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Los Angeles Unified students will now be required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test prior to returning to school after the winter break and will have an extra day to comply.
School was originally slated to resume on Jan. 10, but the district has deemed that a “Pupil Free Day” and students will return to the classroom on Jan. 11.
LAUSD becomes the largest district in the nation to require a negative Covid-19 test and is offering rapid self-tests for students to pick up at various locations across the county on Friday and Saturday.
Weekly testing —which has been in place since students returned to school in the fall — will continue, and masks are required both indoors and out. They will be provided if necessary.
Vaccinations and boosters are being strongly recommended, but will not be required until the Fall semester.
As the Omicron variant continues to spread in cities across the United States, Dr. Ala Stanford, founder and CEO of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, said Monday that she welcomes the federal government’s help after seeing a rise in cases at her health care facility in Philadelphia.
Last month, the White House’s Covid-19 response team released a plan to support testing and treatment across the country.
Stanford, who is also a 2021 CNN Hero, saw how the pandemic devastated minority neighborhoods in her hometown of Philadelphia and brought testing and vaccines into hard hit communities.
“I’m glad FEMA is coming this week, looking forward to working with them,” Standford said. “We need more personnel, we need more rapid tests. There’s a place for it. When someone comes in and they look like they have Covid, to get that positive result, it lets everyone know they’ve been in contact, allows you to separate in your household, so it doesn’t continue to spread, and do your best. Yes, I’m glad we are providing access, but do I need support? Absolutely, to be sustainable and for who we are serving, it’s not just African-Americans, but all of Philadelphia.”
Children are being swept up in “a virus firestorm” with the arrival of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, “the king of transmissible Covid viruses,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Monday.
Part of the problem lies in vaccine misinformation, Hotez said. “I think in the southern part of the United States, where the adolescent vaccination rates are about half, what you’re seeing is there’s a lot of negative press around these vaccines, in terms of coming from even members of Congress and some of the red states here that are working to discredit vaccines. And so that’s working against us,” he said.
“And the same parents who have adolescents that they’re not vaccinating, well, guess what? Those adolescents have younger brothers and sisters, and the parents aren’t vaccinating them, either. So we’ve got this kind of spiraling situation. So we need to step up our vaccine advocacy for little kids.”
Hotez noted that there’s more to the pandemic than cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“There’s too much of a narrative out there that says kids do really fine with this, don’t worry about it. We haven’t even spoken, Jake, about the long Covid symptoms that we’re seeing in kids. Great Ormond Street Hospital in the UK has done a pretty impressive study to show roughly 1 in 7 kids in London are going out to develop long Covid symptoms. We don’t know what that means for their neurodevelopment because in some adults, we’re seeing gray matter brain degeneration, cognitive declines,” Hotez said.
“We don’t know if that’s going to be a situation in kids,” he added. “So this can haunt us for a long time, and the US needs to not only advocate better but bring up this situation and really start proactively doing some neurodevelopmental testing in these kids before and after their Covid.”
Washington, DC reported more than 9,000 new Covid-19 infections and seven deaths over the past four days.
DC Health announced Monday that 9,201 positive Covid-19 cases were detected in the four-day period from Thursday to Sunday.
The new batch of cases brings the total number of infections in DC to 103,487 since the start of the pandemic.
DC Health also reported seven new deaths over the same period, increasing the total number of Covid related deaths to 1,218.
The Omicron variant of the coronavirus accounted for 90% of cases at one Houston hospital system by mid-December, but patients are not as severely ill as those infected by previous variants, a team of doctors reported Monday.
And while nearly half of all patients the doctors saw had been vaccinated, only 10% had gotten booster shots – which supports the value of boosters in fighting Omicron.
Dr. James Musser of the Houston Methodist Research Institute and colleagues reported on the cases of 862 Covid-19 patients treated at the hospital system between November 27 and December 18. The system sequences the genomes of most cases, so they have a good picture of which variants are involved.
“Compared to patients infected with either Alpha or Delta variants and cared for in our system, significantly fewer Omicron patients were hospitalized, and those who were hospitalized required significantly less intense respiratory support and had a shorter length of stay. We cautiously interpret our findings to be consistent with decreased disease severity among Houston Methodist Omicron patients,” they added.
Remember: It’s not clear that Omicron is less virulent, and the study was not designed to show that, they cautioned. “Many factors undoubtedly have contributed, including but not limited to increased vaccination uptake, population immunity, and patient demographics such as younger age. The extent to which our findings translate to other cities and other patient populations, including children, is unknown.”
But they could show how quickly Omicron took over. “The estimated case doubling time during this three-week period was approximately 2.2 days, which means that Omicron increased in frequency approximately three times faster than Delta had increased in our area, an unprecedented trajectory for SARS-COV-2 infections,” they wrote.
And they could show that Omicron evades the protection offered by vaccines, at least to some degree. “We found 430 of the 862 total Omicron patients (49.9%) for whom we have whole genome sequence data met the CDC definition of vaccine breakthrough cases,” they wrote. Just 9.9% of the patients had gotten a booster dose, they found.
The researchers could not find an easy way to measure whether the time since a person was vaccinated had an effect on their risk of a breakthrough infection. They also noted that their study represents just 5% of cases in the Houston metro region.
Public schools in Detroit are closed Monday through Wednesday as the city faces an all-time high Covid-19 infection rate, according to a letter sent to parents Friday from superintendent Nikolai Vitti.
