The latest on the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant

The Omicron variant of coronavirus has now been identified in at least 32 states, with experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci saying it is likely to become the dominant strain in the US. Scientists say they believe Omicron is more contagious, but has led to less severe illness so far.

As the holidays loom, health officials from across the world are encouraging people to get vaccinated and boosted.

Here are the other top headlines you need to know on Tuesday:

Omicron variant:

Covid-19 pill:

Global vaccination effort:

The pandemic around the globe:

A Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine is prepared for administration at a vaccination clinic on September 22 in Los Angeles.

Vaccines prevented more than 1 million Covid-19 deaths and more than 10 million hospitalizations in the United States, a study published Tuesday by The Commonwealth Fund estimates.

The model also predicts that there would have been nearly 36 million additional infections through November 2021 in the absence of vaccines.

Most of the deaths and hospitalizations that vaccines helped to avoid would have occurred in the late summer and early fall as the Delta variant began to spread widely across the country and surge in southern states, according to the study. During that time, average daily deaths could have spiked as high as 21,000 per day. That’s about six times the January 2021 peak of about 3,400 deaths per day, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.   

Researchers from The Commonwealth Fund built their model using published data about vaccine effectiveness and the pace of vaccinations, as well as a timeline and characteristics of the original coronavirus strain and three variants: Alpha, Delta and Iota. They assumed that increased social activities – as well as reopening of business and schools – would have moved forward consistently even without the introduction of vaccines.

 “Our findings highlight the ongoing tragedy of preventable death and hospitalization occurring among unvaccinated Americans,” the researchers wrote. “As immunity wanes and breakthrough infections continue to emerge, it is clear we must vaccinate (and give booster shots) to many more people — building on the tremendous, though mostly invisible, successes the U.S. vaccination program has accomplished thus far.”

Some more context: According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of dying from Covid-19 is 14 times higher for unvaccinated people than it is for those who are fully vaccinated. And cumulative hospitalization rates for adults are also about eight times higher among unvaccinated people than they are among fully vaccinated people.  

Now one year into vaccinations in the US, more than 202 million people – about 61% of the population – are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Overall throughout the pandemic, the US has reported more than 50 million Covid-19 cases and about 800,000 deaths, according to JHU.

Paxlovid, Pfizer's Covid-19 pill, is seen manufactured in Ascoli, Italy, in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on November 16.

As his administration continues to learn more about the Omicron variant, President Biden wrote that he’s “encouraged by the promising data” from Pfizer after results showed the company’s experimental treatment for Covid-19 cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms.

He also again urged Americans to get vaccinated, calling that one of the “most important tools we have to save lives.”

“Getting vaccinated and getting your booster shot remain the most important tools we have to save lives,” the statement continues. “But if this treatment is indeed authorized — and once the pills are widely available — it will mark a significant step forward in our path out of the pandemic. The combination of widespread vaccinations and boosters, testing, and effective pills for those who become ill will help us further reduce the impact of Covid-19 on our lives and our economy as we continue to build back better.”

Most people who test positive for coronavirus in the wave of infections led by the Omicron variant in South Africa have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, the CEO of a large private hospital system told CNN on Tuesday.

“Thus far – and it is very early days – our data over the last 30 days indicates that we are seeing a very mild to moderate form of Covid-19. Many of the cases are asymptomatic,” Richard Friedland, CEO of the private hospital network Netcare in South Africa, told CNN.

Friedland said findings released by Discovery Health, a large health insurance company in South Africa that found less vaccine effectiveness against infection but more mild cases, matched his hospital network’s experience.

He said many fewer patients require oxygen, in contrast to the early waves of the pandemic. Most cases being seen in South Africa are caused by the Omicron variant, Friedland said.

“We know it’s highly transmissible. It’s 4.2 times more transmissible than Delta,” he said. “We know it’s a robust virus, taking over from Delta in terms of being most predominant virus. We know it’s causing mild or moderate disease, but the question is, is it the virus itself that is not that virulent or deadly, that isn’t causing the severe disease – or is it because of high levels of underlying immunity in South Africa?”

It’s possible that people already have some immunity to the virus, either through vaccination, previous infection or both, and that’s protecting them, Friedland said. Multiple studies have shown that people who are naturally infected and then vaccinated have very strong immunity.

“So, about 73% of the cases we’ve admitted are unvaccinated, but many of them are young children and adolescents who ordinary wouldn’t have been vaccinated by this stage. At the moment, it’s toward mainly unvaccinated people – certainly in the deaths that we’ve seen,” he said.

The Omicron coronavirus variant is spreading at a rate not seen before, and there is concern that people are dismissing it as mild, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.

