Cases: Pasadena reported 72 new cases on Thursday, July 28th and no new fatalities. LA County reported 6,135 new cases on Friday and 18 deaths as a result of COVID-19.
As the pandemic has dragged on, L.A. County contact tracers have struggled to reach and interview people with COVID. In January, amid a crush of cases driven by the Omicron variant, there were weeks when contact tracers were reaching and interviewing less than 10% of their assigned cases, county data show.
This summer, that number has stagnated below 30% in recent weeks — better than during the winter surge, but far below the success rates seen for L.A. County contact tracers earlier in the pandemic. And even when they have coaxed people to be interviewed, few of those phone calls led to additional conversations with others who they might have exposed, county statistics show.
Many more COVID cases are probably never being assigned to contact tracers at all, as many Angelenos rely on home tests that are never reported to the county.
President Biden tested positive for the coronavirus again Saturday, slightly more than three days after he was cleared to exit isolation, the White House said, in a rare case of a “rebound” infection after antiviral drug treatment.
White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor said in a letter that Biden “has experienced no reemergence of symptoms, and continues to feel quite well.” O’Connor said “there is no reason to reinitiate treatment at this time.”
In accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, Biden will reenter isolation for at least five full days. He will isolate at the White House until he tests negative. The agency says that most rebound cases remain mild and that severe disease during that period has not been reported.
Vaccine: Biden Administration Plans to Offer Updated Booster Shots in September (from the New York Times). With reformulated shots from Pfizer and Moderna on the horizon, the F.D.A. has decided that Americans under 50 should wait to receive second boosters.
The Biden administration now expects to begin a Covid-19 booster campaign with retooled vaccines in September because Pfizer and Moderna have promised that they can deliver doses by then, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
With updated formulations apparently close at hand, federal officials have decided against expanding eligibility for second boosters of the existing vaccines this summer. The new versions are expected to perform better against the now-dominant Omicron subvariant BA.5, although the data available so far is still preliminary.
At this point, only Americans over 50 and those over 12 with certain immune deficiencies have been eligible for second booster doses. Although some federal officials pressed to bolster the protection of younger Americans now, officials agreed on the goal of strengthening everyone’s immunity in the fall with what is hoped to be a more effective booster, ahead of a possible winter surge of the virus.
Federal officials were considering expanding second-dose booster eligibility to Americans under 50 this summer, but with updated formulations seemingly close at hand, they decided it was better to wait, ahead of a feared winter surge.
All adults are expected to be eligible for the updated booster shots, and children could be eligible as well, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
Right now, the federal government also plans to stress that anyone who is eligible for additional shots — Americans over 50 and those over 12 with certain immune deficiencies — should get them as soon as possible.
A new type of vaccine developed at Caltech aims to ward off novel coronaviruses even before health officials are aware that they exist.When tested in mice and monkeys, it trained the animals’ immune systems to recognize eight viruses at once — and induced immunity to viruses they had never encountered. The findings could lead to a powerful tool against a virus that mutates too quickly to be contained with current vaccines. An international vaccine foundation has pledged $30 million to begin clinical trials of the experimental vaccine in humans.
Meanwhile, super-infectious subvariants pushed L.A. coronavirus cases to their highest level in five months. The county’s case rate hit the high point over the Fourth of July weekend, a troubling sign of how the Omicron strains are creating conditions for a fraught summer. Subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have become dominant nationwide, and they appear to be among the most contagious yet.
The Economy: From the New York Times: The latest G.D.P. numbers — suggesting that the economy shrank in each of the past two quarters — have intensified a debate about whether the U.S. economy has fallen into a recession. The more important question is simpler: Are the economy’s problems likely to get worse in coming months or will the situation stabilize and possibly even improve?
That question has tangible effects for people’s lives. It may influence your decisions about whether to buy a house or car, whether to look for a new job and whether to become more cautious in your spending. There is no clear answer, but there is some useful information.
It helps to start with a basic framework: The country’s economic policymakers want the economy to weaken, just not too much.
The main economic problem in recent months has been an overheated economy, with more demand for goods than supply of them, leading to the highest levels of inflation since the early 1980s. To bring down inflation, the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, which leads families to spend less money and, in turn, causes prices to stop rising so rapidly.
