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Monday, January 31, 2022
This map is the key to when US might start easing Covid-19 restrictions - CNN
(CNN)There is now more optimism that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic may be ending -- and as other nations lift certain Covid-19 restrictions, some public health experts question whether US counties and cities should consider easing their guidance on mask-wearing or social distancing, as well.
But others warn not to relax such measures too soon.
Denmark has decided to lift all Covid-19 restrictions within the country, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced Wednesday evening, adding that Covid-19 "should no longer be categorized as a socially critical sickness."
"Denmark will be completely open from 1 February," Frederiksen said. "Tonight we can start lowering our shoulders and find our smiles again.
"The pandemic is still here, but with what we know now, we dare to believe that we are through the critical phase," Frederiksen added, highlighting the success of Denmark's vaccination program and booster shots.
In the United Kingdom, people in England no longer have to show their Covid-19 vaccination passes to get into nightclubs and other large venues. Masks aren't required in any public places, although they remain recommended on public transport. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are also easing their restrictions.
But in the United States, "we know there is still much to be done to stop the spread of COVID-19 and end the pandemic. We are still seeing far too many new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths," Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in an email to CNN on Friday.
The US daily average of cases is near 500,000, with more than 1,000 deaths, according to the CDC, which encourages everyone to get vaccinated and boosted if they're eligible.
"As we look forward to the spring, it's important to continue practicing prevention measures that we know work -- vaccinating, wearing a mask in public, indoor settings, staying home when you are sick, and washing your hands frequently," Nordlund wrote.
Many US counties and cities rely on coronavirus transmission rates to determine when or if to ease restrictions and recommendations -- and nearly every single county is still experiencing high levels of spread.
Community transmission is still key metric
In the United States, most Covid-19 orders happen at the local level.
And the CDC's data on coronavirus transmission by county is used as a key metric in decision-making around public health policies and when certain restrictions should be implemented or lifted, Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CNN on Wednesday.
The CDC tracks and measures the spread of the virus by county and presents its findings on a map using a four-tiered, color-coded system that shades in counties with "high" levels of transmission as red, those with "substantial" levels as orange, "moderate" levels as yellow and "low" levels as blue.
"This is really important," Freeman said of the data.
"It's based on new cases per 100,000 persons in the past seven days. Low is less than 10. Moderate is another range, substantial another and high is another," she said. "And then a secondary indicator is percentage of positive (nucleic acid amplification) tests during the past seven days."
The CDC defines low transmission of the coronavirus as a community having fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week and less than 5% test positivity during the past week. High transmission is at least 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week, and 10% or greater percentage of positive tests.
As of Monday, nearly all counties are in the red, with high levels of transmission.
Only four are identified as having low levels: Kalawao County, Hawaii; King County, Texas; Arthur County, Nebraska; and Terrell County, Texas. Glasscock County, Texas, is identified as having substantial transmission.
"The whole country is still red," Freeman said. "So we haven't yet overcome this latest surge."
In Columbus, Ohio, the recommendation for the city's mask order is "that we need to be in CDC's yellow category for moderate community transmission for four consecutive weeks" before the order can be lifted, spokesperson Kelli Newman wrote to CNN in an email Friday.
In North Carolina's Mecklenburg County, there is an indoor mask mandate in place that will automatically lift once the percent positivity rate for the county falls below 5% for seven consecutive days, Raynard Washington, the county's public health director, told CNN on Friday.
"Within that mandate, there's actually a stipulation that's tied to community transmission, at which once the community reaches a certain level of transmission, as measured by percent positivity, the mask mandate itself will automatically be rescinded," Washington said.
He added that right now, the county is "a bit away" from reaching that low level.
In San Francisco, city officials announced Thursday that even though Covid-19 cases are "still high," they are "dropping rapidly" and beginning Tuesday, city office workers, gym members and some other groups of people may remove their masks indoors if they are "up to date" on their vaccinations.
In Colorado, the state Department of Public Health and Environment on Friday removed the requirement that people must show proof of vaccination to attend unseated, public indoor events of more than 500 attendees in Arapahoe, Adams, Boulder, and Jefferson counties — as well as the City and County of Denver, and the City and County of Broomfield.
Health officials in Colorado have told reporters that the statewide percent positivity remains high, but shows "encouraging" decreases.
There is no definitive, blanket guidance from the CDC on when communities should lift certain Covid-19 policies and return to some version of normal.
