Omicron Variant

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Global airlines had collectively canceled more than 3,700 flights for Christmas Eve and Christmas day, according to the flight tracking website Flight Aware. Of those canceled, more than 1,000 had been scheduled within, into or out of the U.S.

Several major airlines, including United, Delta and Alaska, said they were forced to cancel hundreds of Christmas Eve flights after the omicron variant infected their employees and crew members.

On Friday, United cut a total of 187 flights; Delta, 166; and Alaska, 11, according to Flight Aware.

“The nationwide spike in omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation,” United Airlines said in a statement. The company said it would rebook as many travelers as possible.

Anyone got stats for vaccinated people going to ICU with omicron?

U.S. airlines scrapped nearly 1,000 flights on Saturday, the second straight day of massive cancellations as surging COVID-19 infections have sidelined some pilots and other crew members, upending plans for tens of thousands of holiday travelers over the Christmas weekend.

A total of 957 Christmas Day flights, including domestic flights and those into or out of the country, were canceled, up from 690 on Christmas Eve, according to a running tally on flight-tracking website FlightAware.com. Nearly 2,000 flights were delayed.

At least one airline said that it expects hundreds more cancellations on Sunday.

“I do not see a scenario for any kind of shutdown,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared this week, as parts of New York were in fact shutting down all around him. Broadway canceled show after show. Restaurants closed their kitchens. De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, who will take office January 1, nixed his inauguration gala. There has been no March 2020–style universal shutdown, but New York is not back anymore, baby.

For Brent Young, who runs a butcher shop and two restaurants in Brooklyn, it began last week when, one by one, staff members tested positive. “It’s more or less decimated our workforce,” he says. One of his restaurants had been booked solid with parties for a week—the holidays are one of the busiest times of the year for restaurants—but people started canceling those parties too. At this point it’s not worth trying to stay open, Young says, “because the anxiety’s so high no one’s wanting to eat.” For most vaccinated people, Omicron will be mild. But even a mild cold, sufficiently widespread, can disrupt a city.

A voluntary suspension of activity—a soft lockdown, essentially—will help dampen transmission of the coronavirus. This happened all over the country in spring 2020, when people began staying at home before official stay-at-home orders came down, says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at Yale and a co-author of a paper that studied the phenomenon using anonymized cellphone data.

Now the shutdowns are much more of a patchwork, with some businesses closing and some events canceled, says Micaela Martinez, an infectious-disease ecologist at Emory University. Case trends will be hard to interpret over the next few weeks.

Whatever the effect of a soft lockdown on the spread of Omicron, it will affect the economy too. Even if customers remain willing to go out, businesses will have to close when too many employees end up sick or get stuck in quarantine.

Shortening isolation periods in light of Omicron might help minimize these disruptions. The U.K. is now allowing sick people to test out of isolation at day seven, and the U.S. is considering a shorter period for vaccinated people with breakthrough cases.

In a soft lockdown, businesses are also on their own. Last spring’s stay-at-home orders came with unemployment assistance and emergency loans. None of that is coming this time. “All of the decision making is put on the small-business owners,” Brent Young says.

As a fast-spreading new strain of the coronavirus swarms across the country, hospitals in Ohio running low on beds and staff recently took out a full-page newspaper advertisement pleading with unvaccinated Americans to finally get the shot. It read, simply: “Help.”

But in a suburban Ohio café, Jackie Rogers, 58, an accountant, offered an equally succinct response on behalf of unvaccinated America: “Never.”

In the year since the first shots began going into arms, opposition to vaccines has hardened from skepticism and wariness into something approaching an article of faith for the approximately 39 million American adults who have yet to get a single dose.

Now, health experts say the roughly 15 percent of the adult population that remains stubbornly unvaccinated is at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the Omicron variant, and could overwhelm hospitals that are already brimming with Covid patients. In Cleveland, where Omicron cases are soaring, a hospital unit at the Cleveland Clinic that provides life support to the sickest patients is already completely full.

