Two different COVID 19 mutations, one for India, and another for America raise concerns as to waves in fall, 2022, while Monkeypox response is botched
So far in NYC, Monkeypox is at this time falsely considered at this time to be mostly a Gay sex disease hazard. But as Isaac Asimov , who was heterosexual who contracted AIDS due to an infected blood transfusion learned, allegedly confined to Gay Sex illnesses, can and do invade blood banks and kill people stone dead. As it is, due to blinkered GOP thinking, this disease likely will bust out of its convenient box and turn into a raging epidemic. Just as COVID 19 did, with endless mutation waves
As we sit in the 2nd week of July, the continent of India has this situation:
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Scientists say the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.
“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase." Whether it will outcompete BA.5, he said, is yet to be determined.
Still, the fact that it has already been detected in many parts of the world even with lower levels of viral surveillance “is an early indication it is spreading,” said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for?Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
end of quote
Meanwhile in the good old USA
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An estimate from the Institute for Health Metrics, a research center at the University of Washington, suggests that actual infection numbers in the first week of July have been about seven times higher than reported cases -- which have averaged about 107,000 each day over the past two weeks, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Before the CDC lifted the requirement for international travelers to test before coming into the country?last month, Mina said, it was an "amazing opportunity" to monitor the state of Covid-19 across the US among a group of mostly asymptomatic people. About 5% of travelers were testing positive throughout the month of May, which he says probably translates to at least 1 million new infections every day in the broader US population -- 10 times higher than the official count.
Now that BA.5 is here, "we know that there is going to be a wave in the fall -- there's almost no doubt about that -- if not before. So you just have to be really cognitive that that is what might happen," Mina said.
end of quote
In order to pander to GOP bigotry, in America, the fact there are about 1 million (not 107 thousand ) new cases of Covid 19 Omicron 5 a day will be covered up, leading to a blow out in late August 2022, whereas the Indian variant will be close behind, and of course the culture warriors in the GOP will falsely accuse Monkeypox victims of just being gay, when the disease busts out of its demographic box. As the idiots did, in the 1980s as to AIDS. Magic Johnson non withstanding, as a famous example, we will see a titanic disease firestorm in America, and it will be solely due to the gutless Culture warriors in the GOP, same as in the 1980s over AIDS
Meaning Fall 2022 will be hell and it will be almost entirely the GOPs fault in America
https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-mutant-raises-concerns-india-041613964.html?.tsrc=374
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New coronavirus mutant raises concerns in India and beyond
LAURA UNGAR and ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL
Mon, July 11, 2022 at 12:16 AM·3 min read
The quickly changing coronavirus has spawned yet another super contagious omicron mutant that’s worrying scientists as it gains ground in India and pops up in numerous other countries, including the United States.
Scientists say the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.
“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase." Whether it will outcompete BA.5, he said, is yet to be determined.
Still, the fact that it has already been detected in many parts of the world even with lower levels of viral surveillance “is an early indication it is spreading,” said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for?Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The latest mutant has been spotted in several distant states in India, and appears to be spreading faster than other variants there, said Lipi Thukral, a scientist at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi. It’s also been detected in about 10 other countries, including Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Two cases were recently identified on the West Coast of the U.S., and Helix identified a third U.S. case last week.
Fueling experts’ concerns are a large number of mutations separating this new variant from omicron predecessors. Some of those mutations are in areas that relate to the spike protein and could allow the virus to bind onto cells more efficiently, Binnicker said.
Another concern is that the genetic tweaks may make it easier for the virus to skirt past antibodies — protective proteins made by the body in response to a vaccine or infection from an earlier variant.
But experts say vaccines and boosters are still the best defense against severe COVID-19. In the fall it’s likely the U.S. will see?updated formulations?of the vaccine being developed that target more recent omicron strains.
“Some may say, ‘Well, vaccination and boosting hasn’t prevented people from getting infected.’ And, yes, that is true,” he said. “But what we have seen is that the rates of people ending up in the hospital and dying have significantly decreased. As more people have been vaccinated, boosted or naturally infected, we are starting to see the background levels of immunity worldwide creep up.”
It may take several weeks to get a sense of whether the latest omicron mutant may affect the trajectory of the pandemic. Meanwhile Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies viruses at India’s Christian Medical College in Vellore, said the growing concern over the variant underlines the need for more sustained efforts to track and trace viruses that combine genetic efforts with real world information about who is getting sick and how badly. “It is important that surveillance isn’t a start-stop strategy,” she said.
Luo said BA.2.75 is another reminder that the coronavirus is continually evolving – and spreading.
“We would like to return to pre-pandemic life, but we still need to be careful,” she said. “ We need to accept that we’re now living with a higher level of risk than we used to.”
end of quote, whereas
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/health/ba-5-hidden-covid-case-increase/index.html
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Undercounted Covid-19 cases leave US with a blind spot as BA.5 variant becomes dominant
By Deidre McPhillips, CNN
Updated 7:39 AM ET, Mon July 11, 2022
(CNN)Official Covid-19 case metrics severely undercount the true number of infections, leaving the United States with a critical blind spot as the most transmissible coronavirus variant yet takes hold.