But NACCHO plans to hold brainstorming and listening sessions this spring with local and federal public health officers to discuss what the end of the pandemic might look like -- and how to determine when we've reached the end.
"NACCHO is having meetings coming up in the spring where we're really actively focused on these discussions, but we're hoping before then, we'll have a little bit more direction and guidance to go on," Freeman said, adding that the first meeting is scheduled for April.
She expects representatives from the CDC, Health and Human Services' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be in attendance.
It is going to be a "real challenge" to determine a clear benchmark for when Covid-19 health measures should lift in the United States, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday.
"Right now, you look at a lot of federal health guidance and it says that these measures should be lifted when there's low prevalence," Gottlieb told CBS's Margaret Brennan on Face The Nation.
"That was the old measure. In the age of Omicron, with a much more contagious variant and with the fact that the population has a lot of immunity, so we're less susceptible overall, we may need to rethink that," Gottlieb said Sunday.
"We may need to decide that once we get to 20 cases per 100,000 per day that may be the point at which we start to withdraw these things," he said. "I'm not so sure we're going to get to 10 anytime soon. Right now, Washington DC is at 15. New York's at 75. With this new Omicron strain that's circling we may stall out around 20 -- and that may be the point where we have to consider withdrawing a lot of these measures."
'We're in a better place now'
As the United States marks two years since the first laboratory-confirmed case of Covid-19, former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said last week he's feeling positive about the direction the nation is headed.
"I am more optimistic about the pandemic today than I have been since it was declared a pandemic nearly two years ago," Frieden, currently the CEO and president of a global health initiative called Resolve to Save Lives, told CNN on Wednesday.
Frieden added that the "flash flood" of cases stemming from a surge of the Omicron variant should soon slow, largely as a result of effective vaccines.
"We don't know if there will be another wave, but we do know that we've got much stronger defenses than we've ever had," Frieden said. "We're in much better shape than we've ever been. But we do need to hang on for just a few more weeks, until the Omicron flood recedes, so we don't overwhelm the hospitals, which are really stressed out."
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US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has said he shares Frieden's optimism that the nation is in better shape, but he urges Americans to remain vigilant against Covid-19.
"I certainly share the optimism that we're in a better place now, and we will be in a better place in a few weeks, but I don't think that means that we should take our foot off the accelerator," Murthy told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday, though he added that we shouldn't underestimate the coronavirus.
"What gives me more optimism and hope, Jake, is the fact that we not only have abundantly available vaccines -- we not only see that they're working well to protect people against hospitalization and death -- but we have more therapeutics," Murthy said.
"These together, along with a targeted use of tests and masks, this is what I believe is going to help us get through future waves, as well."
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January 31, 2022 at 08:07PM
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This map is the key to when US might start easing Covid-19 restrictions - CNN
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COVID-19 isolation rule change aims to encourage NYC students to get back to classes quicker and safer | - AMNY
The Department of Education put into effect Jan. 31 decreased quarantine periods for students and staff who had contracted COVID-19, reducing the isolation period from 10 days to five.
The aim of this is to ensure that students can still get back to school faster, while still taking precautions to prevent widespread infection within classrooms.
This isolation period change also includes unvaccinated students and vaccinated staff and faculty, who will be able to return to class day six to day 10 following a positive test result, as long as they haven’t had a fever within the last 24 hours and wear well-fitted masks that follow CDC recommendations – as all in-person New York City public schools require. In order to return to classes on day six, following a positive test result, students and faculty must exhibit no symptoms as well as test negative using two at-home rapid tests, or a test administered by a healthcare professional.
This new change in isolation period also includes faculty and staff members employed in NYC public schools, with the goal of maintaining higher attendance rates within schools and ensuring that NYC students do not fall behind academically. These changes have been implemented in accordance with current Centers of Disease Control (CDC) recommendations. For students and children younger than five years of age, the isolation period still remains at 10 days.
Since the surge of the COVID-19 variant exponentially increased in the winter months, Omicron has been trending downwards in recent weeks indicating a potential turning point for the battle against the virus. The COVID positive infection rate has decreased 10% from what the numbers were just a month ago, and deaths and hospitalizations have similarly begun a gradual downward trend.
