Category: Corona Virus

WELLINGTON, New Zealand

Samoa will go into lockdown starting Saturday as it faces its first coronavirus outbreak, two years into the pandemic.

The move comes after a woman who was about to leave the Pacific island nation tested positive for the coronavirus. It is the first time Samoa has found any unexplained cases in the community and likely points to an undetected outbreak that has been going on for days or even weeks.

A government report leaked online indicates that the woman had visited church services, a hospital, stores, a library and a travel agency since first feeling ill Saturday.

Samoa and several neighboring island nations were among the last places on Earth to avoid virus outbreaks. But the more transmissible Omicron variant has changed the equation, and one by one the island nations have witnessed infections.

Since the start of the year, Kiribati, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands and American Samoa have all experienced their first big outbreaks.

John Fala, who runs a logistics company in Samoa, said it was inevitable that the coronavirus would eventually come to Samoa, a reality brought home for many when it began spreading in nearby American Samoa.

Weve had two years to prepare, Fala said. Now its finally here. Of course, there is going to be a bit of scrambling.

Starting Saturday, all schools will be closed, public gatherings will be banned, and all stores and other services will be shut down, except those considered essential. People are also required to wear masks.

There were reports Friday of panic-buying ahead of the lockdown.

Fala, who is vaccinated, said that his company is considered an essential service and that hes frantically trying to navigate the new rules to keep it operating.

The lockdown is initially scheduled to last through midnight Tuesday, but Fala expects it will be extended.

The father of three young children, Fala said his biggest concern is that unvaccinated children will catch the coronavirus. He said the nation of 200,000 had good rates of inoculation among adults but had only just begun vaccinating children ages 5 to 11 in the past week or so.

About 65% of all Samoans have had at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataafa told people about the positive case in a special announcement to the nation late Thursday. She said the infected woman was in isolation and that her movements and contacts with people were being traced.

Mataafa said officials wanted to do all they could to contain it from spreading rapidly.

Although our country continues to traverse through these difficult times, let us continue to trust in the Lord, Mataafa said in her announcement.

Samoa has had previous coronavirus scares and lockdowns after returning plane passengers tested positive while isolating, but had managed to avoid any community outbreaks until now.

Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Nauru are among the few remaining Pacific island nations to have avoided Omicron outbreaks.

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Facing its first coronavirus outbreak, Samoa to go into lockdown - Los Angeles Times

Italy is marking the second anniversary of a tragic milestone of the coronavirus pandemic

By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press

March 18, 2022, 2:18 PM

3 min read

ROME -- Italy on Friday marked the second anniversary of a tragic milestone of the coronavirus pandemic: the day when a convoy of army trucks had to transport the dead out of hard-hit Bergamo because the citys cemeteries and crematoria were full.

Premier Mario Draghi opened a press conference Friday with the leaders of Spain, Portugal and Greece by recalling that it was Italy's official Day of Remembrance for COVID-19 victims. The Health Ministry called for Italians to observe a minute of silence, President Sergio Mattarella paid tribute to the dead and the city of Bergamo held a commemoration at its living memorial: a park of newly planted trees.

We bow down in memory of the victims, Mattarella said in his tribute. The entire international community shares in the pain of the families.

Italy became the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe after the first locally-transmitted case was confirmed in late February 2020 in the Lombard city of Codogno. But nearby Bergamo soon became the hardest-hit province in the hardest-hit region. By the end of March 2020, Bergamo had registered a 571% increase in deaths compared with the five-year monthly average, the biggest increase in Italy and one of the biggest localized increases in mortality rates in Europe.

Footage of the army convoy snaking its way through Bergamos roads on March 18, 2020 carrying caskets of the dead remains one of the most haunting and iconic images of the pandemic, early evidence of the outsized toll the first weeks of the outbreak had on the city northeast of Milan.

The anniversary of the convoy comes as Italy begins winding down its anti-virus restrictions. Draghi and Health Minister Roberto Speranza announced Thursday that many workplace vaccination requirements, quarantine rules and mask mandates would be eased in the coming weeks.

Italy, which has recorded more than 157,000 official COVID deaths, has fully vaccinated 89.7% of its over-12 population.