The Omicron offshoot BA.5 became the dominant variant in the US last week, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the subvariant carries key mutations that help it escape antibodies generated by vaccines and prior infection, aiding its rapid spread.
With that will come "escalating numbers of cases and more hospitalizations," Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said on CNNi Monday. "One good thing is it doesn't appear to be accompanied by the ICU admissions and the deaths as previous variants, but this is definitely concerning."
But to look at official case counts, it's hard to tell.
The share of cases that are officially reported is at an "all-time low," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and chief science officer at telehealth company eMed. "There's no doubt about that."
Covid-19 cases have been undercounted to some degree throughout the pandemic for reasons including a lack of available tests at some points and asymptomatic cases that may have been missed.?But as people increasingly rely on rapid at-home tests -- and as attitudes toward the pandemic shift overall -- the US hasn't landed on a reliable way to track transmission levels.
An estimate from the Institute for Health Metrics, a research center at the University of Washington, suggests that actual infection numbers in the first week of July have been about seven times higher than reported cases -- which have averaged about 107,000 each day over the past two weeks, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Before the CDC lifted the requirement for international travelers to test before coming into the country?last month, Mina said, it was an "amazing opportunity" to monitor the state of Covid-19 across the US among a group of mostly asymptomatic people. About 5% of travelers were testing positive throughout the month of May, which he says probably translates to at least 1 million new infections every day in the broader US population -- 10 times higher than the official count.
Now that BA.5 is here, "we know that there is going to be a wave in the fall -- there's almost no doubt about that -- if not before. So you just have to be really cognitive that that is what might happen," Mina said.
But with so many variables at play, it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare the current state of things to other points in the pandemic.
"We really don't have a good sense of what the baseline is," said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "To say 'here's where we are, at this time in 2022, compared to 2021' -- that's not a fair comparison."
To assess your individual risk of Covid-19 as a new variant takes hold, a personal accounting of cases among friends and family may be a better gauge than official data, experts say.
"People are asking one another, they're sharing stories, and that's probably not a bad source of evidence," said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and founding chair of the US Food and Drug Association's Risk Communication Advisory Committee.
Our social networks have probably stayed more consistent than national surveillance systems, he said, and "if more people that you hear about in your circle are getting the disease now than were getting it in the past, and the size of your circle is about the same, then presumably there's much more disease now than there was before."
Severe outcomes don't tell the whole story
At White House Covid-19 Response Team briefings -- the most recent of which was held more than two weeks ago -- CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has presented case trends without referencing these important caveats to the data.
Months ago, the CDC shifted away from Covid-19 transmission levels that categorized risk based on case counts and test positivity rates to focus on Covid-19 Community Levels that rely more heavily on metrics related to hospitalizations.
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During this winter's Omicron surge, hospitalizations and deaths didn't follow the same steep trend line as cases -- an important shift from earlier waves of the pandemic.
But the fact that severe outcomes are still happening at all is enough reason to keep paying attention to cases, experts say.
"If we ever got to a state where people were getting infected but it wasn't causing any severe illness anymore -- maybe it's a new variant that is much less severe, or it wasn't causing long Covid -- if there were no really significant adverse health outcomes, then we would no longer care as much about cases," said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of South Florida.
"But let me be clear, we're not there yet."
There's no evidence that BA.5 causes more severe disease, but studies have shown BA.5 can evade antibodies from vaccination or previous infection -- even from another Omicron subvariant. Vaccines are still expected to provide protection against severe disease, and for fall, vaccine makers are developing updated booster shots that incorporate Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 strains.
There are treatments available, such the antiviral pill Paxlovid, that sharply reduce risk of death or severe disease. And high-quality masks, ventilation, physical distancing and quarantine and isolation can still help reduce spread from any variant, including BA.5.
But currently, more than 5,000 people are being admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 each day, CDC data shows, and more than 300 are dying each day, according to JHU data.
Focusing on these "lagging indicators" costs "meaningful time in which to start to curb people's behavior and prevent a lot of morbidity and mortality," Salemi said.
If 1 in 5 Covid-19 infections results in long Covid and true infections are seven times higher than reported, the number of people with long Covid could be growing by 100,000 each day.
Working around blind spots
For now, the US is in a "sustained management phase," with continued efforts to keep things under control compared with "what was much more of a reactive, emergent -- and emerging -- approach of the past," Plescia said.
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But the federal government recently reallocated resources away from testing?because Congress did not approve additional Covid funds, a move that Mina says will leave the US "pretty blind as we move into the fall."
Some surveillance programs are ongoing, such as wastewater monitoring that tracks the amount of virus present in sewage. But he says they're "minimal," and "generally, they're not really not giving us a good picture of what's really happening across the United States."
