The Scrabble of B and B: Is B Really SO Soft? A Bulletin Before I Go Back to the T.C.T.
This is my last newsletter before I start a book leave. I will be back in late January. Until then, other Times journalists will be writing The Morning, and I look forward to reading their work along with all of you.
One explanation for the underuse is that the drugs are not being used often. The first is that the public discussion of them has tended to focus on caveats and concerns, rather than on the overwhelming evidence that they reduce the risk of hospitalization and death. The second explanation is that many Americans, especially Republicans, still do not take Covid seriously.
BQ.1, Bq.1.2, Bq.2.2, Bq. 2.3, Bq.3 and Bq.4 are found in the United States. In other countries, the recombinant variant XBB has been rising quickly and appears to be fueling a new wave of cases in Singapore. The cases have taken hold in Europe and the UK.
Dr. Peter Hotez, who co-directs the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, says he thinks of them collectively as the Scrabble variants because they use letters that get high scores in the board game like Q, X and B.
Covid-19 Infections are Convergent: A New Phase in the Evolution of the Omicron Family Tree? The Case of the U.S.
As the US moves into the fall, Covid-19 cases are dropping. It is usually a reason for hope that the nation could avoid the spikes of the past two Pandemic winters. It is feared that the downward trend may soon reverse itself, thanks to the new variations of the virus.
The share of new Covid-19 infections caused by the BQs has doubled in the last few weeks, which is likely due to the fact that BA.5 is a good match for these viruses.
The poor uptake of the new boosters, combined with the immune evasiveness of the new variants and the waning of population immunity, is almost surely a recipe for rising cases and hospitalizations in the weeks ahead.
Some of the Omicron family tree’s new inheritors have evolved to share many of the same genes and are referred to as convergent evolution.
Some experts think this convergence means we’ve entered a new phase of the evolution of the virus, one that will see circulation of several variants at the same time.
Nathan Grubaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, says that there are likely to be several co-circulating, semi-dominate lineages going into the winter.
A number of different lineages can get similar levels of transmissibility, versus just one new variant taking over.
“This is what predominantly happens for most pathogens, such as the flu and RSV,” Grubaugh wrote in an email. The virus has adapted to humans and most of what is circulating has good fitness.
According to Maria Van Kerkhove of the Covid-19 response technical lead, the large mix of new variants was becoming more difficult for the WHO to assess.
The authors say the results call for continued efforts to protect individuals from Covid-19 infections.
For now, the Omicron subvariant BA.5 still holds the top spot in the US. According to CDC estimates, it caused about 68% of new infections in the US last week, but it is quickly being outcompeted by several new sublineages – notably BQ.1 and BQ.1.1.
“The projections vary a little, but generally, most people feel somewhere in the middle of November that they’ll wind up being a substantial proportion and have bumped BA.5 off as the dominant variant,” Fauci told CNN.
These variants are different from BA.4 and BA.5, but they’re descended from those viruses, the result of genetic drift. So they share many parts of their genomes with that virus.
Their changes are not as big as what happened when the original Omicron arrived. That strain of the virus, which is now long gone, came out of genetic left field, leaving researchers and public health officials scrambling to catch up.
If people would just get the vaccine, it wouldn’t be different from BA.5 that it would completely escape protection.
Both the Omicron strain and the srB-coV-2 strain are targets of the bivalent boosters used in the United States, the UK and elsewhere. The CDC data shows that people who received a single-strain booster were twice more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who received a bivalent booster. However, any booster still reduces overall chances of death from COVID-19.
Uptake of bivalent boosters has been low in the United States: about 15% of eligible people have received a two-strain jab. Many people receive a mix of vaccines, which has led to confusion among them as to which booster they should get and when.
Can the Big Bang Survive the Omicron Wave? Ask Mark Zeller, vice-president of vaccine supply chain, and Bill Falstich
“It’s probably going to be significantly bigger than the BA.5 wave, at least that’s what I expect,” said Mark Zeller, a project scientist who monitors variants at the Scripps Research Institute. But Zeller says he doesn’t expect this winter’s surge to reach heights of January’s Omicron wave.
The genetic changes these variants share appear to help them escape the immunity created by vaccines and past infections – a recipe for reinfections and breakthrough infections, particularly for people who haven’t had an updated booster.
But antibody therapies are particularly important for people with immune function that has been blunted by drugs, disease or age. People who don’t respond well to vaccines are the same people.
Even if we got money today, it would take us a long time to get a monoclonal into the market.
It will not be easy to coordinate the composition of a COVID-19 jab globally because of the fact that the world does not sweep the same way as the influenza strains do. Bruce Gellin, a global-health specialist at the Rockefeller Foundation, asked at the meeting if the proposal would require other countries to follow FDA decisions. Bill Falstich, vice-president for global supply chain at vaccine-manufacturer Pfizer, which is based in New York City, responded, “Not necessarily.”