At the Bergamo memorial Friday, the president of the lower chamber of parliament, Roberto Fico, said the aim of the anniversary commemorations was to honor the dead but also to ensure that Italy is better prepared for the next pandemic.

What is important today is not just remember the victims and be close to their relatives but to learn from what happened, Fico told reporters. He called for greater investment in funding Italys network of general practitioners and local health care providers, improving telemedicine and rebuilding the public health system as a pillar of Italys social services.

We have to do this to remember those who died in an active way, he said.

Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.

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Italy marks 2nd anniversary of haunting COVID-19 milestone - ABC News

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Booster coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine doses will no longer be required for New York State health-care workers, according to a recent report.

The New York State Public Health and Health Planning Council voted on Thursday to no longer require health-care workers to receive a COVID-19 booster, stated a report by WETM-18 News, in Elmira, N.Y. The change in policy needs to be added to the State Registry before it becomes effective, according to the media outlet.

Gov. Kathy Hochul first mandated the booster in January, citing the effectiveness of the vaccine mandate for keeping health-care workers safe.

Many health-care associations, hospitals and workers themselves spoke out against the mandate, saying it would lead to further staffing shortages. Some associations, like the Health Care Association of New York State, asked for a 90-day extension before the booster mandate went into effect.

To help protect some of our most vulnerable New Yorkers from COVID-19, today the Public Health and Health Planning Council (PHHPC) extended the original vaccination requirement for health-care workers that has remained in effect since last year and does not renew the booster dose requirement for health-care workers, the state Health Department said, according to the report.

In light of concerns about potential staffing issues, on Feb. 18, the New York State Department of Health announced it would not enforce the mandate requiring health-care workers get a COVID-19 booster shot. As a result of the health-care worker vaccine requirement, hospital workers and long-term staff have a completed vaccine series of 98 and 99 percent, respectively, the statement continued.

FOLLOW KRISTIN F. DALTON ON TWITTER.

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Coronavirus booster to no longer be mandated for health-care workers, report says - SILive.com

Companies looking to use mRNA to treat cystic fibrosis include ReCode Therapeutics, Arcturus Therapeutics, and Moderna and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which are collaborating. The companies' goal is to correct a fundamental defect in cystic fibrosis, a mutated protein.

Rather than replace the protein itself, scientists plan to deliver mRNA that would instruct the body to make the normal, healthy version of the protein, said David Lockhart, ReCode's president and chief science officer.

None of these drugs is in clinical trials yet.

That leaves patients such as Nicholas Kelly waiting for better treatment options.

"Nobody wants to be hospitalized," said Kelly, who lives in Cleveland. "If something could decrease my symptoms even 10%, I would try it."

Predicting Which Covid Patients Are Most Likely to Die

Likewise, funding for AIDS research has benefited patients with a variety of diseases, said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine. Studies of HIV led to the development of better drugs for hepatitis C and cytomegalovirus, or CMV; paved the way for successful immunotherapies in cancer; and speeded the development of covid vaccines.

"We never dreamed we could have a PCR test that could be done anywhere but a lab," James said. "Now we can do them at a patient's bedside in rural Oklahoma. That could help us with rapid testing for other diseases."

The discovery of interferon-targeting antibodies "certainly changed my way of thinking at a broad level," said E. John Wherry, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Immunology, who was not involved in the studies. "This is a paradigm shift in immunology and in covid."

The discovery "goes far beyond the impact of covid-19," Michelson said. "These findings may have implications in treating patients with other infectious diseases" such as the flu.

Bastard and colleagues have also found that one-third of patients with dangerous reactions to yellow fever have autoantibodies against interferon.

International research teams are now looking for such autoantibodies in patients hospitalized by other viral infections, including chickenpox, influenza, measles, respiratory syncytial virus, and others.

Overturning Dogma

Today it's clear that the coronavirus and all respiratory viruses spread through a combination of droplets and aerosols, said Dr. Michael Klompas, a professor at Harvard Medical School and infectious disease doctor.

"It's not either/or," Klompas said. "We've created this artificial dichotomy about how we think about these viruses. But we always put out a mixture of both" when we breathe, cough, and sneeze.

Knowing that respiratory viruses commonly spread through the air is important because it can help health agencies protect the public. For example, high-quality masks, such as N95 respirators, offer much better protection against airborne viruses than cloth masks or surgical masks. Improving ventilation, so that the air in a room is completely replaced at least four to six times an hour, is another important way to control airborne viruses.

