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CASES: Pasadena reported 22 new cases of COVID 19 on Thursday, October 6th and no new fatalities. On Friday, LA County reported 1,336 new COVID cases and 11 fatalities.
The Omicron subvariant BA.2.75.2 — a newer coronavirus strain some scientists fear could be problematic — has arrived in Los Angeles County.
BA.2.75.2 has been described by Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor for the pandemic, as “one that looks suspicious — that it might start to evolve as a [troublesome] variant.” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer is also watching it closely. Three specimens of BA.2.75.2 have been detected in L.A. County.
The strain has been spreading elsewhere, including in parts of Asia and Europe, and Ferrer said what is potentially worrisome is that “it may both evade prior protections” of immunity, such as from past COVID-19 shots or infection, “and not respond to some of our currently available treatments.”
If the body’s immune system doesn’t readily recognize a mutated strain, there is a higher chance of it causing infection. In higher-risk people, especially those who haven’t received a recent booster shot , such infections can lead to severe illness or death .
At this point, though, Ferrer said it’s a “theoretical worry.” Just because a new strain demonstrates potentially problematic properties doesn’t mean it will outcompete other versions.
Still, whenever a new subvariant emerges, “we need to be cautious and [study it] because, obviously, a new strain creates more risk for all of us,” Ferrer said.
Though the pandemic is heading in the right direction — with cases and hospitalizations in a sustained, steady decline — many officials and experts believe another uptick is likely over the fall and winter. And while the U.S. is now quite familiar with the Omicron subvariant BA.5 , which has been dominant for months, other subvariants are starting to account for larger shares of cases.
In L.A. County, BA.5 comprised about 90% of analyzed coronavirus cases in mid-September, down from 93% earlier in the month. The share of cases attributed to BA.4.6 increased week over week from 3% to 5%. The share of cases attributed to BF.7, also known as BA.5.2.1.7, is 1.4%.
All these strains are members of the sprawling Omicron family. Though subvariants beyond BA.5 are increasing, their growth has been slow and doesn’t yet signal a major alarm, according to Ferrer. However, Ferrer is worried with the meager interest in the updated booster.
In L.A. County, some 7 million vaccinated residents are eligible for the new shot. But as of Oct. 2, just 355,000 — or 5% — have gotten it since it became available last month. Only 10% of eligible seniors 65 and older have received the new booster.
Officials don’t know whether reinfections are occurring among people who are getting infected with BA.5 twice or with two different strains.
And while “there is a greater likelihood if you were more recently infected that you’ve got some natural immunity that ought to protect you,” Ferrer said, it’s clear that protection is limited in both scope and duration.
Ferrer has noted that guidance from the CDC still allows people to choose to get the updated booster sooner than three months after a coronavirus infection.
But the agency says people should defer a vaccination or booster until they have recovered from acute illness and can leave isolation. In addition, the CDC says people should not get the updated booster less than two months after their last conventional COVID-19 vaccination or booster shot.
Officials hope the new booster will reduce the risk of infection and augment protection against severe illness and death — especially for older, higher-risk people.
Health officials and experts have noted, however, that higher-risk people who haven’t gotten a booster recently are still at risk of dying. And death rates , while improving, are still significant. Since August, L.A. County has recorded an average of 70 to 125 COVID-19 deaths every week. By contrast, L.A. County was recording 25 to 50 deaths per week in May.
And there is growing evidence of an increased risk for long COVID among survivors, including persistent symptoms of fatigue, reduced exercise capacity, breathing problems, brain fog and loss of taste or smell .
Overall coronavirus case rates in L.A. County are still declining. But that may be less reflective of actual trends than earlier in the pandemic, given the proliferation of at-home tests, the results of which aren’t routinely reported to authorities. Coronavirus levels in L.A. County’s wastewater may have plateaued — likely signifying “that viral transmission in L.A. County is no longer decreasing,” Ferrer said.
The number of COVID-19 outbreaks in the county’s K-12 schools, while at a modest level, are increasing. There were 20 outbreaks between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1, up from 16 a week earlier, and 10 for the prior week. The rise was primarily at elementary schools, Ferrer said.
With winter months and colder weather approaching, Los Angeles County’s health director urged residents to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot to fend off what could be another jump in transmission of the virus as more people mingle indoors — a setting conducive to infection.
She noted that millions of county residents are currently eligible to receive the new COVID-19 booster shot, which is specifically engineered to target the most widely circulating viral variants. She said understands the “fatigue” people have over calls to get vaccinated, but the low number of residents who have received the new booster is a cause for concern.