Tedros noted that 77 countries have now reported cases of Omicron, and “the reality is that Omicron is probably in most countries, even if it hasn’t been detected yet.”

“Even if Omicron does cause less severe disease, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems,” he said.

Tedros said that vaccines alone won’t get any country out of this crisis.

“Countries can and must prevent the spread of Omicron with measures that work today,” he said. “It’s not vaccines instead of masks. It’s not vaccines instead of distancing. It’s not vaccines instead of ventilation or hand hygiene. Do it all. Do it consistently. Do it well.”

Sandra Lindsay, left, a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, is inoculated with the Covid-19 vaccine by Dr. Michelle Chester on December 14, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York City.

Sandra Lindsay, a nurse who was the first person to get the Covid-19 vaccine in the United States exactly one year ago today, reflected on the state of vaccinations in the US. 

“I’m very, very honored to hold this place in history,” Lindsay added. 

She said that people still on the fence about getting vaccinated can be persuaded to get their shots using facts and understanding. But she still encounters people who she says are too “far down” the tunnel of conspiracy theories. 

“I can speak on behalf of health care workers at my organization when I say that we are tired, and we’re concerned, especially because we know that the public now has options,” she said. 

Pfizer’s updated results for its experimental treatment for Covid-19 showed it cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms, the company announced in a news release Tuesday.

While CEO Albert Bourla called it a “game changer,” he cautioned that people should not see the treatment as a replacement or alternative to taking the vaccine.

“I’m afraid that there will be some people that will think like that. It’s a very big mistake. Vaccines are needed. Vaccines is the primary frontier that you should be using to stop the disease,” he told CNN.

The goal is prevention from the disease, which is accomplished by the vaccine, he urged.

“The goal is not to get sick. And … to prevent sickness from your kids, prevent that you get sick and then you transfer that to your mothers, to your fathers, to your parents. It’s very important that people will take the vaccines,” said. “For those that are unfortunate that … they’re sick, of course now, we have something that will save a lot of lives.”

Some background: A five-day course of the treatment comprises three pills given twice a day. Pfizer hopes it can eventually offer the pills, under the name Paxlovid, for people to take at home before they get sick enough to go to the hospital. The company announced it has shared this latest data with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of its ongoing application for emergency use authorization. No date has been set by the FDA advisory committee expected to weigh in on the treatment.

Once Pfizer receives the approval, Bourla says “tens of thousands” of the treatment, which includes can be made available immediately.

“In January, it will go to hundreds of thousands. And then February, March, we go to millions,” he told CNN on Tuesday.

Watch:

Travelers pass through the international arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport on November 28, in London, England.

England will remove all 11 countries from its red travel list amid the spread of the Omicron variant within the United Kingdom, UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid told the British Parliament on Tuesday. 

Javid said the government “isn’t prepared to keep measures in place a moment longer than we need to.” 

This means that Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe will be removed from the red list starting at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday morning. 

People arriving into England from these countries will no longer need to complete a mandatory hotel quarantine period.

Javid told members of Parliament that he has asked for a review into whether people currently undergoing hotel quarantine stays may be released.  

The coronavirus variant Omicron has been growing rapidly over the last three weeks and has left the chief medical adviser of the UK’s Health Security Agency concerned about the large volume of people infected daily.

Currently, 10 people are hospitalized in the UK, who tested positive before or on the day of admission for Omicron, said Hopkins. She explained that there aren’t enough people in the hospital to give an understanding of the variant’s severity. 

Discussing reinfections, Hopkins pointed out that there is a higher rate of reinfections with Omicron, “with a rate of three to eight times the reinfection risk for Omicron, compared to what we had seen with Delta.” 

Hopkins expects Omicron to displace the Delta variant. “But they are going to live together in parts of the country for longer. And we are going to continue to see hospitalizations from Delta for the next two weeks baked in from the numbers that we have and then we will start seeing the Omicron case numbers come into hospital,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks during a briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on December 1.

Early data about the Omicron coronavirus variant presents “a very strong argument for people getting their boosters,” according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Omicron is going to be a challenge because it spreads very rapidly, and the vaccines that we use — the regular two-dose mRNA — don’t do very well against infection itself. But particularly if you get the boost, it is pretty good,” Fauci told CNN.

In South Africa, where the variant was first identified, while there is “almost a vertical spike of infection,” the country is not seeing severe hospitalizations, Fauci said.

“The real question is, is that an inherent diminution of virulence of the virus or is it because there are so many people in the population who have already been infected and now have residual post-infection immunity — which is not protecting them from getting infected, but is protecting them from getting severe disease?” Fauci said.

