By the Numbers: Since February 7,2022 the numbers of positive cases and deaths seem to plateauing. In the February 7 ,2022 report that the number of positive cases were 77,532,912 and the number of deaths were 925,072. As of February 19,2022 there are 80,046,293 positive cases and 958,697 deaths. This represents an increase over a 2-week period of 2,513,381 positive cases or 179,527 cases per day and 33,625 deaths or over a two-week period 2,401 deaths per day.
These are still sobering numbers and we still have to treat this pandemic with respect especially since it has been non-stop as we enter our third year. COVID appears to have a few more mutations to share with us. Whether they will be lethal or not remains to be seen.
Omicron is estimated to account for nearly all the virus circulating in the nation. And even though it causes less severe disease for most people, the fact that it is more transmissible means more people are falling ill and dying.
More Americans are taking precautionary measures against the virus than before the Omicron surge, but many people, fatigued by crisis, are returning to some level of normality with hopes that vaccinations or prior infections will protect them.
Omicron symptoms are often milder, and some infected people show none, researchers agree. But like the flu, it can be deadly, especially for people who are older, have other health problems or who are unvaccinated.
Omicron has not burned out yet in most of the U.S. It is still gaining ground meaning new infections are still on the rise in 28 states.
Deaths from COVID-19 are rising. The virus is now killing more than 2,300 Americans per day, on average — an increase of almost 30% over the past two weeks.
It always takes a few weeks for a new wave of COVID infections to kill however many people it's going to kill, and Omicron only landed in the U.S. last month. It is significantly less deadly than previous variants, but it is still deadly. The overwhelming majority of people who have died from COVID, including Omicron, were unvaccinated.
Pandemic Fatigue: People are understandably worn out, tired of thinking about COVID-19 and wanting to get back to a true normal. This so-called “pandemic fatigue” is real. But it’s also contributing to lapses in COVID-19 precautions and to more people getting infected with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
It is become starkly clear that this pandemic is not behind us yet. Since late December 2021, COVID-19 infections have been surging, exceeding the rates seen at any other point in the pandemic.
The people who are becoming the sickest – needing hospitalization or even dying from infection – are the unvaccinated. But new data suggests that older adults who have received two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine but who have not yet received a booster shot are also getting sick and having poor outcomes.
According to a study published online Jan. 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association three doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine is associated with protection against Delta and Omicron compared with being unvaccinated or receipt of two doses,
The 3 shot vaccine protocol is still staving off severe disease and death caused by any version of SARS-CoV-2. But the antibodies that reliably keep Delta from colonizing vaccinated hosts struggle to get a grip on Omicron, which means more people are vulnerable to infection with Omicron.
Delta-induced immunity doesn’t do a great job of protecting people from Omicron. But when Omicron infects people who have been vaccinated, it seems to shore up anti-Delta defenses too. (This effect is weaker in unvaccinated people, though, and it’s unclear how long the effects last). That might mean that the more immunized people Omicron infects, the fewer hospitable hosts Delta will have.
How long did it take for Omicron to take over from Delta: If it felt like omicron exploded with mind-boggling speed, a new look at the numbers backs that up. The highly contagious coronavirus variant achieved dominance in the United States in a record-breaking two weeks. In comparison, it took the Delta variant eight weeks to hit that milestone, researchers report in the February 11,2022 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
At the beginning of May, Delta was responsible for a mere 1 percent of new weekly infections. Eight weeks later, the week ending June 26, Delta drove more than half of new infections. And by the end of July, Delta accounted for more than 95 percent of new COVID-19 cases each week.
Omicron, on the other hand, is estimated to have accomplished the same feat four times faster. U.S. public health officials documented the first Omicron case on December 1, 2021. By the week ending December 11, the variant accounted for more than 1 percent of new cases. Only two weeks later, that number rocketed to more than 50 percent — then rose to more than 95 percent the week ending January 8,2022.
Recent estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that Omicron may have extinguished the Delta variant’s spread in the United States by February 5, though it’s possible that the analysis wasn’t broad enough to catch any lurking delta variants. The numbers can also change over time as officials analyze more data.
Omicron: Antibodies May Not Recognize the Variant, But T-Cells Do: T-cells are more durable and harder to slip by, even for the highly mutated Omicron. Effective protection against viral infection and the disease resulting from the infection requires both parts of an adaptive immune system: (i) the humoral immune response, which involves antibodies that serves to prevent infection and (ii) the cellular immune response, which involves T-cells that are responsible for viral clearance.
Recent findings that Omicron can escape a majority of prior SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies. But while antibodies seem to fall short in the presence of Omicron, emerging studies suggest that T-cell immunity may serve as an effective backup in preventing severe COVID-19 from Omicron.
In simple terms, T cell, also called T lymphocyte, type of leukocyte (white blood cell) that is an essential part of the immune system. T cells are one of two primary types of lymphocytes—B cells being the second type—that determine the specificity of immune response to antigens (foreign substances) in the body. T-cells have receptors, which are cell-surface proteins that bind to other molecules and initiate a reaction. Like antibodies, these T-cell receptors (TCR) are unique on each cell and can recognize only a specific part of the pathogen — which is referred to as an antigen.
T-cell levels do not tend to fade as quickly as antibodies after an infection or vaccination. In fact, SARS-CoV-1-specific T-cells were recently shown to persist up to 17 years in patients who contracted SARS back in 2003.