Compounding the problem, the pace of first-time vaccinations appears to be plateauing this month even as Omicron takes hold, and the numbers of children getting vaccinated and eligible adults getting booster shots are lower than some health experts hoped. Around 20 percent of children 5 to 11 years old have gotten a dose of vaccine. And only around one in three fully vaccinated Americans has gotten a booster.

It is still too early to know whether spiking numbers of Omicron infections in New York, the rest of the Northeast and the Midwest will be followed by a surge in hospitalizations and deaths.

But so far, the threat of Omicron is doing little to change people’s minds. Nearly 90 percent of unvaccinated adults said the variant would not spur them to get shots, according to a recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And some of the unvaccinated said that Omicron’s wily ability to infect vaccinated people only reaffirmed their decision to not get the shot. Others say the virus’s changing nature has stiffened their resolve not to get it.

It’s just another variant,” said Dianne Putnam, an unvaccinated resident of Dalton, Ga., and president of her county’s Republican Party, who spent six days in the hospital this summer after contracting Covid-19. “Next year there’ll be another one. I mean, there’s going to always be different variants.”

Public-health campaigns and employee vaccine mandates have made progress since the summer at reducing the ranks of unvaccinated fence-sitters, people without easy access to health care and those who were hesitant but persuadable.

The remaining ranks of unvaccinated Americans steadfastly opposed to getting a shot tend to be younger, whiter and more Republican than those who have received the vaccine or are still considering one, surveys have shown.

At least six million first doses have been given in December since Omicron was first detected in the United States. But those numbers come with a caveat: Boosters can sometimes be misclassified as first doses, potentially leading to an overcount of how many Americans are getting their first shots, the C.D.C. has warned.

Booster shots, now the preoccupation of many state and federal health officials, have made up a greater portion of the roughly 1.5 million doses administered each day around the country in recent weeks.

Low vaccination rates are still heavily concentrated in rural areas and the South, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama near the bottom.

In interviews across the country, unvaccinated people said they had grown inured to public-health messages from exhausted doctors and nurses and even pleas from their own families, as vaccinations have become entangled in the country’s politics. Even though mandates have been shown to significantly improve vaccination rates in places and at companies that enact them, they said they were dead-set against President Biden’s efforts and had tuned out his appeals for Americans to get vaccinated as a patriotic duty.

Republican governors and attorneys general are fighting to block the administration’s vaccine mandates for federal contractors, health care workers and Head Start programs.

Dr. José R. Romero, the Arkansas health secretary, said his state’s vaccination rate, which is hardly budging, reflected how deep the opposition to the shot was among those left to convince.

“Unfortunately, we can’t say that we’ve identified a single thing that has really moved the needle in any great extent,” Dr. Romero said. “It’s just a slow chipping away at this. It’s sort of a mouse eating the elephant one bit at a time. And you just keep going.”

Pure persuasion? I think we’ve sort of run out of options,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser, said.

But unvaccinated people like Eric Dilts, 45, a DoorDash delivery worker in St. Joseph, Mo., said he felt like the imperfect nature of the vaccines and shifting messages from public officials about boosters and breakthrough infections had validated his skepticism.

“Now you need a first shot and second shot, and now they’re talking about all these boosters,” he said. “How many shots do you need? It seems like a joke to me.”

Instead, many of the unvaccinated have placed their faith in “natural immunity” in weathering Covid-19 so far, despite warnings from infectious disease experts that the body’s protections are not sufficient to ward off re-infection.

Ohio, where 60 percent of people have gotten at least one shot, now has the country’s highest rate of Covid-19 hospitalization, and doctors say emergency rooms and I.C.U.s are running out of beds. They are being forced to call people in from holiday vacations as growing breakthrough infections whittle away at their staff levels.

