20220907

www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/research-finds-latest-omicr…

Research finds latest omicron variant BA.4.6 is better at evading immune system than BA.5, as scientists say COVID will be with us for a long time

Emerging research suggests the latest omicron variant to gain ground — BA.4.6, which accounted for about 8% of new U.S. cases last week — is even better at evading the immune system than BA.5, the Associated Press reported.

The research was published in preprint form by bioRxiv, an open access repository for research hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, meaning it has not been peer-reviewed. But the study, conducted by Chinese researchers, found that omicron subvariants and especially BA.4.6 “exhibit substantial growth advantages compared to BA.4 and BA.5.”

The fact that each new strain is more infectious than the previous one is one reason to expect that the virus will last far into the future, having already lasted longer than the 1918 flu pandemic. Scientists are concerned that the virus will keep evolving in ways that may prove worrisome.

White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said on Tuesday that the illness will be here for the rest of our lives.

Living with COVID “should not necessarily be a scary or bad concept,” since people are getting better at fighting it, Jha said during a recent question-and-answer session with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Obviously if we take our foot off the gas — if we stop updating our vaccines, we stop getting new treatments — then we could slip backward.”

Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute, told the AP the world is likely to keep seeing repetitive surges until “we do the things we have to do,” such as developing next generation vaccines and rolling them out equitably.

Topol is also skeptical about the government’s plan to move to annual COVID boosters, similar to the seasonal flu shot, until more research has been conducted.

Vaccines and boosters still offer the best protection against severe disease and death. And the more people get vaccinated, the greater the level of immunity for all humans, which will also help slow the emergence and spread of new variants.

The World Health Organization said Wednesday the global tally of COVID cases fell 12% in the week through Aug. 29 from the previous one, with just under 4.2 million infections counted. The number of fatalities fell 5% to just over 13,700, according to the agency’s weekly epidemiological update.

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 75,359 on Tuesday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 18% from two weeks ago. Cases are still rising in six states, namely Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, Rhode Island, Colorado, and Ohio. They are falling everywhere else, the tracker shows.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 12% at 34,864 while the daily average for deaths is down 10% to 420.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday that Covid-19 shots are likely to be offered on an annual basis, similar to flu shots. He said the shots would likely be matched to the circulating strain of a given year.

Other Covid-19 news you should know about:

• The death toll from the earthquake in western China has jumped to 74 with another 26 people still missing, the government reported Wednesday, as frustration rose with uncompromising Covid-19 lockdown measures that prevented residents from leaving their buildings after the shaking, the AP reported. The 6.8 magnitude quake that struck just after noon Monday in Sichuan province caused extensive damage to homes in the Ganze Tibetan Autonomous Region and shook buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu, whose 21 million citizens are under a strict Covid-19 lockdown.

Rescue workers in southwestern China cleared roads and dug through rubble to search for survivors after Monday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake. Sichuan province is already reeling from a heat wave, drought and Covid-19 outbreak.

• The German government is planning to scrap a face mask mandate on flights to and from the country, though the health minister said Tuesday that it could be reimposed if coronavirus cases rise sharply, the AP reported separately. The rules run through Sept. 23, and the smallest party in the coalition government, the libertarian Free Democratic Party, has pressed for an end to them. The initial draft for this fall’s rules foresaw an obligation to wear N95-type masks on planes as well as long-distance trains and buses.

• For the first time since COVID brought air travel to a standstill, the number of people streaming through U.S. airport-security checkpoints over a holiday weekend exceeded pre-pandemic levels, the AP reported. The summer travel season ended on a busy note as more than 8.7 million people passed through security in the last four days, topping the Labor Day weekend of 2019. United Airlines Holdings Inc. confirmed the trend on Wednesday, raising its third-quarter revenue growth outlook, citing continued “strong” demand exiting a “robust” summer. Online travel company Sabre Corp. said that net air bookings and passengers boarded reached their highest levels for us in the last week of August since the beginning of the pandemic.

• The U.K. Health Security Agency said children who had not turned five by the end of last month would not be offered a vaccination, the Guardian reported. The news has sparked an outcry from parent groups and academics. The move is in line with advice published by the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization in February 2022, the paper reported. UKHSA said the offer of Covid jabs to healthy five to 11-year-olds was always meant to be temporary.

