COVID Winter Surge: Will It Happen? – Update for October 21, 2022 | Legal Information Services Associates LLC

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COVID’S IS NOT GOING AWAY

COVID is such old news. President Biden says the pandemic’s over. The Bureau of Prisons’ notoriously unreliable numbers say that as of last Friday, only 160 inmates and 367 staff have the virus (although it’s present in 73% of BOP facilities). Nationally, confirmed cases are down 25% in the last two weeks.

Except… In the UK, infections from highly mutated subvariant BQ.1.1 are doubling every week — a rate of growth that far exceeds other leading subvariants. In the U.S., BQ.1.1 is spreading twice as fast as its cousin subvariant BA.2.75.2. In fact, BQ.1.1 seems to be the first form of COVID against which antibody therapies don’t work at all.

What’s more, last week a new subvariant called XBB began spreading in Singapore. New COVID-19 cases there more than doubled in a day, from 4,700 on Monday to 11,700 last Tuesday. The same subvariant just appeared in Hong Kong, too.

XBB is a highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant that drove a record wave of infections last winter (including almost 10,000 BOP cases at one time). XBB is more contagious than any previous variant and, like BQ.1.1, evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies. It is unclear whether the newest batch of bivalent booster shots will work against the XBB variant.

The Washington Post reports, “This time, it’s unlikely we will be barraged with a new collection of Greek alphabet variants. Instead, one or more of the multiple versions of the omicron variant that keep popping up could drive the next wave. They are different flavors of omicron, but eerily alike — adorned with a similar combination of mutations. Each new subvariant seems to outdo the last in its ability to dodge immune defenses.”

A report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the subvariant, called BA.4.6, could drive reinfections. “It’s astonishing to see how the virus keeps mutating at such a rapid rate,” said study author Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “This is essentially viral evolution on steroids.”

“This suggests that omicron continues to evolve and continues to evolve in a way that becomes more transmissible and more effective at escaping vaccines and immune responses,” he said. “The results are actually a harbinger to new variants that might be even more worrisome.”

Two new COVID-19 variants that quietly emerged on the scene over the last few weeks — ones that Dr. Anthony Fauci has described as “pretty troublesome” — are becoming increasingly prevalent in the New York area and stoking fresh concerns as the nation braces for yet another potential winter surge, the latest CDC data show.

The CDC estimates that variants B.Q.1 and B.Q.1.1 now could account for up to 36.6% of New York area cases, which is nearly double the highest-range estimate at the national level.

These reasons may be why the Dept of Health and Human Services renewed the COVID-19 public health emergency last Thursday for another 90 days at least. This is not the emergency under the National Emergencies Act that authorizes CARES Act home confinement, which currently ends on February 28, 2023 (although experts believe that the NEA emergency will be extended, like it has been twice before). According to Government Executive, “[F]ederal public health officials are bracing for a possible winter surge in COVID-19 cases and a few weeks after President Biden said in a “60 Minutes interview “the pandemic is over.”