It feels like it will never end,” said Claire Strauser, a nurse manager in the intensive care unit whose adult son still has refused her entreaties to get vaccinated. Ms. Strauser said she will probably not see him over Christmas to reduce her own chances of getting infected and sidelined from a job she is devoted to.

“I don’t know what can change,” she said. “They’re just dug in.”

More children and teens are being hospitalized for COVID-19 in New York City and the surrounding area than at any other time this year, data from the state health department shows. The vast majority of those hospitalized are unvaccinated, according to a health advisory issued by the department on December 24th.

In the week leading up to Christmas, hospitals in and around New York City had an average of about 73 pediatric COVID patients each day — up from just 18 per day at the start of the month. On December 23rd alone, 115 COVID-positive young people spent the day in the hospital.

Half of the children hospitalized in the last week were too young to be vaccinated, state officials said. None of the hospitalized 5- to 11-year olds were fully vaccinated, and just a quarter of the hospitalized 12- to 17-year-olds had received a full course of vaccines.

Citywide, 15% of 5- to 11-year-olds and 71% of 12- to 17-year olds are fully vaccinated, according to state data. Older teens are also eligible to receive a booster shot, although it’s not clear how many in NYC have opted for the additional dose.

For those taking the subway this week -- prepare to wait longer for the train. The MTA will be scaling back service on Monday-Thursday trains as its own workforce confronts the COVID surge.

There have been more Covid-related flight cancellations globally as the week starts, capping off a miserable festive period for thousands of people.

More than 1,400 flights have been scrapped on Monday, with Chinese and US destinations being the worst hit, the FlightAware data tracking website says.

US airlines say the disruption is due to crews testing positive or isolating.

Hong Kong is banning all South Korea's Korean Air flights for two weeks, after positive cases among some arrivals.
In all, more than 8,000 flights have been grounded over the long Christmas weekend that began on Friday.

Although the number of cancellations is a small percentage of the total, it is higher than normal and comes at a time of year when many are travelling to spend time with loved ones, the BBC's Jonathan Josephs reports.

In a separate development, US authorities are monitoring dozens of cruise ships hit by Covid cases while sailing in the country's waters, with several of them reportedly denied port in the Caribbean, AFP news agency reports.
Recorded Covid cases are rising sharply around the world, largely driven by the Omicron variant.

The majority of the flights cancelled on Monday are those by Chinese companies, including China Eastern (368) and Air China (141), according to FlightAware.

Airports in Beijing and Shanghai appear to be the worst affected, with nearly 300 cancellations combined. The Chinese authorities have not commented on the issue.

The airport in the northern Chinese city of Xi'an is also on the list. More than 13 million people in the city have been recently ordered to stay at home as authorities attempt to tackle a Covid outbreak there.

Meanwhile, the worst hit US companies are United (84) and JetBlue (66).

United warned last week that a spike in Omicron cases had "had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation", with many employees required to self-isolate after coming into contact with those infected. O

The omicron variant of the coronavirus might have symptoms similar to the common cold because the new variant literally has a genetic code from the common cold inside of it.

Per Reuters, the omicron variant likely acquired a mutation — one of its more than 30 mutations, mind you — from a snippet of genetic material from the common cold. Meaning, yes, the omicron variant mutated to include parts of the common cold’s genetic makeup

Researchers — who published a study in early December on OSF Preprints about this idea — found this after seeing genetic material in the common cold and the omicron variant.

Venky Soundararajan, who works at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm Nference and led the study, said this is why omicron has made itself look “more human.”

The small bit of the common cold inside of omicron “could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease,” according to Reuters.

Professor Tim Spector, who helps run the ZOE COVID symptoms app that monitors COVID-19 cases and symptoms, recently said that the omicron variant can be hard to find because it does not lead to symptoms different than those you see in the common cold, according to The Independent, a U.K. news outlet.