Still, Klompas said, there's no guarantee that the country will handle the next outbreak any better than this one. "Will we do a better job fighting influenza because of what we've learned?" Klompas said. "I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath."

Fighting Chronic Disease

Lauren Nichols, 32, remembers exactly when she developed her first covid symptoms: March 10, 2020.

It was the beginning of an illness that has plagued her for nearly two years, with no end in sight. Although Nichols was healthy before developing what has become known as "long covid," she deals with dizziness, headaches, and debilitating fatigue, which gets markedly worse after exercise. She has had shingles a painful rash caused by the reactivation of the chickenpox virus four times since her covid infection.

In fact, research suggests that "the two conditions are one and the same," said Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. The main difference is that people with long covid know which virus caused their illness, while the precise virus behind most cases of chronic fatigue is unknown, Nath said.

"Anything that shows promise in long covid will be immediately trialed in ME/CFS," said Jarred Younger, director of the Neuroinflammation, Pain and Fatigue Laboratory at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

"There is a lot of frustration about being written off by the medical community, being told that it's all in one's head, that they just need to see a psychiatrist or go to the gym," said Dr. David Systrom, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

That sort of ignorance seems to be declining, largely because of increasing awareness about long covid, said Emily Taylor, vice president of advocacy and engagement at Solve M.E., an advocacy group for people with post-infectious chronic illnesses. Although some doctors still refuse to believe long covid is a real disease, "they're being drowned out by the patient voices," Taylor said.

"In a very dark cloud," Nichols said, "a silver lining coming out of long covid is that we've been forced to acknowledge how real and serious these conditions are."

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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'This is just the start': Research into Covid-19 opens doors to understanding other diseases and conditions - CNN

All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs despite decades of warnings from public-health experts. It has been as inevitable as the passing of day into night.

Even so, its not meant to happen this quickly. When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over. The U.S. funds pandemic preparedness like Minnesota snow, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2018. Theres a lot in January, but in July its all melted.

Or, as it happens, in March.

This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it wont be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It cant buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, theyll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government wont have enough for everyone.

To be clear, these facets of the pandemic response were already insufficient. The U.S. has never tested sufficiently, never vaccinated enough people, never made enough treatments accessible to its most vulnerable, and never adequately worked to flatten global vaccine inequities. These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further. Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the countrys earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will. As I wrote last September, the U.S. was already barreling toward the next pandemic. Now it is sprinting there.

The virus is moving too. Cases are shooting up across Western Europe, auguring a similar rise in the U.S., as has happened in every past surge. (A third of the CDCs wastewater sites have detected upticks in coronavirus samples this month, although such data are noisy and hard to interpret when levels of virus are low.) Meanwhile, mask and vaccine mandates are being lifted. Contact tracing and quarantine policies are being discontinued. The CDCs new guidelines recast most of the country as low risk and left the most vulnerable individuals with the burden of protecting themselves. Some experts supported the guidelines on the grounds that testing, treatments, and other defensive tools were availableand, as promised in Bidens recently unveiled national plan, would be strengthened even further. But those promises were always contingent on congressional funding; without it, those residual layers of protection evaporate too. For half a year, Biden, administration officials, and several prominent public-health voices have encouraged optimism because we have the tools to fight the virus. The first half of that catchphrase now seems doubtful.

As The Washington Post and others have reported, the funding meltdown occurred because Republicans were skeptical about the need for further COVID funding. Their counteroffer was to repurpose unspent pots of money that had already been set aside for state-level pandemic responses; Democrats refused, and coronavirus aid was omitted from the bill entirely. It is reasonable to ask for accountability in spending, but this particular line of reasoning is familiar. In 2016, Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to fight Zika, but Republicans refused, arguing that such funds should be cannibalized from a pot that was set aside for the 2015 Ebola outbreak. In 2018, Donald Trump asked Congress to rescind $252 million that was leftover in that pot, which he billed as an example of irresponsible federal spending. In fact, those funds were an investment, left deliberately untouched so that the U.S. could more quickly respond to future outbreaks (such as the one that began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exactly as Trump issued his call). The U.S. clearly grasps the concept of preparedness during peacetime: It spends at least $700 billion a year on its military, more than any other country. But when thinking about infectious diseases, vital preparations for the future are routinely seen as unnecessary excesses of the presenteven in the middle of a pandemic.

