It’s too soon to know whether the omicron variant will be the final phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, on Monday.
“It is an open question as to whether or not omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for,” Fauci said, putting air quotes around the phrase “live virus vaccination.”
There are two ways for a pandemic to end: the infectious disease is eradicated, or it becomes endemic, which means it still exists without being disruptive to society — chickenpox, for example.
“If you look at the history of infectious diseases, we’d only eradicated one infectious disease in man and that’s smallpox,” Fauci said at the World Economic Forum. “That’s not going to happen with this virus.”
That means COVID-19 must evolve into a less dangerous disease for the pandemic to officially end.
And although the highly contagious omicron variant is spreading like wildfire — infecting about 782,000 Americans per day, according to the CDC — some point to its low mortality rate as a sign that the virus may be becoming less severe.
It’s possible that omicron could signal that the pandemic is ending, “but that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response,” Fauci said.
And omicron will likely not be the final variant of the coronavirus, said Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of infectious diseases research at the Lee Kong Chian School of medicine.
“Clearly with such high a virus circulation we’re seeing now, there’s a high probability that we’ll have another variant coming up,” she said at the World Economic Forum.
Also in the news:
►Tickets to the upcoming Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing won’t be sold because of the “current grave and complicated situation of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said officials in China, where the discovery of the first omicron variant infection Saturday has led to increased efforts to prevent the virus from spreading.
►Canada approved use of the antiviral pill Paxlovid, created by Pfizer, to treat people with COVID-19. The U.S. approved its use in December.
►Celebrity Cruises and Royal Caribbean International, both subsidiaries of Royal Caribbean Group, have canceled cruises as COVID-19 continues to spread.
Today’s numbers: The U.S. has recorded more than 66 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 851,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Global totals: More than 330 million cases and over 5.5 million deaths. More than 208 million Americans – 62.9% – are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What we’re reading: Many parents are “just trying to stay afloat” as omicron is forcing day care centers to close in droves across the country. Read the full story.
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Research from New Mexico State University has found that the pandemic fueled stress-related unhealthy eating habits in Americans. Now, a study co-authored by a researcher from the NMSU Department of Public Health Sciences shows nearly half of all adults in the United States gained weight during the first year of the pandemic.
The new findings were part of a national assessment on weight gain in America conducted by a research team that included Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at NMSU.
“Obesity was an epidemic before the pandemic, and little was known on body weight changes in the past year for adult Americans,” Khubchandani said. “We wanted to estimate weight changes in the U.S. population and its determinants after the first year of the pandemic.”
The study, published in “Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research and Reviews,” included 3,473 adult participants. The results show 48 percent of the study group reported gaining weight during the first 12 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to April 2021.
Participants who reported weight gain were more likely to be males, white or Hispanic, married, 45 years old or older, working full time, have less than a college education, or living in southern and western states or rural areas of the U.S., according to the study.
— Carlos Andres López, Las Cruces Sun News
COVID-19 infections are soaring again at U.S. nursing homes because of the omicron wave, and deaths are climbing too, leading to new restrictions on family visits and a renewed push to get more residents and staff members vaccinated and boosted.
Nursing homes were the lethal epicenter of the pandemic early on, before the vaccine allowed many of them to reopen to visitors last year. But the wildly contagious variant has dealt them a setback.
Nursing homes reported a near-record of about 32,000 COVID-19 cases among residents in the week ending Jan. 9, an almost sevenfold increase from a month earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A total of 645 COVID-19-related deaths among residents were recorded during the same week, a 47% increase from the earlier period. And there are fears that deaths could go much higher before omicron is through.
Despite the rising numbers, the situation is not as dire as it was in December 2020, when nursing home deaths per week topped out at about 6,200. Experts credit the high vaccination rates now among nursing home residents: About 87% are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.
— Associated Press
Contributing: The Associated Press