Fauci also said that even though it’s been one year since vaccines became available in the US, 60 million eligible people still need to get their shots.

“We have got to be doing better than that if we want to get this thing over with,” he said.  

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla delivers a speech in Thessaloniki, Greece, on October 12.

Pfizer Chair and CEO Albert Bourla said that the company’s antiviral pill is a Covid-19 treatment, not prevention, and people still need to get vaccinated.

“This is a treatment, this is not something that we use for prevention at this stage,” Bourla said, when asked on CBS Mornings on Tuesday about how the pill could be a gamechanger for dealing with Covid-19.

“People that are getting sick, unfortunately some of them ending up in hospitals or ending up dying. With this pill, we have now proof that instead of 10 of them going to hospital, only one will go and, frankly, no one died in this study,” he said.

Mortality should be prevented at very high levels, he said. 

Asked if the news about the treatment would encourage those who haven’t been vaccinated to think that they don’t need to be, Bourla said, “there is a risk to happen, what you said, and that will be a very big mistake. Vaccines are needed, people need to prevent getting sick. They should not take chances that they may not get seriously sick because there’s a pill that could treat them. People should prevent.” 

People need to get vaccinated to protect themselves and those that they love, he said. 

“But, unfortunately, there will be cases of Covid disease,” he said. “And now, this is the big news, when we have Covid surges, usually what is happening is that our hospitals are overwhelmed, people are in ICUs, hospitals need to change the normal procedure, sometimes they postpone elective surgeries. It’s a very big problem for the health care system. Right now, with this pill, instead of 10 going there, only one, nine will stay at home and hopefully nobody will die. This is a very big deal.” 

The World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa says it is necessary to “dispel” the notion that vaccines are being wasted in Africa, explaining less than 0.25% of doses made available to the continent have expired. 

“It’s necessary to dispel the impression that, even as we are expressing concerns over access to vaccine supplies, that there are millions of doses being wasted and expiring in Africa,” WHO’s regional director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, told journalists during a virtual news conference on Tuesday. 

“That is not the case,” she added.

Moeti went on to break down the number of vaccines received, administered and the ones which have expired in Africa.

“We have had about 434 million doses received in Africa, about 264 million doses administered in Africa, about 61% of those that have been received and 910,000 vaccines have expired in 20 countries,” she said. “That represents less 0.25% of the doses that have been received in Africa.”

Moeti explained that the main challenge in Africa continues to be “access to vaccine supplies,” but conceded that the planning operation for vaccine delivery in the continent, which has been largely dependent on donations of a wide variety of vaccines, had also been a factor. 

“Planning for the operation of vaccine delivery has been extremely challenging for African countries,” she said. “There is a great deal of concern now about ensuring that the vaccines that are being delivered in African countries have an adequate shelf life to enable the delivery operation to be undertaken in such a way that we minimize the expiry of vaccines and what might be considered the waste of vaccines.”

Dr. Twana Jackson prepares a Covid-19 vaccine in Freeport, New York, on November 30.

The science around whether the definition of “fully vaccinated” should change from two shots to three shots is still evolving, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on NBC’s Today on Tuesday.

She urged people to get the vaccine if they hadn’t yet, and if eligible for a booster shot, to “get that boost because you’ll have more protection.”

Asked again if fully vaccinated should be two or three doses, Walensky said that the science is evolving right now: “As that science evolves, we will continue to follow it for that question,” she said.

Pfizer’s Covid-19 pill, Paxlovid, is manufactured in Ascoli, Italy.

Pfizer’s updated results for its experimental treatment for Covid-19 showed it cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms, the company announced in a news release Tuesday.

Pfizer hopes it can eventually offer the pills, under the name Paxlovid, for people to take at home before they get sick enough to go to the hospital. Paxlovid combines a new antiviral drug named nirmatrelvir and an older one called ritonavir.

After a month of follow-up, the study found five hospitalizations and no deaths among 697 people who received the drug within the first three days of symptoms. Among 682 who received placebo, 44 were hospitalized, including 9 who died. All of the adults in this study were unvaccinated.

If given within the first five days of symptoms, the efficacy was similar: 88%. These results hold up against a similar announcement from the company last month, when not all the data had come in yet.

The research also showed “an approximate 10-fold decrease in viral load at Day 5, relative to placebo,” the statement said.

The company says it expects the drug to retain activity against variants like Omicron – and it appears to do so in lab tests – because the drug blocks an enzyme involved in viral replication. This is different from the spike protein on the virus’ surface, whose numerous mutations have escalated the global concern around the variant.

Pfizer added that full study data are expected to be released later this month and submitted to a peer-reviewed publication.