One could argue that such thinking reflects pragmatism rather than complacency. Budgets arent infinite, and countries face a multitude of pressing problems. If one threat goes away, doesnt it make sense to divert resources to others? This argument fails for three major reasons. First, and most obvious, the threat didnt go away! Even when the coronavirus reaches endemicity (which it very much hasnt yet), an endemic threat isnt one that can be ignored but one that must be managedwhich requires regular investment of the kind that Congress saw fit to deny. Second, preventing epidemics is far more cost-effective than dealing with their consequences, and allocating funds only when a threat is knocking on our door is economic folly.

Third, many of the measures that would make a difference against COVIDbetter ventilation, paid sick leave, equitable health care, a stronger public-health infrastructurewould also protect people from other diseases and health problems. In this respect, even the $15 billion that the White House asked for (and now wont get) is insufficient. And to consider such money as COVID funding is part of the problema misguided approach of tackling health problems one by one, instead of fixing the inequities that underlie them all.

These dynamics might occur for many of the same reasons that I identified in a recent article about why much of the U.S. has normalized so many COVID deaths. The virus is invisible. The ruin it inflicts is hidden from public view. The pandemic has gone on for two long years, turning tragedy into routine and breeding fatalism from failure. Older, disabled, poor, Black, or brown Americans, whose excess deaths were tolerated long before COVID, have borne the brunt of the pandemic, while privileged people have had the swiftest access to medical interventionsand have been quickest to declare the crisis over. A country that so readily forgets its dead is surely prone to also forgetting the lessons of the all-too-recent past, setting itself up for further failure in an all-too-imminent future.

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The COVID Funding Collapse Is a Disaster - The Atlantic

(STACKER) The vaccine deployment in December 2020 signaled a turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of May 2021, 40% of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated. But as vaccination rates lagged over the summer, new surges of COVID-19 came, including Delta in the summer of 2021, and now the Omicron variant, which comprises the majority of cases in the U.S.

Researchers around the world have reported that Omicron is more transmissible than Delta, making breakthrough and repeat infections more likely. Early research suggests this strain may cause less severe illness than Delta and the original virus, however, health officials have warned an Omicron-driven surge could still increase hospitalization and death rates, especially in areas with less vaccinated populations.

The United States as of March 16 reached 964,448 COVID-19-related deaths and 79.4 million COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. Currently, 65.3% of the population is fully vaccinated, and 44.4% have received booster doses.

Stacker compiled a list of the counties with the highest COVID-19 infection rates in Oregon using data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and vaccination data from Covid Act Now. Counties are ranked by the highest infection rate per 100,000 residents within the week leading up to March 15, 2022. Cumulative cases per 100,000 served as a tiebreaker.

Keep reading to see whether your county ranks among the highest COVID-19 infection rates in your state.

Editors note: A previous version of this story misstated the date of the data we used for the rankings. We have updated the copy to reflect that the data comes from infection rates per 100,000 residents within the week leading up to March 15, 2022.

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Counties with highest COVID-19 infection rates in Oregon - KOIN.com

(The Hill) White House adviserAnthony Fauci is warning that COVID-19 infection rates are likely to rise in the next few weeks in the United States after their dramatic drop following the omicron variants rapid spread across the country.

I would not be surprised if in the next few weeks, we see somewhat of either a flattening of our diminution or maybe even an increase, Fauci said on theABC News podcast Start Here,ABC News reported.

Whether or not that is going to lead to another surge, a mini-surge or maybe even a moderate surge, is very unclear because there are a lot of other things that are going on right now, he added.

Cases have fallen heavily across the nation over the last two months, with the average number of new cases totally just over 30,000.

Faucis prediction is based on the United Kingdom, where cases have slightly started to go up, although their intensive care bed usage is not going up, which means theyre not seeing a blip up of severe disease, Fauci added.

The increase in cases comes as the BA.2 variant is seeing an uptick in the U.S., with Fauci predicting on the podcast the variant will overtake omicron in the future.

The U.S. has just begun easing COVID-19 restrictions after two years of pandemic policies such as masking and social distancing.