He says current realities require that the government continue to incentivize the production of new therapies, and he expects that the Biden administration will again try to ask Congress to pass more funding to do that.
Why are COVID-19 restrictions so large? The onset of flu and other respiratory illnesses in the United States from 2020 to 2021 and beyond
The spread of other respiratory illnesses was mitigated by the restriction of the spread of COVID-19. The seasonal virus that can make people sick with mild cold-like symptoms, but can be dangerous for young kids and older people, disappeared in 2020 and early 2021. Now, in the Northern Hemisphere, RSV is surging, and the hospitalization rate for flu in the United States is higher for this time of year than it has been since 2010. Why exactly are these surges happening now? And what’s in store for future winters?
“These viruses are coming back, and they’re coming back with a vengeance,” says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It is possible that this year will have the most flu incidences of them all.
Some scientists theorize on social media that the increase in hospitalizations might be the result of immune deficiencies caused by a disease, such as the respiratory syncytial virus, and thus leave people more susceptible to other infections. Miller has seen no evidence that it was because people missedExposures in the past few years. There are more naive people who are at risk. So you’ve got more numbers going into the system.”
There is waning immunity for older children and adults that have been previously exposed to infections. In the absence of a flu vaccine, levels of immune system components decline. In a typical year, “we might get exposed to a small bit of virus and your body fights it off”, says John Tregoning, an immunologist at Imperial College London. But “that kind of asymptomatic boosting maybe hasn’t happened in the last few years”.
A lot of researchers don’t understand seasonal viruses. For example, COVID-19 restrictions seemed to have little impact on one type of seasonal virus, rhinoviruses — which are the most common cause of colds — for reasons that aren’t entirely understood. That might be because of their hardiness, Miller says. They can persist for a longer time in the environment because they are less prone to desiccation.
This is another question that needs to be answered. Infection with one virus can raise a strong innate immune response that might prevent infection with another virus. The Omicron surge led to the decline in last year’s first wave of flu. Omicron could have provided some protection against the flu. Or maybe the Omicron surge simply convinced people to mask up and keep their distance.
Can ensitrelvir accelerate recovery from COVID-19 during the winter surge be given earlier in the year? A counterexample against SARS-CoV-2
Pitzer expects that next year’s peaks and valleys might look much more like those that occurred before the pandemic. She is not placing bets. She thinks that this winter is likely going to be the last unusual one.
Although offering COVID-19 vaccines alongside influenza jabs could boost uptake, Gellin also questioned the plan to offer the updated jab in the US autumn. Throughout the pandemic, the United States has seen a late-summer COVID-19 wave in addition to a larger winter surge, which could suggest that it’s better to give the vaccine earlier in the year, he says.
Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Silver Spring, Maryland stated that if the vaccine was administered before the winter surge a rush of hospitalizations could be avoided. In winter, clinics are swamped with people infected with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which led to some US hospitals nearing capacity this season.
Bivalent vaccine will become the main vaccine for people who haven’t had a primary series if the vaccine composition is changed.
Other risk factors for long Covid include older age, being female, tobacco use, higher body mass index, and experiencing more symptoms during the acute Covid-19 illness. The vaccine is associated with a decreased risk of long Covid according to previous research.
Czeisler said that it shows that the coast is clear if you don’t get Covid once and then develop it again, or if you don’t get acutely ill.
The data shows that the drug has the ability to stop long COVID, according to the manufacturer. But scientists are sceptical about that claim and critical of the design of the clinical trial. The research presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections has not yet been peer reviewed.
About 1,200 people were investigated by the organizers of the ensitrelvir trial to determine if the drug could accelerate recovery. The results indicated that the people who took 125-milligram ensitrelvir pills recovered from five specific symptoms about one day earlier than the people in the control group.
Those who took a 125-milligram dose tested positive for SARS- CoV-2 about 29 hours before those who took a placebo. The study was the first one to show a statistically significant reduction in time to a negative test result.
Simon Portsmouth, head of clinical development at Shionogi in Florham Park, New Jersey, says that the company could not specify the plan for analysing long COVID data ahead of time because long COVID was less clearly defined in the past than now. An ongoing trial evaluating ensitrelvir is going to be shaped by the results of these tests.
Topol agrees that the data that Shionogi have made public support the idea that antivirals protect against long COVID, at least when residual virus is involved in causing prolonged symptoms.
There isn’t a consensus that persistent virus causes long carbon dioxide. “It’s entirely possible that the virus has nothing to do with long COVID,” says Edward Mills, a health researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. The immune response to the virus might be the cause of long COVID.