And as T-cells can recognize fragments from multiple proteins of the virus rather than just the spike protein, it is unlikely that Omicrons can slip past the T-cell immunity easily.
This means that even if pre-existing antibodies fail to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2, the memory T-cells we get from either natural infection or COVID-19 vaccination may still confer protection against severe COVID-19.
Omicron Variant Not Looking 'Dramatically Different': The "stealth" Omicron variant (BA.2)that has recently surfaced does not look like anything that is "dramatically different" from other versions, but it does bear watching, Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health said.
"[It has] the same symptoms, same severity, as far as we know, Dr. Jha says." "We have got to get more data on this, but so far, it's not looking like anything dramatically different."
Meanwhile, Moderna has announced it is in the second phase of testing its Omicron-specific booster, but Jha said he does not know if that will be needed.
"When Delta showed up, basically, there was an effort to build a Delta-specific variant vaccine, but we didn't end up needing it," Jha said. "The original vaccine works just fine, and so we never ended up needing it. I don't know if we're going to end up needing this. We'll have to see what the clinical trial data show.
Long Term Effect of Long COVID: Long COVID is usually diagnosed many weeks after a bout with COVID-19. Any long-lasting effects typically appear about 90 days after symptoms of the initial infection go away, Maria Van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization said this week.
Overall, some estimates suggest more than a third of COVID-19 survivors will develop some symptoms of long COVID. Symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, anxiety and other problems. The lingering illness is more likely if you’ve been hospitalized with COVID-19, but research shows it can happen even after a mild infection.
In the meantime, scientists are racing to figure out what’s behind the mysterious condition. Some theories? It may be an autoimmune disorder. Tiny micro clots may be causing the disabling symptoms. Or perhaps latent viruses in the body have been reactivated.
Scientists are also looking at whether vaccines could be part of the answer. A Yale University team is studying the possibility that vaccination might reduce long COVID symptoms. And two other studies offer early evidence that being vaccinated before getting COVID-19 could help prevent the lingering illness or at least reduce its severity.
COVID-19 Can Lead To Long-Term Heart Trouble, Especially In Severe Cases: Coronavirus can leave patients at risk for heart problems for at least one year following infection, according to one of the largest analyses of post-COVID health effects to date.
The study, published last week in Nature Medicine, found that the illness increased the possibility of heart rhythm irregularities, as well as potentially deadly blood clots in the legs and lungs, in the year after an acute infection.
COVID also increased the risk for heart failure by 72 percent, heart attack by 63 percent and stroke by 52 percent. The study's lead author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said he and his colleagues expected to see some elevation in heart problems following COVID, but assumed it would be limited largely to people whose health wasn’t robust previously.
Physicians on the front lines of treating COVID and its effects suspect vaccinations do cut heart risks because they reduce COVID infections in general.
"I've taken care of patients with heart problems" after COVID-19 infection, said Dr. Steve Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. "The vast majority are unvaccinated.
"Anybody who is hospitalized with any kind of pneumonia that they acquire in the community has these risks for six to 12 months," said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association. "The open question for me is, is this something unique about COVID? Or is this the same story we already know?"
COVID's heart risks may be showing up with more regularity just because the virus spread so quickly.
"It's very concerning because so many people will be getting COVID in the next however many years, and so many have already gotten it," said Dr. Jennifer Haythe, co-director of the Women's Center for Cardiovascular Health at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. "This may really increase the burden of cardiovascular disease across the board."
A study of recovered COVID patients in Germany found that 78 percent of patients had heart abnormalities. Swedish research, too, found an increased risk of heart attack and stroke following COVID-19. It is not entirely clear how COVID could cause heart problems over the long term, though it is known that the virus can affect blood vessels all over the body and in multiple organs, including the heart.
COVID Can Destroy the Placenta and Cause Stillbirths During Pregnancy in Rare Cases: Women who are expecting a baby but are unvaccinated against COVID-19 are at a higher risk of experiencing a stillbirth, according to a peer-reviewed study, published on Thursday in the journal Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. Another study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah-University Medical Center reported last November that getting vaccinated between 27-31 weeks and earlier of pregnancy will better protect the baby.
It confirms that pregnant women can suffer from tissue destruction in the placenta while suffering from the virus if they are not vaccinated. The placenta essentially is what "unites the fetus to the maternal uterus," according to its definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
The virus can directly attack and destroy the placenta, cutting off its life-giving supply of oxygen and nutrients to the developing fetus and causing asphyxiation and death, the study, published in the journal Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, found.
Stillbirth is one of several potential issues the Centers for Disease Control and OB-GYNs have warned can occur in pregnant people who contract COVID-19, and why they've urged them to get vaccinated.
For this study, researchers from 12 countries, including the U.S., looked at placental tissue from 64 stillbirths and four newborns who died shortly after birth. All of the fetuses were from mothers who were unvaccinated and had COVID-19 during pregnancy.
All those involved had autopsy pathology findings of a stillborn or a neonatal death - death which occurs within 28 days of the baby's birth - as well as placentas that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 following positive diagnosis of the mothers with the virus.
COVID-19 appears to cause three issues in the placenta: a build-up of a protein that can cause blood clots, the death of cells in its protective layer and inflammation. The researchers found that around three-quarters of the placenta was damaged in each case, making it unable to function.
Until next time PLEASE Stay Safe, Stay Well, Stay Distant, be Careful in Crowds and Wear Your Mask. We are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. By working together we can bring this pandemic to an safe and healthy end.
James A Vito, D.M.D