Local officials also hint possibility to reimpose pandemic measures.
On Tuesday, the US CDC reported that more than 90% of COVID-19 cases in the Northeast are now caused by a sublineage of the Omicron variant called the BA.2 and this is the main reason the region is now dealing with a rise in cases and hospitalizations from the virus.
BA.2 is becoming more and more common across the country, replacing the BA.1 Omicron subvariant that caused the winter surge. As of the end of last week, the prevalence of BA.2 was estimated to be about 85.9%. This represents an increase from 75.4 percent the previous week.
A monoclonal antibody treatment called sotrovimab has already been canceled by the Food and Drug Administration because of fears that it wouldn’t work against infections caused by the subvariant. GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology said they’re working on a request to the FDA to allow the therapy to be used at a greater dose again.
Additionally, in light of a statewide relaxation of mask mandates and other COVID-19 measures, local authorities are now considering the potential of reimposing pandemic measures.
A recent increase in cases prompted Philadelphia to announce Monday that it would be resuming the indoor mask requirement.
As cited by CBS News Philly, the city’s chief health official, Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, said:
“We hope by having folks whenever they’re in public, indoor spaces we can get ahead of the wave and keep it from reaching a peak like we saw in January.”
The vast majority of counties remain in the green zone of “low” virus risk, according to the CDC’s recently revised “COVID-19 Community Levels” advice. However, according to the CDC’s old paradigm, which relied solely on COVID-19 case counts, most of the Northeast is experiencing “high” or “substantial” transmission – levels at which the CDC previously advised masks indoors.
According to the CDC’s statistics, Philadelphia has “low” COVID-19 levels but “substantial” transmission.
Experts at the CDC have also acknowledged that Americans’ increased dependence on at-home testing is masking the true number of infections. The CDC and companies like Biobot Analytics have been tracking increases in viral levels that appear to be surpassing official counts in wastewater.
Recent weekly averages for new COVID19 hospital admissions show an increase of 8.8 percent in New England and a 19 percent increase in the New York area, but these numbers are still much below the peak seen during the winter surge in the region.
“Home testing is really changing the case reporting. And we also see that many jurisdictions are choosing to go to less frequent reporting anyways,” remarked Caitlin Rivers, associate director of the CDC’s disease forecasting initiative at an event held by the University of California San Francisco, adding “So it continues to be the case, or it is newly the case I suppose, that the primary metric is more along the lines of hospitalizations and deaths.”
New variants tracking
While officials have claimed for months that BA.2 does not appear to cause more serious sickness than its Omicron cousins, investigations of the subvariant in other countries have revealed that it does have a little edge in terms of spreading faster than BA.1.
Health experts in the Biden administration said they are hopeful that the repercussions from the BA.2 outbreak will not be as high as it was last winter.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s senior medical adviser, asked during a Uniformed Services University speech on Monday.
He said: “Now the cases are starting to come up. The critical issue is: are hospitalizations and deaths going to go up?.
“We think that there’s enough immunity in the community, from either being infected and hopefully vaccinated and then boosted, that we likely would see disassociation between infections and hospitalizations. We’re hoping for that.”
On the other hand, scientists and health officials have been keeping an eye out for the next virus that could be dangerous. They have found and studied dozens of different viruses as the virus keeps changing through new infections.
Some are “recombinant” variants, such as XD and XE, which are hybrids of previously identified variants. The rate of XE cases in the United Kingdom suggested it was spreading 12.6 percent quicker than BA.2, but health officials stressed that the estimate was preliminary and had varied substantially when fresh data was added.
Additional Omicron subvariants like BA.4 and BA.5, which are currently displacing BA.2 in South Africa and have already been found in Europe, are among the others. Experts predict that these mutations may be better able to evade immune defenses from immunizations or early infections than older Omicron subvariants, but data is still being collected.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence that these variants increase the risk of hospitalization or death, researchers warn that a fresh wave of infections and reinfections could nevertheless leave more people with “long COVID” symptoms.
To counter this, Fauci said on Monday that officials were contemplating making COVID-19 antiviral drugs like Paxlovid more widely available.
“We are underutilizing Paxlovid. We have more Paxlovid now than we have people who can use Paxlovid,” said Fauci.
Pfizer’s drugs are currently only available to Americans who are at the highest risk of developing severe COVID-19 disease. Every week, approximately 175,000 courses of the drug are made available for distribution to states and territories.
“Can’t guarantee it, but you’re going to be hearing soon that we’re going to be much more flexible in giving Paxlovid to people who may not necessarily be in a high risk group in order to prevent them, possibly, from getting long COVID,” Fauci added.
Following an increase in Covid-19 instances in the area, three universities in the Washington, DC, area — American, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins — have also partially reintroduced campus mask mandates, according to announcements from the institutions.
Image Credit: Getty
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