doom and warned that the darkest days of the pandemic still lay ahead, despite vaccination, due to the emergence of new variants. A few months later, his prediction came true with Delta, which has killed more than 100,000 in the U.S. alone. Now Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, is eyeing Omicron. Intelligencer asked Osterholm how Delta will fare against the new variant, how worried we should be about lab tests showing immune escape, and whether the term fully vaccinated should continue to apply to the unboosted.
Omicron Four Times More Transmissible Than Delta in New Study – Bloomberg
The omicron variant of Covid-19 is 4.2 times more transmissible in its early stage than delta, according to a study by a Japanese scientist who advises the country’s health ministry, a finding likely to confirm fears about the new strain’s contagiousness.
Early data on Omicron show surging cases but milder symptoms – The Economist
Two weeks after the Omicron variant was identified, hospitals are bracing for a covid-19 tsunami. In South Africa, where it has displaced Delta, cases are rising faster than in earlier waves.
Vaccine Headlines
What Data Shows About Vaccine Supply and Demand in the Most Vulnerable Places – NYT
The detection of the Omicron variant has brought renewed attention, and a new urgency, to the worldwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign, which experts say remains among the most powerful tools at our disposal when it comes to preventing dangerous new variants.
Fix the global vaccine rollout or face even worse COVID variants, experts warn – NPR
The world has “lost the plot” on equitable vaccine access during the coronavirus pandemic and is falling far short of targets to vaccinate the global south, according to scathing assessments from experts as the omicron variant spreads to more countries.
Omicron may require fourth vaccine dose sooner than expected, Pfizer says – Washington Post
The new omicron variant could increase the likelihood that people will need a fourth coronavirus vaccine dose earlier than expected, executives at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said Wednesday. Boosters are likely to help control the variant, according to the company, which said early lab experiments suggest that the standard two-dose regimen still provides some protection against severe illness from the variant.
Clinical Considerations
How Does Omicron Challenge the Treatments for Covid? – Bloomberg
A treatment Covid-19 patients could take by pill to avert life-threatening illness has been something of a holy grail for doctors and drugmakers. The earliest therapeutics shown to help have typically been administered to patients via a transfusion or once they have become sick enough to require hospitalization. Two years after the first Covid cases were reported in China, two pill-based treatments have emerged that even skeptical scientists are hailing as potential game-changers. Intended for newly infected patients at risk of developing severe disease, the medicines promise to reduce hospitalizations and death as well as make users less likely to spread the coronavirus. Research is ongoing to determine how well these and other treatments perform against the omicron variant of the virus identified in late November.
Official Reporting for December 10, 2021
World Health Organization
Weekly Epi Update December 7th (latest release)
New Cases: 644,923
Confirmed Cases: 267,184,623
Deaths: 5,277,327
Johns Hopkins
Confirmed Cases: 268,774,060
Deaths: 5,292,013
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Total cases: 49,458,520 (+125,961 New Cases)
Total deaths: 790,766 (+1,335 New Deaths)
Science and Tech
Poop sleuths hunt for early signs of omicron in sewage – NPR
Scientists have detected traces of omicron in wastewater in Houston, Boulder, Colo., and two cities in Northern California. It’s a signal that indicates the coronavirus variant is present in those cities, and it highlights the useful data produced by wastewater surveillance research as omicron looms.
An Inside Look at a New York Lab Working With Omicron – MedPageToday
What’s it like in a New York lab working with Omicron right now? MedPage Today spoke with Benjamin tenOever, PhD, a virologist at NYU Langone Health, for an inside look at sequencing efforts to track down Omicron.
Scientists puzzle over Omicron’s origins as variant spreads – Financial Times
Reports of a heavily mutated coronavirus variant first surfaced in late November after a flurry of baffling genomes was uploaded to a global database. Omicron, as it came to be known, was traced back to a disparate set of cases: university students in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, a diplomatic mission in Botswana and a South African traveller in a Hong Kong quarantine hotel.
Psychological and Sociological Impact
Psychological Barriers May Lead to COVID Vaccine Refusal – MedPageToday
Deep distrust in government and science are among the reasons that some are continuing to hold out on the shots. But experts suggest that there are psychological barriers that may have nothing to do with mistrust. To understand all of the factors at play, we need to first recognize how the mind processes the act of making a decision — whether it is to opt in or out.
Offices remain eerily empty. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Subways and buses are running less often. Schools sometimes call off entire days of class. Consumers waste time waiting in store lines. Annual inflation has reached its highest level in three decades.
Long covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake – Washington Post
Suffering from debilitating exhaustion and pain for months, patients find themselves on food stamps and Medicaid
Published Research
Immunogenicity of Extended mRNA SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Dosing Intervals – JAMA
Willingness to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2: The role of reasoning biases and conspiracist ideation – Vaccine
Misinformation, Disinformation, and Conspiracy Theories
Disinformation Group Allegedly Staked Out California Med Board President – MedPageToday
The president of the Medical Board of California described a “terrifying” ambush, threats, and intimidation from four men she said were wearing jackets indicating they were part of “America’s Frontline Doctors,” a group that has been widely accused of promoting ineffective or unproven treatments for COVID-19.
In July, a fake slide deck with the logos of the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum purporting to show a schedule for when coronavirus variants would be “released” rocketed around social media, racking up thousands of likes on Twitter and Instagram.
Coping with COVID
Two poets chronicle their friendship and isolation during the pandemic – NPR
Like many of us, Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair were two friends separated from each other by the pandemic last March. They live in Paris and are both poets. Before the pandemic, they spent a lot of time on the road. Hacker was meant to be teaching in Lebanon and had to return home suddenly when COVID cases started rising. And Nair, who is also a dancer and frequently on tour, was diagnosed with breast cancer just as France announced a lockdown.