"We kind of just floated through this major outbreak," Mina said, referring to previously dominant Omicron subvariants. "But we should not let our guard down, I would say, because with BA.5, I expect it will be a very different story."
end of quote
While GOP theology as to COVID 19 has its consequences
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3554054-us-stumbles-in-monkeypox-response/?email=7333d49bc56a64bea870e9564cfcd5df7b7a550b&emaila=bdd35c16c6f97cc9593ec0cb87503b97&emailb=a1308fd49384818dd7d56d447678604a2d5e85d3d524fb7ae58388e28cab4cc1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=News%20Alerts
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US stumbles in monkeypox response
BY?JOSEPH CHOI?- 07/11/22 7:54 PM ET
People wait in line to enter the Chelsea Sexual Health Clinic on July 08, 2022 in New York City. The Chelsea Sexual Health Clinic is one of two locations, currently administering a vaccine for Monkeypox in NYC. Cases of Monkeypox have doubled in the city in one week. According to the Department of Health, 141 people have tested positive for the Monkeypox virus in NYC. They also have stated that they have a limited amount of appointments for vaccines at Central Harlem and Chelsea Sexual Health Clinics.
The U.S. has had a faltering response to the monkeypox outbreak, with confirmed cases jumping to 700 in the two months since outbreaks were first detected and clinics across the country struggling to meet the demand for effective vaccines.
Some public health experts and patients say more needs to be done and warn that mistakes made during the COVID-19 pandemic are being repeated.?
The monkeypox virus is less infectious than COVID-19 and is so far mostly affecting one community: men who have sex with men. But the U.S. has learned lessons from the coronavirus pandemic that should still help the nation control monkeypox, experts say.?
Leana Wen,?a research professor of health policy and management at George Washington University as well as Baltimore’s former health commissioner, told The Hill that she has felt a sense of déjà vu.
“Probably the most significant one to me is the lack of testing. We saw during COVID that every case that was found was like the canary in the coal mine, that they really were just the tip of the iceberg,” Wen said. “And that was because there was such little testing available. Why haven’t we learned our lesson?”
Last week, one of the largest laboratory testing networks in the U.S., Labcorp, announced it would begin testing for monkeypox using tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The company will be able to conduct about 10,000 tests daily.
In its announcement, Labcorp recommended that people contact their health care providers to initiate monkeypox testing and sample collecting, a more cumbersome process compared to COVID-19 tests, especially for people who don’t have a regular health care provider.
Wen said monkeypox testing should not be made into a complex process, noting that performing the test itself is fairly simple: Monkeypox tests involve swabbing the base of the characteristic lesions that form after infection.
More than 760 monkeypox cases have been confirmed in the U.S. as of Monday across almost 40 states, which is almost certainly an undercount as many may be unaware that they are infected or have not yet been tested.
Unlike COVID-19, monkeypox is not a novel virus, it does not spread as easily and is largely transmitted through close, skin-to-skin contact. And although it is currently affecting relatively few people in the U.S., advocates and scientists worry this outbreak may spread out of control.
Jay Varma,?an epidemiologist who served as senior health adviser to former New York City Mayor?Bill de Blasio?(D), said in a recent interview that he feared monkeypox could become entrenched in the U.S.
“If we don’t really get ahead of this, then we are going to fall further behind and it will become a permanent part of our disease landscape,” Varma said.
De Blasio himself urged the federal government to ramp up access to monkeypox vaccines on Twitter Monday.?
New York’s gay community has been particularly hard hit by the outbreak. The state Department of Health said in a tweet on Tuesday that 111 people had tested positive in New York City as of last week, up from 55 a week prior.
end of quote
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) made note of the unmet demand for monkeypox vaccines in a letter he sent to President Biden on Monday. Adams asked that the White House consider a different vaccination schedule that allowed for a longer interval period between the two doses of the preferred smallpox vaccine Jynneos so that more people could be immediately immunized.
In an NBC News report published last week, several gay men who tested positive for monkeypox detailed exasperating experiences in communicating with public health officials when attempting to get tested and share their possible close contacts. One man in New York said it took nearly a week before he was able to get tested and possible contacts’ names.
Clinics in major cities like New York and Washington, D.C., have quickly run out of available vaccine doses.?
New York gave no warning before announcing its own vaccine push late last month, running out of doses within hours with no word on when more shots would be available. On Monday, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene announced that an additional 1,250 doses would be made available.
Health authorities maintain that monkeypox does not pose a threat to the general public, and the mortality rate for the virus is low.
Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that this recent monkeypox outbreak could very well be a sign of an “age of epidemics” that the world is entering.
“As people interact more and more with wild animals — whether it’s in wet markets as food or moving into their habitats because of population growth — we are going to see people get exposed more and more to exotic pathogens,” Toner said.
Overall, Toner said he felt that the response has been adequate considering the limitations, noting the inherent difficulties in measures like contact tracing as well as the swift manner in which the federal government deployed vaccines and placed orders for more.
“I don’t think that they have been slow. I don’t think it’s the case that they haven’t learned lessons from COVID-19,” he said.
Still others say that the response has not been as streamlined as it could be. One senior Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, acknowledged to The New York Times last week that monkeypox testing has not been as fast or convenient as it needs to be. Contributing factors included negotiations with labs, ramping up testing supplies and training personnel, according to the official.
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1 年Exchange your Ideas at 6th International Conference on Rare Diseases Which will be held during October 04, 2023 as a Webinar.
How's that Monkeypox going? Seems like it was a storm in a tea cup.