Additionally, during a press conference on Jan. 30, Mayor Eric Adams announced a new free antiviral medication initiative aimed to deliver at-home COVID antiviral medications, as well as a move to allow individuals to get vaccinated in their own homes. This medication delivery initiative aims to make access to medications while positive with COVID-19, and increase services to COVID patients while According to Mayor Adams, nearly 75% of New Yorkers are now vaccinated, and to bolster this the Adams administration aims to make COVID-19 prevention and treatment even more accessible than before.
“The city will also offer at-home delivery of COVID antiviral pills to eligible New Yorkers who need them, and we’re going to do it with the magic New York word – we’re going to do it for free. For free,” said Mayor Adams on Jan. 30, “Delivering the antiviral pills to you at home if you’re an eligible New Yorker and is for free.”
The decision to deliver these medications to infected individual’s homes was made in order to prevent another widespread spike in positivity cases by limiting the number of people infected individuals interact with, as well as providing a medication that can help mitigate the contagious nature of this virus. NYC is currently one of very few places internationally that offers same-day delivery for antiviral medications.
“Oral antiviral pills (…) for five days helps stop the virus from reproducing, which reduces the amount of virus in the body, and prevents symptoms from getting worse,” said NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi. “With these new treatments, and of course, our life saving vaccines, we now have the tools to mitigate the worst of Covid-19.”
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February 01, 2022 at 01:25AM
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COVID-19 isolation rule change aims to encourage NYC students to get back to classes quicker and safer | - AMNY
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Latest Covid, Vaccine and Omicron News: Live Coronavirus Updates - The New York Times
Downing Street suffers from a culture of “excessive” workplace drinking that led to social gatherings during pandemic lockdowns, according to a highly anticipated report from a British government investigation released on Monday.
The document described leadership failures in the office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, though it did not directly implicate Mr. Johnson in wrongdoing, leaving that judgment to a separate police investigation. That may give him some political breathing room, but it is unlikely to dispel the cloud of what has become a career-threatening scandal.
The report, by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray, was scrubbed of its most potentially damaging findings at the request of London’s Metropolitan Police, which launched their own investigation of the lockdown breaches last week. So abridged was the document released on Monday that the Cabinet Office characterized it as an “update” of Ms. Gray’s investigation rather than as a report.
Still, even in its redacted form, the report painted a troubling portrait of a work culture at Downing Street, where staff members held alcohol-fueled gatherings with colleagues during a period when the government was urging the public to avoid socializing, even with close friends and relatives. Accusations of double standards have engulfed Mr. Johnson’s government and threatened his grip on power.
“At least some of the gatherings in question represent a serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of government, but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time,” Ms. Gray said in one of her general findings.
“There were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No. 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times,” she continued. “Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place. Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”
Ms. Gray took particular aim at the regular drinking at these events. “The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time,” she wrote, adding that government agencies needed “a clear and robust policy in place covering the consumption of alcohol in the workplace.”
The prime minister had shored up his position somewhat in recent days, and the findings released on Monday did not immediately appear to pose a fresh threat to him. But at a minimum, they raised hard questions about the operation Mr. Johnson and his senior aides have put together at Downing Street.
Mr. Johnson, who addressed Parliament about the report on Monday, has been scrambling to avoid a vote of no-confidence in his leadership by Conservative lawmakers. Such a vote would be called if 54 members submit confidential letters demanding it. That threshold has not yet been met, and it was unlikely that the details released Monday would lead to a flood of new dissidents.
Indeed, Downing Street moved swiftly to change the subject. Mr. Johnson, eager to drape himself in a statesman’s mantle, scheduled a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday to discuss the mounting tensions in Ukraine. He will visit the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on Tuesday.
Britain has been staking out a more assertive policy on Ukraine in recent weeks. But Mr. Johnson has been forced to cede much of the spotlight to his foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and defense secretary, Ben Wallace, while he grappled with the mutiny inside his Conservative Party over the party scandal.
Later in the week, the government will release a report on its “leveling up” program, the blueprint to bolster economically blighted parts of the country’s north, which is the centerpiece of its legislative agenda.
Mr. Johnson hopes to mollify Conservative lawmakers, many of whom were swept into Parliament in 2019 on the strength of Mr. Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” campaign slogan but who have grown disillusioned with him, particularly in the wake of disclosures about pandemic socializing at Downing Street.