“Omicron is probably more, much more similar to the mild variants we’re seeing in people who have been vaccinated with Delta than anything else,” he said.
“And so it is going to be producing cold-like symptoms that people won’t recognize as Covid if they just believe the official government advice“

Craig Spencer, a Manhattan ER doctor affiliated with Columbia University who became a Twitter superstar in the early days of the pandemic for his running commentary on the battle against the virus, tweeted a detailed breakdown late Sunday of what omicron cases look like.

"Every patient I’ve seen with Covid that’s had a 3rd ‘booster’ dose has had mild symptoms. By mild I mean mostly sore throat. Lots of sore throat. Also some fatigue, maybe some muscle pain. No difficulty breathing. No shortness of breath. All a little uncomfortable, but fine," Spencer wrote.

“Most patients I’ve seen that had 2 doses of Pfizer/Moderna still had ‘mild’ symptoms, but more than those who had received a third dose. More fatigued. More fever. More coughing. A little more miserable overall. But no shortness of breath. No difficulty breathing. Mostly fine," he said

“Most patients I’ve seen that had one dose of J&J and had Covid were worse overall. Felt horrible. Fever for a few days (or more). Weak, tired. Some shortness of breath and cough. But not one needing hospitalization. Not one needing oxygen. Not great. But not life-threatening," he tweeted.

And almost every single patient that I’ve taken care of that needed to be admitted for Covid has been unvaccinated. Every one with profound shortness of breath. Every one whose oxygen dropped when they walked. Every one needing oxygen to breath regularly," he said.

“There's a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we've gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder strain of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that's good for most Americans," Gottlieb said on "Face the Nation." "The one group that may be a problem is very young kids, very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you're in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children."

Acting New York Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett said last week that pediatric hospitalizations had risen 395% in New York City since the week ending December 11.

According to the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics, COVID-19 cases among children have been increasing throughout the month of December, with nearly 199,000 reported for the week that ended December 23, which made up more than 20% of all weekly reported case. Among the 24 states reporting, children ranged from 1.8%-4.1% of total hospitalizations, and 0.1%-1.8% of all pediatric COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization.

Moving into the New Year, Gottlieb said the focus should be on the hospitalization rates and how many people are becoming severely ill.

Gottlieb also noted that places that have been hard hit early by the Omicron variant, such as the mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, New England, Florida and parts of the Pacific Northwest, are as soon as "two weeks away from peaking, but the rest of the country probably faces a hard month ahead of us." Gottlieb predicted the country won't start to see a national peak until February, since there are parts of the country that haven't yet been hit by the Omicron variant.

“This is an airborne illness," Gottlieb said. "We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission. It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus."

New York COVID hospitalizations surpassed the 10,000-mark and then some Tuesday, totaling their highest levels since early May 2020 as new estimates released by the CDC estimate omicron's regional prevalence to be as high as 99%.

The variant's estimated share of current U.S. COVID-19 cases is at least 92% or higher, according to the federal health agency. Both reflect sharp increases over last week, especially at the national level, and come as New York and America battle record-shattering caseloads almost daily along with soaring virus hospitalizations.

The data are almost hard to fathom. More than one in five New York tests are coming back positive these days, and that number is expected to bounce up considerably Wednesday after Gov. Kathy Hochul said holiday weekend reporting lags were likely behind "misleading" daily case counts in the 51,000-53,000 range over the last two days after nearing a record 90,000 on the first day of the new year.

There's nothing misleading about the skyrocketing statewide hospitalization numbers, however. Statewide hospitalizations stood at 10,411 as of Tuesday, the highest total since since April 30, 2020, when the total was 10,993. The level of increase over the last two days alone (1,638), for comparative purposes, is just 238 admissions shy of the total hospitalized statewide exactly three months ago.

More than half of all COVID patients hospitalized statewide are in New York City, which has the second-highest adult full vaccination rate (84.1%) of the state's 10 regions behind only Long Island (86.5%). Yet both regions, once again impaired by their density compared with others, find themselves atop COVID impact charts.