All U.S. states have dropped their mask mandates as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said most areas in the U.S. did not need to require masks indoors.

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Fauci warns COVID-19 infection rates likely to increase - WGN TV Chicago

Ian Sheer, a Keller Army Community Hospital at West Point nursing student, administers a coronavirus booster shot to Master Sgt. Jose Rivera of the 1179th Transportation Surface Brigade during a booster shot clinic at the U.S. Army Garrison Fort Hamilton, N.Y., on Feb. 24, 2022. (Connie Dillon/U.S. Army )

Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more storieshere. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletterhere. Please support our journalismwith a subscription.

WASHINGTON The Army has issued its first three separations for soldiers who refused to get their mandatory coronavirus vaccinations, the service announced Friday.

The Army is the last of the service branches to begin kicking out troops who do not get the shots. Technically, the three soldiers were separated for refusing a lawful order to receive the vaccine, according to the Army.

The announcement comes more than three months after the Armys deadline to receive the vaccine, and about six weeks after Army Secretary Christine Wormuth ordered service commanders on Jan. 31 to begin the process of involuntarily separating vaccine refusers as expeditiously as possible.

While the Army had not separated any soldiers until this week, the Army relieved six service leaders from command including two battalion commanders and issued 3,251 general officer written reprimands to soldiers for refusing the vaccination order.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered all service members to receive the vaccine in August, but allowed each service to determine their own timelines.

Last week, the Army approved its first permanent religious waiver for the vaccine order. The service has granted one more as of Friday, according to an Army statement released Friday.

About 702 active-duty soldiers have been denied a religious exemption, while another 3,943 are awaiting decisions on their religious waiver requests.

The Army also has approved seven permanent medical exemptions to the vaccine, as of Friday. The service has denied 658 permanent waiver requests and another 692 are awaiting decisions.

Those denied exemptions to the Armys vaccine mandate have seven days to start the vaccination process or file an appeal of their denial before commanders are to begin the process of kicking them out, according to Wormuths January order.

Some 96% of the Armys about 486,000 active-duty soldiers have been fully vaccinated and another 1% were partially inoculated, the service said Friday. Those percentages remain unchanged from the previous week.

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Army kicks outs its first three coronavirus vaccine refusers - Stars and Stripes

After two years in a pandemic that has killed nearly a million people in the United States, analysts are examining how the crisis has evolved.

An essay released this month by Pew senior researcher Bradley Jones used death data compiled by The New York Times to explore how location and politics influenced responses to COVID-19.

The pandemic rolled across the U.S. unevenly and in waves. Today, the death toll of the pandemic looks very different from how it looked in the early part of 2020, Jones wrote in The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 Over the Last Two Years.

In a perhaps-unexpected seesaw, data shows community characteristics associated with higher death rates at the beginning of the pandemic are now associated with lower death rates, the report says. Areas with early low death rates have seen them climb.

Obviously, the pandemic has been front and center in so many of our lives over the last two years, said Jocelyn Kiley, who is associate director of research for Pew Research Center and was involved in shaping the report. I think its clear that the pandemic has impacted different populations differently and at different stages.

Americas first COVID-19 wave, between March and June 2020, was concentrated in the Northeast, around New York City. That summer, most of the deaths were in the South. But the deadliest period took place from fall 2020 into winter 2021 and those 370,000 deaths occurred amid far less pronounced geographic distinctions, Jones writes.

Early on, the fact that it impacted urban centers in the Northeast more than other parts of the country I think really did shape some of that early coverage, said Kiley. If we look at public opinion data, we also saw that people in urban areas were more likely to say they saw COVID-19 as a public health threat in those early stages. She said Pew also looked at geography and politics in the pandemic in December 2020.

When vaccines became widely available to adults in spring and summer 2021, national death rates slowed, though they picked up again with the arrival of first the delta variant at summers end, then omicron. In those two waves, more than 300,000 people in the United States died.

Pews analysis also considers how political leanings might have changed the response to COVID-19 and thus the toll of the pandemic over time. Jones wrote that in spring 2020, areas that had the most deaths were those that were more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. The pattern reversed by fall of 2020.

Other geographic reversals have also occurred over the course of the pandemic. The report highlights:

That change probably comes from differences in mitigation efforts and how many people were vaccinated, as well as other differences that are correlated with partisanship at the county level, according to Pews report.