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February 01, 2022 at 12:26AM
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Latest Covid, Vaccine and Omicron News: Live Coronavirus Updates - The New York Times
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Ivermectin shows 'antiviral effect' against COVID, Japanese company says - Reuters
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Test tube with Corona virus name label is seen in this illustration taken on January 29, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
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TOKYO, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Japanese trading and pharmaceuticals company Kowa Co Ltd (7807.T) on Monday said that anti-parasite drug ivermectin showed an "antiviral effect" against Omicron and other coronavirus variants in joint non-clinical research.
The company, which has been working with Tokyo's Kitasato University on testing the drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, did not provide further details.
Clinical trials are ongoing, but promotion of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment has generated controversy.
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Prominent vaccine sceptic Joe Rogan, whose podcast on Spotify has prompted protests by singers Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, has long stirred controversy with his views on the pandemic, government mandates and COVID-19 vaccines.
Rogan has questioned the need for vaccines and said he used ivermectin.
The drug is not approved for treatment of COVID-19 in Japan, and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the World Health Organization, the EU drug regulator and Merck (MRK.N), which makes the drug, have warned against its use because of a lack of scientific evidence that it has therapeutic effect. read more
In guidance on its website dated September 2021, the FDA noted growing interest in the drug for preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans but said it had received multiple reports of patients who had required medical attention, including hospitalisation, after self-medicating with it.
The use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 is currently being investigated in a UK trial run by the University of Oxford. The researchers said on Monday that it was still under way and they did not want to comment further until they have results to report. read more
Many potential COVID-19 treatments that showed promise in test tubes, including the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine promoted by former U.S. President Donald Trump, ultimately failed to show benefit for COVID-19 patients once studied in clinical trials.
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Reporting by Sam Nussey and Rocky Swift Additional reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London Editing by Josephine Mason, Jan Harvey and David Goodman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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February 01, 2022 at 12:34AM
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Ivermectin shows 'antiviral effect' against COVID, Japanese company says - Reuters
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Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine gets full FDA approval - The Verge
The Food and Drug Administration has granted full approval to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced today. The Moderna vaccine joins the Pfizer / BioNTech shot as the second licensed vaccine against the coronavirus in the United States.
This is Moderna’s first FDA-approved product in the US. “This is a momentous milestone in Moderna’s history,” said Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, in a statement.
FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a significant step in the fight against #COVID19, marking the 2nd vaccine approved to prevent COVID-19. Rest assured that it meets our high standards for safety, effectiveness & manufacturing quality required of any vaccine approved in the U.S. https://t.co/4d973XkIeA
— Dr. Janet Woodcock (@DrWoodcockFDA) January 31, 2022
The Moderna vaccine has been available for over a year under an emergency use authorization (EUA), a designation that allows the FDA to sign off on products quickly during an emergency. Now that it’s fully licensed, Moderna is able to advertise its shot directly to patients. It’ll be marketed under the brand name Spikevax.
The full approval is based on clinical trial data from nearly 30,000 people, which showed the vaccine was safe and effective protection against COVID-19. There’s also a year of real-world data for this vaccine, which has been administered to tens of millions of people in the US. Along with the other COVID-19 shots available, it’s saved millions of lives through the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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February 01, 2022 at 12:15AM
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Sunday, January 30, 2022
Spotify covid misinformation controversy grows as Nils Lofgren, Joni Mitchell join protest - The Washington Post
Separately, Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston who hosts the popular podcasts “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead” on Spotify, tweeted Saturday that she “will not be releasing any podcasts until further notice” but did not list a specific reason or whether the announcement was linked to the protest. The Post could not immediately reach Brown for comment.
The latest developments are escalating pressure on Spotify to clarify how it will weigh promoting the free speech of its content creators against the impact that some can have on public health during the pandemic. The company is seeking to dominate the podcast space and faces growing scrutiny as the medium attracts more anti-vaccine activists who run afoul of misinformation policies on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
And competitors appear to be seeking an advantage amid the controversy: Apple Music on Friday called itself the “the home of Neil Young” in a tweet promoting his catalogue.
Lofgren and Mitchell in their statements said they stood in solidarity with Young, who collaborated with Crazy Horse to produce many well-known albums. Young had demanded that his music be taken off the streaming platform in response to the presence of “fake information about vaccines” in some of the content it hosts.
The letter, which was posted to his website and has since been removed, cited Joe Rogan, who hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience,” as part of Young’s issue with Spotify. “They can have Rogan or Young,” the legendary musician reportedly wrote. “Not both.”
