The BA.5 Covid-19 subvariant is now the most dominant strain in the country; the highly infectious variant has led to an increase in cases and hospitalizations in both hot spots like New York City and the country at large, but action and public health messages are less aggressive than with previous outbreaks.
BA.5 usually causes familiar symptoms such as fever, headache, muscle aches, cough and sore throat, but it can still cause serious illness, especially in people with pre-existing conditions. It has even entered the highest halls of power, with President Joe Biden’s doctor saying in a letter Saturday that Biden is likely infected with BA.5. But there has been little focus on the national plan to keep subversion under control, which the Biden administration released on July 12.
Monitoring the rise in BA.5 is somewhat complicated due to an increase in rapid at-home tests to confirm infection, rather than testing in a clinical setting, which would open up health authorities and would paint a more complete picture of the data. Although the number of cases is nowhere near the level of infections due to omicron last winter, total weekly hospital admissions overall have risen steadily over the past month, according to data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Furthermore, the full magnitude of the BA.5 outbreak is likely not captured by the available data. In some places like San Diego that use wastewater monitoring, wastewater analysis showed a massive increase in copies of the virus spilled into the community’s wastewater: 15.5 million copies per liter of wastewater on Wednesday of last week, compared to 8 million copies per liter of the same. location last week, according to Paul Sisson of the San Diego Union-Tribune. This trend directly contradicts data available from the San Diego County Health Department, which actually showed positive rates declining 8.3 percent during the same period. By comparison, Sisson reported, there were 47.6 million copies per liter at the same site on January 9, 2022, during the omicron wave.
The advantage of BA.5 and its omicron subvariant BA.4 likely comes from a combination of increased transmissibility and mutations that enhance their ability to evade the immunity that people have from an infection or previous vaccination, Natalie Dean, associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics and epidemiology. at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, he told Reuters. “You don’t even need an increase in transmissibility to explain the advantage,” he said.
Given data showing low rates of serious illness and death in many places and fatigue with Covid-19 restrictions, many health authorities are not tightening previously loosened restrictions.
“I’m like everyone else: I hate wearing this mask. But more than that, I hate the idea that I might accidentally pass it on to someone else,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told the New York Times. “That’s my biggest fear: that we’re so eager to end this virus that we’re complacent.”
New York City is a hot spot. Does anyone care?
Throughout the pandemic, New York City has been a hot spot; Crowded living conditions and public transport make it easier for the virus to spread through the air. While the city’s BA.5 infection rate is nowhere near what it was in previous waves, it continues to rise, and may even be much higher than available data shows.
As the Times report notes, New York City’s testing and tracing program was eliminated this April under Mayor Eric Adams, who contracted Covid-19 that month. Restaurants no longer require proof of vaccination to enter, and the city’s mask mandate ended in March, though masks are still required on public transportation. Despite the city’s surge and its own health department’s recommendation that people wear masks indoors, Adams has repeatedly resisted bringing back the mask mandate.
“We’re always reevaluating our response efforts to make sure we’re providing New Yorkers with the best information possible so they can make the decisions that are right for them,” Fabien Levy, Adams’ press secretary, told Vox in an email electronic However, as City & State, an outlet that covers New York City and Albany politics, noted earlier this month, the New York City Department of Health eliminated a system of color-coded alert that included specific guidance on how to manage different levels of Covid. -19 outbreak, including the public health measures to be enacted. As the New York Times reported earlier this month, the system, which Adams unveiled in March, recommended that the mayor require face masks indoors and outdoors in crowded areas, and that the vaccine requirement to enter restaurants and bars is back.
As of Sunday, the website still says the administration is “reevaluating the city’s COVID alert system” and advises users to “check back here for updates in the coming weeks.” It also recommends that New Yorkers “wear a high-quality mask in all indoor public settings and around crowds outside,” as “there are currently high levels of transmission of COVID-19 throughout the city.”
Instead of rolling back those measures, Adams’ office has promoted vaccination, home and community testing sites, and antivirals to deal with Covid-19.
“New York leads the nation in testing and treatment, and in the past six months alone, we’ve given more than 35 million at-home tests to New Yorkers and delivered approximately 90,000 courses of Paxlovid,” Levy said in his email to vox “We review the numbers every day and will continue to follow the guidance of health experts to keep New Yorkers safe and healthy.”
But New Yorkers continue to get sick, with reported cases of Covid-19 up 22 percent over the past two weeks, hospitalizations up 25 percent and deaths up 29 percent, according to the New York Times. Again, the numbers are still small in comparison; a daily average of 12 deaths is nothing like the daily average in spring 2020. Vaccines and antivirals certainly help prevent serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths, but they must be complemented by other mitigation measures and support like masking, as Ed Yong pointed out. in his article for The Atlantic earlier this month.
Things are not so clear from the White House either
Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, and although he is reportedly still working and showing only mild symptoms, his age (he is 79) puts him at greater risk of complications from the disease. He has been boosted twice, as Vox’s Dylan Scott and Li Zhou wrote Thursday, and is being treated with paxlovid. In a short video address posted on Twitter, Biden assured the crowd that he was doing well and doing a lot of work.
While he shared that he had been vaccinated and fully boosted, he gave no guidance to onlookers — no exhortation to get vaccinated or boosted, or to wear masks indoors. “In the meantime, keep the faith,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
That’s not to say the White House hasn’t made any recent efforts to address the prevalence of BA.5; on July 12, the administration released new guidance for managing the latest subvariant of Covid-19.
A press release announcing the strategy acknowledged that BA.5’s apparent ability to evade at least some immunity “has the potential to cause the number of infections to increase in the coming weeks,” especially as the people are not vaccinated or where vaccine immunity is waning.
To do that, the White House proposal includes increasing access to antiviral treatments like the one Biden is taking, as well as continuing to encourage vaccination and increase uptake. Increasing the availability and access to free testing is also a key principle of the strategy, as well as better ventilation, increasing access to preventive treatment Evusheld for immunocompromised people and ensuring access to ventilators and a clear indication of the situations in which masking is advised.
This proposal at least presents a comprehensive, if not aggressive, approach to the new subvariant and “new normal” of life with Covid-19. As experts have warned throughout the pandemic, relying on vaccines as a silver bullet, especially when a booster of the omicron-specific vaccine is months away, will not stop Covid-19 and prevent new variants from forming . As Yong points out, we don’t know what those variants will look like, and we have no way of predicting the severity of the resulting disease, or how they will evade our immune responses in the future.
“Everybody hopes to get a degree of what they call endemicity — living with the virus at a level that doesn’t disrupt society,” Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, told Barron’s in an interview Thursday. “That’s where I think we’re going. I don’t think we’re going to eradicate that.”