The report notes that among the large majority of counties for which reliable vaccination data exists, counties that supported Trump at higher margins have substantially lower vaccination rates than those that supported Biden at higher margins.

Jones found that counties with lower vaccination rates have had substantially greater death rates in each wave of the pandemic during which vaccines were widely available.

Kileyemphasized that Pew is far from the only survey organization to document a partisan divide on COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors, which she described as established fairly early on. We saw it in the very earliest surveys, with the exception of those conducted in that first week or so when we all first heard about the pandemic.

Between the third and delta waves of the pandemic, case counts dropped and people were more apt to say they were comfortable going places theyd avoided earlier. But that changed again as case counts and deaths rose with the delta variant, Kiley said.

In late 2020, she said, about 80% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said the outbreak was a major threat to the health of the U.S. population. By comparison, just under 50% of Republicans and Republican leaners said that, and really that pattern persisted over the course of the entire pandemic, said Kiley.

The patterns of infection arent the only thing that changed in the pandemic. In February, Pew issued a report called Increasing Public Criticism, Confusion Over COVID-19 Response in the U.S which found that the public was increasingly dissatisfied with how elected officials and public health experts have handled the pandemic.

Amid debates over how to address the surge in cases driven by the omicron variant, confusion is now the most common reaction to shifts in public health guidance, Pew research fellows Alec Tyson and Cary Funk wrote in that report. They found 60% of U.S. adults have been confused by changes to public health recommendations on how to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Thats up 7 percentage points since last summer.

The report shows a near-even split on whether the response to COVID-19 by public health experts has been fair or poor or excellent or good. Public health scored about 10 points higher in August, which was also a drop from early 2020.

Approval of elected officials has also dropped, with 6 in 10 calling Bidens response to the coronavirus only fair or poor. The 40% who say Biden is doing a good or excellent job is barely above the 36% who said that of Trump during his presidency.

Kiley sees great diversity in the reaction to the pandemic throughout the country not even in terms of state or local policies, but in terms of almost culture. She said people wore masks in restaurants and stores even when it wasnt explicit state or local policy in some parts of the country, while in other areas that behavior was far less common. Its likely that an areas culture and even what neighbors do influence such decisions, she said.

The February report found more than three-fourths of U.S. adults said theyd gotten at least one vaccine dose, including 73% who claimed to be fully vaccinated. Of those fully vaccinated, 66% said theyd received a COVID-19 booster shot, too.

Vaccination is another area with significant differences along political lines. The survey showed 90% of Democrats or those who lean to the Democratic Party have received at least one dose, compared to 64% of Republicans or those leaning to that party.

And 73% of vaccinated Democrats say theyve gotten a COVID-19 booster in the past six months, compared to 55% of fully vaccinated Republicans.

The report said age and education strongly shape the vaccine decision among Republicans. The share whove gotten the vaccine seems to go up with age, from a low of 52% for those ages 18 to 29 to 80% among those 65 and older who received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose.

Well-educated Republicans are more likely than those with less education to be vaccinated (81% of Republicans with a postgraduate degree compared to 57% of those with a high school diploma or less). Among Democrats, the differences were modest, the report said.

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COVID Pew research: Which states were hit the hardest? - Deseret News

Last November, having alerted the world to the new and highly transmissible Omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, South Africa-based scientist Tulio de Oliveira saw that country hit with travel bans.

Already smarting at what he saw as wealthier nations hoarding of vaccines, antiviral drugs and test reagents, his frustration spilled over. If the world keeps punishing Africa for the discovery of Omicron and global health scientists keep taking the data, who will share early data again? he tweeted.

Two years into this pandemic, as the World Health Organization (WHO) mulls the tricky question of when to call it over and some countries, including the UK, pre-empt that decision, the worlds attention is turning to the future.

How do we improve our response to the next pandemic?

There are two main challenges: improving the surveillance of pathogens; and ensuring vaccine equity.

And as De Oliveira intimated, these are linked. Not only morally, but for the first time in pandemic history, legally.

It used to be that living organisms, including pathogens, were considered humanitys common heritage, and sharing them for scientific purposes happened informally.