Spotify soon began removing Young’s music from its catalogue, including his best-known hits such as “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Mitchell, whose renowned album “Blue” just turned 50, wrote in a statement on her website on Friday that she “decided to remove all” her music from Spotify because “irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.”
Spotify, in a statement previously provided to The Washington Post acknowledged the balancing act. “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators,” a Spotify spokesperson said.
“We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic," the statement continued. "We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”
Rogan, whose immensely popular podcast Spotify exclusively acquired in 2020, has questioned the need for young, healthy people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and hosted guests who have promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic.
Earlier this month, 270 experts called on Spotify in an open letter to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”
The experts particularly criticized an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” in which Rogan interviewed Robert Malone, a doctor and prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines, as an example of the podcast’s “concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding” the pandemic.
The episode “is not the only transgression to occur on the Spotify platform, but a relevant example of the platform’s failure to mitigate the damage it is causing,” the experts wrote.
Young in a statement posted to his website on Wednesday said he “first learned” of the prevalence of misinformation around the pandemic on Spotify “by reading that 200 plus doctors had joined forces, taking on the dangerous life-threatening COVID falsehoods found in SPOTIFY programming,”
“I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others,” he wrote on Friday.
Travis M. Andrews contributed reporting.
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January 30, 2022 at 09:09PM
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Why is the new COVID variant called stealth omicron? - WOODTV.com
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- Why is the new COVID variant called stealth omicron? WOODTV.com
- Explainer-Scientists on alert over rising cases caused by Omicron cousin BA.2 Yahoo News
- ‘Stealth’ Omicron Variant No Cause for Alarm, but Could Slow Case Decline The New York Times
- What central Ohio doctors say about COVID-19 omicron subvariant NBC4 WCMH-TV
- Medical experts: BA.2 strain of omicron explained and how to stay safe KSTP
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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January 30, 2022 at 11:22PM
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Why is the new COVID variant called stealth omicron? - WOODTV.com
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China's Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Coronavirus - The New York Times
The country has instituted a wide range of high-tech controls on society as part of a mostly successful effort to stop the virus. The consequences may endure.
The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway.
His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks.
Then his app turned red, flagging him as high risk. Airport security tried to put him in quarantine, but he resisted. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of meddling with his health code to bar him from traveling.
“The Chinese Communist Party has found the best model for controlling people,” he said in a telephone interview in December. This month, the police detained Mr. Xie, a government critic, accusing him of inciting subversion and provoking trouble.
The pandemic has given Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, a powerful case for deepening the Communist Party’s reach into the lives of 1.4 billion citizens, filling out his vision of the country as a model of secure order, in contrast to the “chaos of the West.” In the two years since officials isolated the city of Wuhan in the first lockdown of the pandemic, the Chinese government has honed its powers to track and corral people, backed by upgraded technology, armies of neighborhood workers and broad public support.
Emboldened by their successes in stamping out Covid, Chinese officials are turning their sharpened surveillance against other risks, including crime, pollution and “hostile” political forces. This amounts to a potent techno-authoritarian tool for Mr. Xi as he intensifies his campaigns against corruption and dissent.
The foundation of the controls is the health code. The local authorities, working with tech companies, generate a user’s profile based on location, travel history, test results and other health data. The code’s color — green, yellow or red — determines whether the holder is allowed into buildings or public spaces. Its use is enforced by legions of local officials with the power to quarantine residents or restrict their movements.
These controls are key to China’s goal of stamping out the virus entirely within its borders — a strategy on which the party has staked its credibility despite the emergence of highly contagious variants. After China’s initial missteps in letting the coronavirus spread, its “zero Covid” approach has helped keep infections low, while the death toll continues to grow in the United States and elsewhere. But Chinese officials have at times been severe, isolating young children from their parents or jailing people deemed to have broken containment rules.
City officials did not respond to questions about assertions by Mr. Xie, the lawyer. While it is hard to know what goes on in individual cases, the government itself has signaled it wants to use these technologies in other ways.
Officials have used pandemic health monitoring systems to flush out fugitives. Some fugitives have been tracked down by their health codes. Others who avoided the apps have found life so difficult that they have surrendered.
For all of its outward sophistication, though, China’s surveillance system remains labor intensive. And while the public has generally supported Beijing’s intrusions during the pandemic, privacy concerns are growing.