France does not “expect” to introduce new restrictions despite a recent rise in cases attributed to the Omicron variant, said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.

“We have reinforced the restrictions at the border,” Attal told French radio Franceinfo on Tuesday. “In France, rules are not expected to change.”

Attal said there are currently 133 diagnosed Omicron cases but he admits that more may have gone undetected.

“We are certain that there are probably more cases than those which are sequenced, the 133 that I mentioned,” Attal said, adding that French health authorities were screening and then sequencing “a lot” of those positive Covid-19 cases detected in the country, but that the process takes time.

More than 10,000 cases have been sequenced per week, according Attal, who went on to say there is “strong concern” over the new variant.

Test tubes hold Covid-19 tests in Los Angeles, California, on December 6.

The Omicron variant has been identified in at least 32 states on Monday.

Here’s the full list:

Emma Raducanu competes in the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on October 29.

US Open champion Emma Raducanu has tested positive for COVID-19 and will miss this week’s Mubadala World Tennis Championship exhibition event in Abu Dhabi, the 19-year-old Briton said on Monday.

Raducanu, who became the first qualifier to win a major when she triumphed at Flushing Meadows in September, was due to face Olympics singles gold medallist Belinda Bencic at the December 16-18 event.

“I was very much looking forward to playing in front of the fans here in Abu Dhabi, but unfortunately after testing positive for Covid-19, I will have to postpone until the next opportunity,” Raducanu said.

“I’m isolating as per rules and hopefully will be able to get back soon.”

Read more here.

A health worker prepares a Covid-19 vaccine at Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, on November 26.

Spain will begin vaccinating children aged 5 to 11 on Wednesday, the Health Ministry has announced. 

The aim is to vaccinate the 3.3 million children in this age range during December and January, according to a Health Ministry statement. 

The Health Ministry sent the first shipment of 1.3 million doses to Spain’s 17 regions this week and more doses are due in January, the statement added.

It comes after the country’s public health commission approved the Covid-19 vaccination for 5 to 11-year-olds on December 7.

Spain has fully vaccinated 89.6% of its population 12 years and older, per the Health Ministry’s latest data, issued on Monday

A new study from South Africa indicates that Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine is only about 33% effective against the Omicron variant of coronavirus, but people infected with the Omicron variant are less likely to end up in the hospital than those infected with the original strain of the virus.

The data comes from Discovery Health, a large health insurance company that covers 3.7 million people in South Africa. The team there, along with researchers at the South African Medical Research Council, looked at claims data coming from the time when Omicron became predominant across South Africa, and compared it to data from earlier periods.

They examined 211,000 positive coronavirus test results, 41% of them taken from adult members who had been given two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine. The company estimated 78,000 of these cases involved Omicron between November 15 and the first week of December.

They estimate the risk of ending up in the hospital from Covid-19 was 29% lower for Omicron infections in adults, compared to the original virus, but said children were 20% more likely to be hospitalized. The comparison was to one of the first strains of the virus, not to the Alpha or Beta variants that were prevalent in South Africa this year.

Two doses of the Pfizer vaccine was 33% protective against infection overall, but 70% effective in preventing severe complications including hospitalization, they said. 

“The Omicron-driven fourth has a significantly steeper trajectory of new infections relative to prior waves. National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection,” Dr. Ryan Noach, CEO of Discovery Health, said in a statement.

“Notwithstanding the fact that children continue to show a very low incidence of severe complications following Covid-19, Discovery Health’s data indicate that children under age 18 have 20% higher risk of admission for complications of Covid-19, when infected with Omicron,” Collie added.

“This is early data and requires careful follow up. However, this trend aligns with the South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) warning in recent days that during South Africa’s third wave of infection (June to September 2021) they had seen an increase in pediatric admissions and now, in the fourth wave, they are seeing a similar increase in admissions for children under five. Anecdotal reports from hospitals in South Africa indicate that most Covid-19 diagnoses in children admitted to hospital are co-incidental – many children that are admitted for non-COVID related conditions, and are not experiencing Covid-19 complications, test positive for Covid-19 on routine screening tests.”

The northwest German city of Bremen began vaccinating children aged five to 11 on Tuesday, the Health Senator’s spokesman told CNN. 

Shots will be administered at a special vaccination center designed for children in the city center.

Parents and custodians will receive invitations for vaccination appointments, which they can book on the center’s website.

First invitations will go to children born in 2010 and 2011, as supplies for children are still scarce. Younger siblings over five can get their shot if they accompany the invitees, the press release said.

Priority will be given to children with pre-existing medical conditions, as recommended by Germany’s independent vaccination committee.