There is no single definition of a recession. One informal definition is two consecutive quarters of shrinking gross domestic product (a measure of the economy’s output). With yesterday’s G.D.P. report, the economy met that standard.
Most economists, however, don’t like the two-quarters definition. They consider it too narrow because it is based on a single economic indicator. Any one indicator, even G.D.P., can sometimes be misleading.
Right now, G.D.P. may be overstating the economy’s problems for a couple of technical, temporary reasons involving global trade and corporate inventories, Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said. Another broad measure of the economy, known as gross domestic income, has not been declining in recent months, and it tends to be less volatile than the initial estimates of G.D.P. (Yesterday’s number was an initial estimate, and the government will revise it — maybe even to a positive number — as more information comes in.)
Much of the public discussion about inflation in the U.S. has focused on domestic problems, particularly President Biden’s policies. Critics argue that the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief bill that Biden signed into law 16 months ago, has supercharged consumer demand by sending $1.9 trillion to Americans, state governments and other programs. As higher demand has chased limited supplies of goods, prices have soared.
The law has certainly played a role in increased inflation, economists say. But the global trends suggest that focusing solely on the U.S.’s role misses a big part of the story — how external forces have driven up prices, too.
Welcome to the postpandemic economy (from the New York Times): The U.S. economy is in a strange place, one that is still clearly showing the ripple effects of pandemic disruptions.
On one hand, the job market looks strong: Unemployment is low, and job growth is robust. At the same time, inflation is soaring, supply chain disruptions are still common and there are signs that the country could be heading into a recession — if it’s not in one already.
For more on Covid’s effects on our wallets, I spoke to my colleague Ben Casselman, who covers economics.
How would you describe the moment the economy is in, as it relates to the pandemic?
From an economic perspective, not from a public health perspective, we’re starting to see a postpandemic economy take shape. I don’t think we are done with that process, and I don’t think we know exactly what the postpandemic economy will look like. But we’re no longer in the acute phase.
You used to see that every time there was a spike in cases, there was a decline in restaurant bookings or a decline in in-person activities. Then, as cases fell again, those activities would return. But for good or ill, we don’t see that behavioral response to nearly the same degree anymore.
How is the pandemic still affecting the economy?
It’s not always easy to draw a one-to-one connection.
For example, significantly fewer people are working or even looking for work than before the pandemic. Early on, it was pretty easy to attribute that to people being afraid of the virus or to child care disruptions or — early on — to business shutdowns. But those explanations have become steadily less convincing as time has gone on.
In many ways, the economy has returned to normal. But given that many workers still haven’t returned, it seems logical to think that that’s at least indirectly due to the pandemic, even if it’s no longer absolutely direct. You hear lots of stories about people reconsidering their priorities and changing the way that they approach work and life in the wake of the pandemic.
However, there are a couple of things that we know are happening because of the pandemic. We know that there are global supply chain disruptions that are clearly the effects of the pandemic, including disruptions that are continuing because China continues to have a very aggressive approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus. And we know that a significant amount of the inflation that we’re experiencing now — although the details are in dispute — is, to one degree or another, the result of the pandemic, as well as the government response to the pandemic.
How will the interaction between the pandemic and the economy play out in the next few months?
There are a couple of plausible scenarios.
If you think back to when the economy began to reopen, many of us thought that we would have a period of disruption, and then things would return to normal. That obviously hasn’t happened. But, in one scenario, we were basically right that these effects were temporary, and we were just wrong in thinking that they would go away quickly. So if that’s the case, over the next several months, we will see supply chains normalize. We will see people’s spending patterns normalize. We will see people return to work. And we look back on this and say, “Well, that took longer than expected, but we still ended up where we always thought we would be.”
It is also possible that the pandemic has changed our lives and the economy in lasting ways that are going to take much longer to adjust to. We’ve obviously seen this in terms of the way we work. People have not returned to the office in anywhere close to the numbers that there were before the pandemic. And if that continues, eventually, the economy will adjust to that. Coffee shops will open up in residential neighborhoods and close down in urban business districts. And the economy will reorient itself around this new reality. But those kinds of adjustments will take time, and they won’t be clean and smooth.