That changed with the UNs 1992 convention on biological diversity (CBD), which states that countries have sovereign rights over genetic resources found on their territory.

Under an annex to that convention, the Nagoya protocol, the host country can set terms for accessing those resources and for ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from them.

Covid-19 is the first pandemic since Nagoya entered into force in 2014, but the spirit of the protocol has not been respected. Starting with China in January 2020, countries have shared Sars-CoV-2-related data freely, demanding nothing in return.

That data has driven revolutions in vaccinology, pathogen sequencing and data collection. But the fruits of those revolutions have not been shared equitably.

Just 14% of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose, compared with about 80% in high- and upper middle-income countries.

The WHO is now proposing several separate initiatives to improve surveillance, including two Europe-based hubs for the international sharing of pathogen data and samples. But these proposals, too, effectively ignore Nagoya.

The WHO expects countries to contribute to the hubs for the common good, possibly even on pain of sanctions. Though it has been vocal about the need for vaccine equity, none of the current proposals explicitly address benefit-sharing.

Were treating pathogen-sharing as a common good, but were not treating vaccines and medical countermeasures as a common good, sayslegal scholar Mark Eccleston-Turner of Kings College London.

Eccleston-Turner says human pathogens should be excluded from Nagoya and vaccines should be similarly reclassified.

Practically, he suggests, this might be enshrined in a pandemic treaty the WHO is working on, that could apportion intellectual property (IP) rights according to the ratio of public-private investment in vaccine development.

The three or four leading coronavirus vaccines all took a different route to market, but one thing they have in common, according to IP law specialist Luke McDonagh of the London School of Economics, is that the public bore most of the risk and the drug companies maintained most of the IP.

More of the IP should stay in the public domain, he says, reflecting taxpayers investment. McDonagh points to research showing private-sector claims that reducing their IP dominance would dilute innovation do not hold up, and gives the example of antiretroviral drugs for HIV the subject of an earlier IP battle.

The fact of generic production in the global south has not affected incentives for HIV research in the rich countries, he says.

But changing the status quo via a new treaty may not be easy without government backing, he admits, and the UK and EU are among those whose current stance on patents suggests they might oppose it. Sharing knowhow and building up vaccine manufacturing capacity globally are also vital for achieving vaccine equity, he says, and the WHO is promoting both.

There may be a radically different solution: leave pathogens in Nagoya and respect its insistence on equitable benefit-sharing.

There is a precedent, says Edward Hammond, a Texas-based consultant who has advised low- and middle-income countries on the implications of Nagoya. He points to a successful implementation of Nagoya in the WHOs own pandemic influenza preparedness (PIP) framework.

Through PIP, WHO member states share samples of flu viruses that have human pandemic potential, and the WHO receives a share of the benefits. It has generated over $250m [190m] in cash payments from vaccine [and other] companies, Hammond says.

Some have said applying Nagoya to pathogens would at best create delays in sharing and at worst give control to bad actors. In the event of another pandemic, some country might assert its rights over virus samples, keeping the rest of the world in the dark, Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, wrote in a blog post at Stat last November.

It is not just drug companies expressing that view. It is shared by some in public health. Three years ago, Vasee Moorthy, a senior science adviser at the WHO, worked on a study into the impact of Nagoya on public health. Certain people were worried that there might be delays, but we havent seen that, Moorthy says.

If anything, the study found that the protocol encourages pathogen-sharing by building trust that benefits will be fairly shared. As Moorthy says: Sharing is in everyones interests.

De Oliveira agrees. With its history of fighting HIV, he says, South Africa would never withhold crucial data whose rapid release it knows could potentially save millions of lives, but unfortunately not every country has this long-term experience or transparent government and they might withhold.

To avoid that, he says, containment measures including travel bans should be balanced by financial or other support.

Nagoya is not perfect, Hammond admits. For one thing, it only covers physical samples, not the digital sequence data that is increasingly all that is needed to make vaccines, tests and drugs though he and others are lobbying to change that.

But it does embrace the spirit of the era, with its accent on reciprocity. It allows for multilateral benefit sharing, as befits a pandemic. It could, he feels, have prevented or at least mitigated vaccine nationalism.

And PIP could provide the model for a better instrument that covers many pathogens, including the one that causes the next pandemic.

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How should the world respond to the next pandemic? - The Guardian