Recent testing of COVID-19 samples has shown a small but discernable increase in the number of new variants of the virus, most notably a variant known as BA.4.6, which represented 5% of tested samples, up from 3% a week ago. The county has also now detected three samples of BA.2.75.2, which has been spreading in parts of Asia and Europe and appears to be able to avoid current vaccinations. Samples of a variant known as BF.7 have also been detected.
Health officials have long warned that as long as COVID continues spreading, the more likely it is that mutations, or variants, will develop that could spread more quickly or cause more severe illness.
A worrisome pattern has emerged with Paxlovid and other drugs that reduce the severity of Covid: Many people who would benefit most are not receiving the treatments, likely causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths every day in the U.S.
There seem to be two main explanations for the drugs’ underuse. 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 still do not take Covid seriously.
Despite major progress, the pandemic isn’t over-Some declare victory, but experts remain concerned over death rates, new variants. By Luke Money and Rong-Gong Lin for the LA Times: SCIENTISTS will have to see months of stability before it’s certain the pandemic is over. The ultimate wild card is whether a problematic new variant soars to prominence.
“The pandemic is over.”
It’s a pronouncement we’ve heard several times in the more than 2½ years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
As California enters fall with the coronavirus very much on the decline, some are once again declaring victory. But health experts say that despite the significant progress, it’s less about turning the page than about understanding that COVID-19 remains quite unpredictable.
The heat was recently turned up on the long-simmering question when President Biden declared “ the pandemic is over ” during an interview with “60 Minutes.” Days later, Biden acknowledged the criticism he received over his statement but added that the pandemic “basically is not where it was.” It wasn’t the first time the president has sought to project the end of the pandemic. On the Fourth of July 2021 — almost seven months into the nation’s vaccine rollout — Biden said, “ we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”
But that declaration, which came when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll stood at a bit more than 605,000, proved premature. Nearly 450,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported since, fueled by last summer’s Delta variant and the dual-pronged Omicron waves that first struck after Thanksgiving.
Officials across the nation widely acknowledge the substantial gains made in the fight against COVID-19. The U.S. is awash in vaccines and effective therapeutics, and new boosters targeting the dominant circulating coronavirus strain are now available .
And even after the arrival of the Omicron variant — which sent cases soaring to unprecedented levels — California came nowhere close to reinstituting the shutdowns or other stringent restrictions that typified earlier phases of the pandemic.
Still, public health experts remain concerned at the considerable number of daily deaths . And there is worry that too few Americans have gotten a single booster shot, which is important to protect against severe illness.
“We are much better off now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor for the pandemic, said at a recent virtual talk of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we are not where we need to be if we are going to, quote, ‘live with the virus.’ ”
There’s no doubt conditions have improved since the darkest days of the pandemic, when more than 3,000 Americans were dying every day. Since August, the U.S. has been reporting 350 to 500 COVID-19 deaths a day. That’s above the low of about 200 before last year’s Delta surge, and is “unacceptably high,” Fauci said.
Over a year, that would add up to 125,000 to 180,000 COVID-19 deaths — four to five times the average annual number of flu deaths, which is about 35,000.
Although there’s no shortage of pundits, politicians and other prognosticators clamoring to declare the end of the pandemic, the ultimate call is up to the WHO . And that’s a decision that will probably be based on a scientific committee’s review of data, not personal sentiment.
“The definition of a pandemic is an outbreak of disease that has then spread beyond any one or two countries to a global spread,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert with the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
One challenge to defining the end of a pandemic is figuring out when we’ve returned to some kind of baseline for coronavirus cases and deaths. For now, “we don’t have what the baseline is for COVID because we’ve never had it before,” Kim-Farley said.
declared a global pandemic was the H1N1 swine flu in 2009 . That pandemic, however, ended up being less deadly than initially feared, and the agency declared its end the following year.
A prior system outlined by the WHO broke a pandemic flu’s trajectory into phases — including a “post-peak” period, in which “pandemic activity appears to be decreasing; however, it is uncertain if additional waves will occur,” followed by a “post-pandemic period.”
But COVID-19 is the first pandemic known to be caused by a coronavirus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has sought to balance the unmistakable data showing the pandemic is improving while emphasizing it’s not over. He noted in early September that the number of weekly reported COVID-19 deaths had fallen to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.
Scientists will have to see many months of stability before it’s certain the pandemic is over. Declaring the end too soon could be like sounding an all-clear announcement after a major earthquake when there’s still the potential for significant aftershocks.
There are also additional practical ramifications.