Mount Sinai South Nassau told News 4 Tuesday it was rescheduling most elective surgeries that require inpatient overnight states in a bid to preserve hospital capacity as COVID-19 cases soar unabated. It's one of nearly two dozen hospitals in the state that have taken such action to maintain bed capacity above 10% in accordance with the state's winter surge plan.

e number of hospitals on pause hit a high in late November, around 32, and has since declined to around 22 as of Tuesday as the state leverages updated federal guidance around quarantine and deploys various resources and plans to mitigate the wide-ranging impacts of the omicron surge.

Long Island has the highest rolling positivity rate of New York's 10 regions as of the state's Tuesday update, with more than a quarter of all tests conducted in that region coming back positive. More than one in five are coming back positive in the city. Of the five boroughs, the Bronx has the highest positivity rate at around 28%.

Breakthrough COVID cases account for an increasing share of positives, though state data shows the unvaccinated are still at least six times as likely to be infected. They're 14 times as likely to be hospitalized with the virus, the latest statistics show

An Israeli hospital on Monday said preliminary research indicates a fourth dose of the coronavirus vaccine provides only limited defense against the omicron variant that is raging around the world.

Sheba Hospital last month began administering a fourth vaccine to more than 270 medical workers — 154 who received a Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and 120 others who received Moderna’s. All had previously been vaccinated three times with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.

The clinical trial found that both groups showed increases in antibodies “slightly higher” than following the third vaccine last year. But it said the increased antibodies did not prevent the spread of omicron.

“Despite increased antibody levels, the fourth vaccine only offers a partial defense against the virus,” said Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the hospital’s infection disease unit. “The vaccines, which were more effective against previous variants, offer less protection versus omicron.”

The preliminary results raised questions about Israel’s decision to offer a second booster shot — and fourth overall — to its over-60 population.

Dr. Nahman Ash, director of Israel’s Health Ministry, said the research did not mean the fourth vaccine effort was a mistake. “It returns the level of antibodies to what it was at the beginning of the third booster. That has great importance, especially among the older population,” he told Channel 13 TV.

The sub variant is thought to have originated in India, and has been found in Canada, Denmark, Singapore, China and Australia.
Some 20 cases of a new sub-variant that developed from the original Omicron variant have been discovered in Israel, KAN reported on Thursday evening.
The sub-variant, known as BA2, was discovered during genetic sequencing of sample COVID patients. It contains more mutations than the original Omicron and may be more violent. However, the danger posed by the new sub-variant is still uncertain, and the Health Ministry's coronavirus outreach headquarters clarified that there was no evidence that BA2 behaved differently than Omicron.
BA2 was first seen in China a few weeks ago, and is suspected to have originated in India. It has also been observed in Denmark, Australia, Canada and Singapore, Kan reported.
Scientists quoted in KAN's report said they were concerned about this new development.
Over the past 10 days, Israel has continuously hit a new record of virus carriers, increasing from 12,000 a day to 48,000, with experts believing that the real number of those infected is likely to be much higher.

The number of serious patients, while still limited, has also started to increase. There were 283 patients on Thursday compared with 136 a week earlier. In addition, 284 new patients were classified as serious over the previous seven days, marking an increase of 189% over the previous week.
However, the general situation of Omicron patients appear to be much better than in previous waves.
If the new sub-variant is indeed more violent than Omicron, this may cause more severe illness and raise the number of serious patients in hospital. It is being tracked by Israeli and international researchers.

Children infected with COVID-19 were admitted to hospitals at a far greater rate than the general population during the first month of the omicron surge, New York State officials said, as experts warned that with future variants likely, children are not immune from the virus.

That warning, laid out in a state Department of Health report, came as all regions in the state are seeing a downward trend in their seven-day average for positivity in testing for COVID-19, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday.

A special report released by the state Department of Health on Friday found that hospital admissions for children with COVID-19 increased sevenfold, or 700%, statewide from the week of Dec. 5-11 to the week of Jan. 2-8.