“China’s pandemic controls have really produced great results, because they can monitor down to every individual,” said Mei Haoyu, 24, an employee at a dental hospital in Hangzhou, a city in eastern China, who worked as a volunteer early in the pandemic.
“But if after the pandemic ends these means are still there for the government,” he added, “that’s a big risk for ordinary people.”
‘A vicious cycle arises’
A Covid cluster that rippled across Zhejiang Province in east China late last year began with a funeral. When one attendee, a health worker, tested positive in a routine test, 100 tracers sprang into action.
Within hours, officials alerted the authorities in Hangzhou, 45 miles away, that a potential carrier of the coronavirus was at large there: a man who had driven to the funeral days earlier. Government workers found and tested him — also positive.
Using digital health code records, teams of tracers plotted out a network of people to test based on where the man had been: a restaurant, a mahjong parlor, card-playing rooms. Within a couple of weeks, they stopped the chain of infections in Hangzhou — in all, 29 people there were found to be infected.
China’s capacity to trace outbreaks like this has relied heavily on the health code. Residents sign up for the system by submitting their personal information in one of a range of apps. The health code is essentially required, because without it, people cannot enter buildings, restaurants or even parks. Before the pandemic, China already had a vast ability to track people using location data from cellphones; now, that monitoring is far more expansive.
In recent months, the authorities in various cities have expanded their definition of close contact to include people whose cellphone signals were recorded within as much as half a mile of an infected person.
The party’s experiment in using data to control the flow of people has helped keep Covid at bay. Now these same tools potentially give officials greater power to manage other challenges.
Mr. Xi has praised Hangzhou’s “City Brain” center — which pulls together data on traffic, economic activity, hospital use and public complaints — as a model for how China can use technology to address social problems.
Since 2020, Hangzhou has also used video cameras on streets to check whether residents are wearing masks. One district monitored home power consumption to check whether residents were sticking to quarantine orders. The central city of Luoyang installed sensors on the doors of residents quarantining at home, in order to notify officials if they were opened.
With so much invested, financially and politically, in technological solutions, failures can have big repercussions.
During the recent lockdown in Xi’an, a city of 13 million in northwest China, the health code system crashed twice in two weeks, disrupting the lives of residents who had to update their apps each day with proof that they had taken Covid tests.
By focusing on technology and surveillance, Chinese officials may be neglecting other ways of protecting lives, such as expanding participation in public health programs, wrote Chen Yun, a scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, in a recent assessment of China’s response to Covid.
The risk, Ms. Chen wrote, is that “a vicious cycle arises: People become increasingly marginalized, while technology and power increasingly penetrate everywhere.”
‘On call at all times’
For over a decade, the Communist Party has been shoring up its armies of grass-roots officials who carry out door-to-door surveillance. The party’s new digital apparatus has supercharged this older form of control.
China has mobilized 4.5 million so-called grid workers to fight the outbreak, according to state media — roughly one in every 250 adults. Under the grid management system, cities, villages and towns are divided into sections, sometimes of just a few blocks, which are then assigned to individual workers.
During normal times, their duties included pulling weeds, mediating disputes and keeping an eye on potential troublemakers.
Amid the pandemic, those duties mushroomed.
Workers were given the task of guarding residential complexes and recording the identities of all who entered. They called residents to make sure they had been tested and vaccinated, and helped those in lockdown take out their trash.
They also were given powerful new tools.
The central government has directed the police, as well as internet and telephone companies, to share information about residents’ travel history with community workers so that the workers can decide whether residents are considered high-risk.
In a county in southwestern Sichuan Province, the ranks of grid workers tripled to more than 300 over the course of the pandemic, said Pan Xiyu, 26, one of the new hires. Ms. Pan, who is responsible for about 2,000 residents, says she spends much of her time distributing leaflets and setting up loudspeakers to explain new measures and encourage vaccination.
The work can be exhausting. “I have to be on call at all times,” Ms. Pan said.
And the pressure to stifle outbreaks can make officials overzealous, prioritizing adherence to the rules no matter the cost.