Chin-Hong said his definition of a pandemic’s end is when there’s a level of predictability and a lower number of deaths — and neither of those criteria has been met.
COVID-19 was the third- leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2021, behind only heart disease and cancer. And during the first four months of this year, the per capita death rate for the illness in L.A. County was higher than the rate for diabetes, motor vehicle crashes and flu/pneumonia.
Older residents are continuing to die at elevated rates. L.A. County’s COVID-19 death rate between May and July 2022 for those age 65 and older was significantly higher than during the same period in 2021. The pandemic also continues to disproportionately affect poorer residents and people of color. Unvaccinated individuals also remain at higher risk — of being infected and of suffering the worst health outcomes of COVID-19.
The Economy: From the New York Times: By many measures, the labor market is still extraordinarily strong even as fears of a recession loom. The unemployment rate, which stood at 3.7 percent in August, remains near a five-decade low. There are twice as many job openings as unemployed workers available to fill them. Layoffs, despite some high-profile announcements in recent weeks, are close to a record low.
But there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.
U.S. employers slowed their hiring in September but still added 263,000 jobs, a solid figure that will probably keep the Federal Reserve on pace to continue raising interest rates aggressively to fight persistently high inflation.
Friday’s government report showed that hiring fell from 315,000 in August to the weakest monthly gain since April 2021. The unemployment rate dropped from 3.7% to 3.5%, matching a half-century low.
The Fed is hoping that a slower pace of hiring would eventually mean less pressure on employers to raise pay and pass those costs on to customers through price increases — a recipe for high inflation. But September’s job growth was probably too robust to satisfy the central bank’s inflation fighters.
Last month, hourly wages rose 5% from a year earlier, the slowest year-over-year pace since December but still hotter than the Fed would want. The proportion of Americans who either have a job or are looking for one slipped slightly, a disappointment for those hoping that more people would enter the labor force and help ease worker shortages and upward pressure on wages.
Major employers such as Walmart and Amazon have announced slowdowns in hiring; others, such as FedEx, have frozen hiring altogether.
Americans in July quit their jobs at the lowest rate in more than a year, a sign that the period of rapid job switching, sometimes called the Great Resignation, may be nearing its end. Wage growth, which soared as companies competed for workers, has also slowed, particularly in industries like dining and travel where the job market was particularly hot last year.
More broadly, many companies around the country say they are finding it less arduous to attract and retain employees — partly because many are paring their hiring plans, and partly because the pool of available workers has grown as more people come off the economy’s sidelines.
The labor force grew by more than three-quarters of a million people in August, the biggest gain since the early months of the pandemic. Some executives expect hiring to keep getting easier as the economy slows and layoffs pick up.
But the robust pace of US jobs growth cooled in September but unemployment dropped, underscoring the need for the Federal Reserve to continue its campaign to tighten monetary policy. The world’s largest economy added 263,000 positions last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than the 315,000 positions created in August and well below July’s 537,000 increase.
Federal Reserve officials have raised rates five times this year as they try to beat back the worst inflation in 40 years, and the past three moves have been especially rapid. That has prompted Wall Street and policymakers to contemplate when the Fed might start to slow down.
Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has signaled that moving less rapidly will be appropriate at some point in the future, though he has declined to put a date on when that might begin. On Thursday, Lisa D. Cook, one of the Fed’s newest governors, echoed that stance, saying that “at some point” the central bank will decide to “slow the pace of increases while we assess the effects of our cumulative tightening on the economy and inflation.”
Based on the central bank’s statements and economic projections, markets are betting heavily that the pace will not step down until December. But a debate is beginning to firm up ahead of the central bank’s meeting in early November: Some officials are open to a potential slowdown as soon as the meeting next month, while others believe that the central bank needs to push ahead with very rapid policy adjustments as it races to control inflation.
The head of International Monetary Fund warned on Thursday that recession risks across the globe were rising as a toxic mix of inflation, higher borrowing costs and lingering supply chain disruptions continued to batter the global economy.
Kristalina Georgieva, the leader of the I.M.F., said that as a result of these persistent problems, the international body would downgrade its growth projections for next year in an upcoming report, one that she said would paint a dark picture of the looming economic threats. The assessment is the latest example of how last year’s optimism for a strong global recovery has been replaced by worries about rapid inflation, Russia’s war in Ukraine and an ongoing pandemic.
The I.M.F. has been steadily downgrading its forecasts in recent months and currently projects global output to grow by 2.9 percent next year. That projection will be lowered when the fund releases its closely watched World Economic Outlook report on Tuesday as the annual meetings of the I.M.F. and World Bank begin in Washington.