They increased ninefold for children from Long Island and the Mid-Hudson region combined.

In contrast, hospitalization for all age groups combined increased threefold, or 300%, during that time.

The report found that the vast majority — 90% — of children ages 5 to 11 years old who were hospitalized in early January with the virus were unvaccinated.

Among 12- to 17-year-olds who were hospitalized with the virus, 61% were unvaccinated.

Medical experts said the report was worrying.

"Pediatricians are very concerned about both the known and unknown short- and long-term potential consequences of COVID infection on children’s health," said Dr. Eve Meltzer Krief of Huntington Village Pediatrics, a member of the executive council of the Long Island-Brooklyn/Queens chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Meltzer Krief said pediatricians are especially concerned the influx in COVID-19 cases among children could lead to more of them developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a serious illness that could come four to six weeks after even mild and asymptomatic infections.

The largest rise in pediatric hospitalizations, she said, are in the youngest children, under the age of 5, who are not eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination.

Dr. Charles Schleien, senior vice president and chair of Pediatric Services at Northwell Health, said most of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients there have been infants or children with existing medical issues. And about 90% were not fully vaccinated.

Schleien said the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 has fallen to about 50% of what it was during the peak at the end of December.

He also said the number of people coming into the emergency room has "plummeted."

Schleien said he expects new variants to emerge and added that people should no longer hold onto the idea that COVID-19 does not impact children.

Scientists and health officials around the world are keeping their eyes on a descendant of the omicron variant that has been found in at least 40 countries, including the United States.

This version of the coronavirus, which scientists call BA.2, is widely considered stealthier than the original version of omicron because particular genetic traits make it somewhat harder to detect. Some scientists worry it could also be more contagious.

But they say there’s a lot they still don’t know about it, including whether it evades vaccines better or causes more severe disease.

Since mid-November, more than three dozen countries have uploaded nearly 15,000 genetic sequences of BA.2 to GISAID, a global platform for sharing coronavirus data. As of Tuesday morning, 96 of those sequenced cases came from the U.S.

“Thus far, we haven’t seen it start to gain ground” in the U.S., said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas, which has identified three cases of BA.2.

The mutant appears much more common in Asia and Europe. In Denmark, it made up 45% of all COVID-19 cases in mid-January, up from 20% two weeks earlier, according to Statens Serum Institut, which falls under the Danish Ministry of Health.

BA.2 has lots of mutations. About 20 of them in the spike protein that studs the outside of the virus are shared with the original omicron. But it also has additional genetic changes not seen in the initial version.

It's unclear how significant those mutations are, especially in a population that has encountered the original omicron, said Dr. Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

For now, the original version, known as BA.1, and BA.2 are considered subsets of omicron. But global health leaders could give it its own Greek letter name if it is deemed a globally significant “variant of concern.”

The quick spread of BA.2 in some places raises concerns it could take off.

An initial analysis by scientists in Denmark shows no differences in hospitalizations for BA.2 compared with the original omicron. Scientists there are still looking into this version's infectiousness and how well current vaccines work against it. It's also unclear how well treatments will work against it.

Doctors also don’t yet know for sure if someone who’s already had COVID-19 caused by omicron can be sickened again by BA.2.

The World Health Organization classifies omicron overall as a variant of concern, its most serious designation of a coronavirus mutant, but it doesn’t single out BA.2 with a designation of its own. Given its rise in some countries, however, the agency says investigations of BA.2 “should be prioritized."

The original version of omicron had specific genetic features that allowed health officials to rapidly differentiate it from delta using a certain PCR test because of what’s known as “S gene target failure.”

BA.2 doesn't have this same genetic quirk. So on the test, Long said, BA.2 looks like delta.

“It's not that the test doesn't detect it; it's just that it doesn't look like omicron,” he said. "Don’t get the impression that ‘stealth omicron’ means we can’t detect it. All of our PCR tests can still detect it.”