During the lockdown of Xi’an, hospital workers refused medical care to a woman who was eight months pregnant because her Covid test result had expired hours earlier. She lost the baby, an episode that inspired widespread public fury. But some blamed the heavy burden placed upon low-level workers to stamp out infections.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
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Omicron in retreat. Though the U.S. is still facing overwhelmed hospitals and more than 2,500 deaths a day, new cases are falling rapidly across the country. But experts warned that spotty immunity and the threat of new variants mean the virus is not likely to ever completely disappear.
“In their view, it’s always preferable to go too far than be too soft-handed, but that’s the pressure created by the environment nowadays,” Li Naitang, a retired worker in Xi’an, said of local officials.
Still, for defenders of China’s stringent measures, the results are undeniable. The country has recorded only 3.3 coronavirus deaths per million residents, compared to about 2,600 per million in the United States. In mid-January, Xi’an officials announced zero new infections; this past week, the lockdown was lifted entirely.
‘You’ll never be lost’
The government’s success in limiting infections means its strategy has earned something that has proved elusive in many other countries: widespread support.
Ms. Pan, the grid worker, said her job was easier now than at the start of the pandemic. Then, residents often argued when told to scan their health codes or wear masks. Now, she said, people have come to accept the health measures.
“Everybody takes them more and more seriously, and is very cooperative,” she said.
Indeed, many Chinese fear that loosening controls could leave room for a resurgence of Covid, said Shen Maohua, a blogger in Shanghai who has written about the pandemic and privacy concerns under his pen name, Wei Zhou.
“For many people, I think, it’s actually a kind of mental trade-off,” he said in an interview. “They’re giving up some rights in return for absolute security.”
The question is how long people will continue to find that exchange worthwhile. Already, social media users have complained about the apparent arbitrariness with which they can find themselves blocked from traveling because of software glitches or policies that vary by city.
Even officials have acknowledged the problems. A state-run news outlet this month published an analysis of each province’s criteria for a health code to turn from green to yellow. It concluded that, for most provinces, the answer was unclear.
“You never know if your planned itinerary will be canceled, or if your travel plans can be realized,” the article said.
Some government critics warn that the costs will go far beyond inconvenience.
Wang Yu, a well-known human rights lawyer, says she believes the authorities have weaponized the health code to try to stop her from working. In November, as she was returning to Beijing after a work trip, she tried to log her travel on her health code app, as required. But when she selected Jiangsu Province, the drop-down menu listed only one city, Changzhou, where she had not been and which had just recorded several infections. If she chose that, she would most likely be refused entry to Beijing.
In the past, security officers had to physically follow her to interfere with her work. Now, she worries, they can restrict her movements from afar.
“Wherever you go, you’ll never be lost,” said Ms. Wang, who stayed with relatives in Tianjin until her app abruptly returned to normal a month later.
Less high-profile critics are vulnerable, too. Several local governments have pledged to keep a close eye on petitioners — people who travel to Beijing or other cities to lodge complaints about officials — because of their supposed potential to violate travel restrictions.
The health code “can also easily be used as a dirty trick for stability maintenance,” said Lin Yingqiang, a longtime petitioner from Fuzhou, in southeastern China. He said that he was taken off a train by the police ahead of a party leaders’ meeting in November. His health code app turned yellow, requiring that he return to Fuzhou for quarantine, though he had not been anywhere near a confirmed case.
Officials have openly promoted using virus control measures in ways unlinked to the pandemic. In the Guangxi region of southern China, a judge noticed that the grid workers’ accounting of local residents was “more thorough than the census.” That gave him an idea.
“Why not use this opportunity to have epidemic grid workers find people we couldn’t find before, or send summonses to places that were hard to reach before?” he said, according to a local news report. Eighteen summonses were successfully delivered as a result.
Local governments across China have sought to assure people that their health code data will not be abused. The central government has also issued regulations promising data privacy. But many Chinese people assume that the authorities can acquire whatever information they want, no matter the rules.
Zan Aizong, a former journalist in Hangzhou, says the expansion of surveillance could make it even easier for the authorities to break up dissenters’ activities. He has refused to use the health code, but it means moving around is difficult, and he finds it hard to explain his reasoning to workers at checkpoints.
“I can’t tell them the truth — that I’m resisting the health code over surveillance,” he said, “because if I mentioned resistance, they’d think that was ridiculous.”
Joy Dong, Liu Yi and Li You contributed reporting and research.
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January 31, 2022 at 12:00AM
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China's Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Coronavirus - The New York Times
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‘Stealth’ Omicron Variant No Cause for Alarm, but Could Slow Case Decline - The New York Times
A mutated version of the Omicron variant could slow the steep decline in cases, but it is not likely to change the overall course of the pandemic, scientists said.
