Omicron! More COVID in BOP’s Future? – Update for November 30, 2021 | Legal Information Services Associates LLC

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SOMETHING NEW ABOUT COVID – AND IT’S NOT GOOD

Last week, I suggested COVID might not be over, but may just be in a “lull.” Sadly (and unusual for me, according to my wife), I may be right.

First, how’re things in the Bureau of Prisons? After hitting a low of 95 inmates and 258 staff with COVID on November 19, the BOP numbers started climbing again. As of last night, inmate cases had increased by 41% since then, and staff cases remained at 258. Facilities reporting COVID jumped from 92 to 102 in a week (constituting 83% of all BOP installations) reported inmate or staff COVID.

The White House said last week that 92% of federal employees got the vaccine by President Biden’s November 22 deadline. But the BOP reported as of last Friday that only 66.5% of its estimated 37,000 employees had been jabbed. That number still trails the 70.9% of inmates who have been vaccinated, and is way off the government average. BOP staffers, however, can remain pretty confident – given the agency’s serious staffing shortage – that no one’s going to be fired for refusing a dangerous and untested vaccine that only a handful of Americans, say 225 million or so, have received without serious adverse effects.

(Americans like me: I’ve had three doses of Pfizer, and the only side effect I have suffered is weight gain… or maybe that’s from doughnuts).

A Times of India story last week reported that the FCI Texarkana study done by the Centers for Disease Control last August confirmed that “there is no statistically significant difference in the transmission of coronavirus between fully vaccinated and non-vaccinated.” That is, being around fully vaccinated people does not protect an unvaccinated person from contracting the virus.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the predicted winter surge may have already begun. The city’s positive test rate rose to a two-month high as hospitals admitted more than 100 new virus patients last Friday, contributing to a 25% jump in hospitalizations in just two weeks.

News broke last Thursday of a new, potentially fearsome COVID threat, variant B.1.1.529. The variant is called “Omicron,” which was not the next letter in the Greek alphabet but was the next letter in the Greek alphabet beyond “xi,” a letter that sounded a lot like the leader of a large country in which COVID may have first escaped from a lab. Maybe.

At any rate, COVID Omicron is already spreading, the Biden administration was told. And, before long, evidence emerged that the variant carried worrisome mutations. When it first appeared on a global database of coronavirus genomic sequences, scientists were surprised. “This was the weirdest creature they’d seen to date,” The Washington Post reported. It had an unruly swarm of mutations. Many were known to be problematic, impeding the ability of antibodies to neutralize the virus. But there had never been a variant with so many of these mutations gathered in a package.”

“We have seen these mutations in other strains, in twos and threes, and each time they were a little harder to neutralize, but didn’t spread particularly well. Now, all together? It’s a complete black box,” Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University, said in an email to the Post.

On Saturday, COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant were confirmed or suspected in a widening circle of nations, including Britain and Germany. The pharmaceutical companies whose vaccines had appeared to chart a path out of the pandemic are expediting development of new formulations targeting the variant.