Here’s what the numbers say

The global tally of confirmed cases of Covid-19 topped 606.6 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose above 6.5 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 94.9 million cases and 1,048,470 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 224.1 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equal to 67.5% of the total population. But just 108.8 million have had a booster, equal to 48.5% of the vaccinated population, and just 22 million of the people 50 and over who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 34% of those who had a first booster.

www.wsj.com/articles/a-key-to-long-covid-is-virus-lingeri…

A Key to Long Covid Is Virus Lingering in the Body, Scientists Say
Virus remaining in some people’s bodies for a long time may be causing longer-term complications, recent research suggests

The virus that causes Covid-19 can remain in some people’s bodies for a long time. A growing number of scientists think that lingering virus is a root cause of long Covid.

New research has found the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the blood of long Covid patients up to a year after infection but not in people who have fully recovered from Covid. Virus has also been found in tissues including the brain, lungs, and lining of the gut, according to scientists and studies

The findings suggest that leftover reservoirs of virus could be provoking the immune system in some people, causing complications such as blood clots and inflammation, which may fuel certain long Covid symptoms, scientists say.

A group of scientists and doctors are joining forces to focus research on viral persistence and aim to raise $100 million to further the search for treatments. Called the Long Covid Research Initiative, the group is run by the PolyBio Research Foundation, a Mercer Island, Wash., based nonprofit focused on complex chronic inflammatory diseases.

“We really want to understand what’s at the root of [long Covid] and we want to focus on that,” says Amy Proal, a microbiologist at PolyBio and the initiative’s chief scientific officer. Dr. Proal has devoted her career to researching chronic infections after developing myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness that shares similar symptoms with long Covid, in her 20s. She has mostly recovered now but has symptoms she manages.

Three long Covid patients, frustrated at the lack of answers and treatments, have helped connect researchers.

“Long Covid is this really incredible emergency,” says Henry Scott-Green, one of the patients, a 28-year-old in London who says brain fog, extreme fatigue and other debilitating long Covid symptoms prevented him from resuming full-time work as a product manager, though he plans to return soon. “We’re really trying to run really efficiently and cut out as many layers of bureaucracy as possible.”

So far, the group says it has received a pledge of $15 million from Balvi, an investment and direct giving fund established by Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of the cryptocurrency platform Ethereum.

Among the strongest evidence of viral persistence in long Covid patients is a new study by Harvard researchers published Friday in the journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases. Researchers detected the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a large majority of 37 long Covid patients in the study and found it in none of 26 patients in a control group.

Patients’ blood was analyzed up to a year after initial infection, says David R. Walt, a professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School and lead researcher of the study. Dr. Walt isn’t currently involved with the long Covid initiative.

A year after infection, some patients had levels of viral spike protein that were as high as they did earlier in their illness, Dr. Walt says. Such levels long after initial infection suggest that a reservoir of active virus is continuing to produce the spike protein because the spike protein typically doesn’t have a long lifetime, he adds.

Dr. Walt plans to test antivirals such as Paxlovid or remdesivir to see if the drugs help clear the virus and eliminate spike protein from the blood. He says it’s possible that for some people, the normal course of medication isn’t enough to clear the virus. Such cases may require “a much longer exposure to these antivirals to fully clear,” says Dr. Walt.

One of the research group’s goals is to find a way for people to identify whether they continue to have the virus in their bodies. There is no easy way to determine this now.

Long Covid patients experience such a wide range of long-term symptoms that scientists think there is likely more than one cause, however. Some cases may be fueled by organ damage, for instance.

Yet consensus is growing around the idea that lingering virus plays a significant role in long Covid. Preliminary research from immunologist Akiko Iwasaki’s laboratory at Yale University documented T or B cell activity in long Covid patients’ blood, suggesting that patients’ immune systems are continuing to react to virus in their bodies. Dr. Iwasaki is a member of the new initiative.

In a 58-person study published in the Annals of Neurology in March, University of California, San Francisco researchers also found SARS-CoV-2 proteins circulating in particles in long Covid patients’ blood, especially in those with symptoms such as fatigue and trouble concentrating.

Now, the group is completing a study using imaging techniques and tissue biopsies to detect persistent virus or reactivation of other viruses in tissue. It also is looking at T-cell immune responses in tissues and whether they correlate with symptoms.

Some people may harbor the virus and don’t have long-term symptoms, says Timothy Henrich, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF involved with the study and a member of the long Covid initiative. For others, lingering virus may produce problems.

“I think there’s a real amount of mounting evidence that really suggests that there is persistent virus in some people,” says Dr. Henrich.

Write to Sumathi Reddy at Sumathi.Reddy@wsj.com

Posted by guywong on 2022-09-08 23:46:01

Tagged: , COVID-19 , Covid , SARS-COV-2 , Coronavirus