In recent days, headlines about a “stealth” Omicron variant have conjured the notion that a villainous new form of the coronavirus is secretly creating a disastrous new wave of Covid.
That scenario is highly unlikely, scientists say. But the new variant, which goes by the scientific name BA.2 and is one of three branches of the Omicron viral family, could drag out the Omicron surge in much of the world.
So far, BA.2 doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease, and vaccines are just as effective against it as they are against other forms of Omicron. But it does show signs of spreading more readily.
“This may mean higher peak infections in places that have yet to peak, and a slowdown in the downward trends in places that have already experienced peak Omicron,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London.
In November 2021, researchers in South Africa first raised the alarm about Omicron, which carried 53 mutations setting it apart from the initial coronavirus strain isolated in Wuhan. Some of those mutations enabled it to escape the antibodies produced by vaccines or previous infections. Other mutations appear to have made it concentrate in the upper airway, rather than in the lungs. Since then, Omicron’s genetic changes have driven it to dominance across the world.
Within weeks of Omicron’s emergence, however, researchers in South Africa started finding a few puzzling, Omicron-like variants. The viruses shared some of Omicron’s distinctive mutations, but lacked others. They also carried some unique mutations of their own.
It soon became clear that Omicron was made up of three distinct branches that split off from a common ancestor. Scientists named the branches BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3.
The earliest Omicron samples belonged to BA.1. BA.2 was less common. BA.3, which was even rarer, appears to be the product of a kind of viral sex: BA.1 and BA.2 simultaneously infected the same person, and their genes were scrambled together to create a new viral hybrid.
At first, scientists focused their attention on BA.1 because its occurrence outnumbered the others by a ratio of 1,000 to one. A lucky break made it easy for them to track it.
Common PCR tests typically detect three coronavirus genes. But the tests can identify only two of those genes in BA.1 because of a mutation in the third gene, known as spike.
In December, researchers in South Africa found that a growing number of PCR tests were failing to detect the spike gene — a sign that BA.1 was becoming more common. (The dominant variant at the time, known as Delta, didn’t cause spike failures in PCR tests.) As Omicron rose, Delta waned.
Unlike BA.1., BA.2 lacks the spike mutation that makes PCR tests fail. Without the ability to use PCR tests to track BA.2, some scientists nicknamed it the “stealth” version of Omicron.
But BA.2 wasn’t invisible: Researchers could still track it by analyzing the genetic sequences of samples from positive tests. And once Delta virtually disappeared, scientists could use PCR tests to tell the difference between BA.1 and BA.2: Samples that caused spike failures contained BA.1, whereas the ones that didn’t contained BA.2.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
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Omicron in retreat. Though the U.S. is still facing overwhelmed hospitals and more than 2,500 deaths a day, new cases are falling rapidly across the country. But experts warned that spotty immunity and the threat of new variants mean the virus is not likely to ever completely disappear.
In recent weeks, BA.2 has become more common in some countries. In Denmark, BA.2 makes up 65 percent of new cases, the Statens Serum Institut reported on Thursday. So far, however, researchers there have found that people infected with BA.2 are no more or less likely to be hospitalized than those with BA.1.
On Friday, the British government released another early analysis of BA.2, finding that the variant makes up just a few percent of cases there. Still, surveys across England show that it is growing faster than BA.1 because it is more transmissible.
Reassuringly, the British researchers found that vaccines were just as effective against BA.2 as BA.1.
Trevor Bedford, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, found a similar pattern in the United States in viral sequences from recent test samples. He estimated that about 8 percent of cases in the United States are BA.2, and that figure is climbing fast, he added.
“I’m fairly certain that it will become dominant in the U.S.,” Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale University School of Public Health said, “but I don’t yet know what that would mean for the pandemic.”
It’s conceivable that BA.2 could lead to a new surge, but Dr. Grubaugh thinks it’s more likely that Covid cases will continue to decline in weeks to come. It’s also possible that BA.2 may create a small bump on the way down, or simply slow the fall. Experiments on BA.1 now underway may help scientists sharpen their projections.
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January 30, 2022 at 10:19PM
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‘Stealth’ Omicron Variant No Cause for Alarm, but Could Slow Case Decline - The New York Times
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