No virtual classes will be offered as an alternative, Vitti said. Instead, employees will be required to take Covid-19 tests during the days off on Monday and Tuesday. Students are not required to test, but are encouraged, Vitti said, and 10 sites at schools across the city will offer free tests.
Nearly 20 percent of school employees who took voluntary Covid-19 tests last week tested positive, Vitti said. The city’s infection rate is even higher — at 36 percent.
More than 100,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the US for the first time in nearly four months, according to the latest data from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Covid-19 hospitalizations reached a record high of more than 142,000 about a year ago, on Jan. 14, and they last topped 100,000 on Sept. 11. There have only been 67 days throughout the entire pandemic when more than 100,000 people have been hospitalized with coronavirus.
Currently, about three-quarters of hospital beds across the country are full, and one in seven are for Covid-19 patients.
There are more than 18,500 Covid-19 patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Nearly 78% of intensive care unit beds are currently occupied, and about a quarter of them are for Covid-19 patients.
Hospitalization rates are currently highest in New Jersey, Ohio and Delaware, where there are more than 50 Covid-19 hospitalizations for every 100,000 people. They’re lowest in Alaska and Wyoming, with less than 10 Covid-19 hospitalizations per 100,000 people.
Child hospitalizations are the highest they’ve ever been, with more than 500 children admitted each day over the week ending Dec. 31, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the latest data from the CDC, cumulative hospitalization rates through November are about eight times higher for unvaccinated adults and about 10 times higher for unvaccinated children ages 12 to 17.
Here’s a look at how US hospitalizations have changed over time, according to HHS data:
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is scheduled to meet Wednesday.
The meeting follows Monday’s announcement by the US Food and Drug Administration that the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was expanded to include boosters for adolescents ages 12 to 15, reducing the time between completing an initial series and recommended booster from six months to five months, and allowing for a third dose of the primary series for some immunocompromised children ages 5 to 11.
The CDC’s vaccine advisers are scheduled to meet from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. ET Wednesday.
The Chicago Teachers Union is planning to convene an emergency meeting to vote on whether its teachers would move strictly to virtual teaching amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, according to a union official, setting up a potential lockout with the school district.
Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the country, resumed in-person learning Monday and has maintained its conditions are safe for in-person instruction.
The union meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, would include a poll of the group’s delegates, (elected union leaders for individual schools,) on if they support a return to remote learning until the pandemic is under better control.
The union will also be sending the same question electronically to its roughly 25,000 rank-and-file members Tuesday, according to the official. If rank-and-file members vote to return to remote learning, those teachers would notify their respective principals either Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning that they would be ready to teach, but remotely.
At that point, it would be in the hands of Chicago Public Schools to potentially lock teachers out of their remote classrooms, as the district has threatened to do under similar circumstances in the past.
At a union virtual town hall meeting Sunday, about 80% of the 8,000 members who attended indicated they did not want to return to work in-person under the current conditions, according to the union official.
It could trigger a “mass electronic lockout,” the official said.
Part of the union hesitation to return has come from a recent surge in Covid-19 cases among both students and in the community, along with uncertainty over the current picture of infection.
According to data released by Chicago Public Schools, 35,590 tests were completed by students and staff between Dec. 26 and Jan. 1, and 24,843 were declared invalid. Of those tests that were accepted, 18% tested positive for Covid-19.
In a statement to CNN, Chicago Public Schools wrote, “Over the holiday weekend, we learned from our vendors, ThermoFisher and Color, that more than half of the 40,000 submitted tests could not be validated. While we continue to seek answers, we are focused on increasing on-site testing opportunities for the impacted students and schools this week as part of our ongoing weekly testing.”
Additionally, as the school district headed into winter break, it reported its highest weekly Covid-19 case count since the school year began. Citywide over the past two weeks, Chicago has reported its highest daily case counts of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
“Remote two-way live online instruction” is available for any students directed to quarantine.
Primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands will reopen next week despite a strict national lockdown, the Dutch government announced on Monday. Higher education, including trade schools and universities, will remain closed for in-person learning.
“Primary schools, secondary schools and schools for special (secondary) education will reopen on January 10, 2022. This also applies to out-of-school care,” the government said in a news release. “According to the OMT [Outbreak Management Team], that is responsible.”
“In vocational education, colleges, and universities, online education will be provided because of an increase in the number of infections in this age category, except for the previously excluded groups,” the statement continued.
More context: The government last month said that schools would be closed to in-person learning starting Dec. 20. For primary school students, that meant starting the so-called Christmas vacation a week early.
The Netherlands has been in a strict lockdown since Dec. 19, in an effort to curb the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. All hospitality venues and non-essential shops have been closed, the government has advised people to stay at home as much as possible, and has said that people should receive no more than two visitors per day.
The president of one of the largest teachers’ unions in New York City says he is concerned about safely staffing schools this week in the wake of rising Covid-19 cases in the city.
Mulgrew told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that he wanted to avoid a scenario where there is a high rate of student attendance combined with low staff, resulting in a lower than normal rate of teachers to students.
Only one New York City school closed Monday due to staffing issues. There are more than 1,700 schools in the New York City system – the largest in the country.
Mulgrew said Sunday was a frustrating day for teachers who were trying to get tested because they faced long lines at testing sites.
“The teachers have had a very difficult time trusting government. Let’s just put it that way. So we now have a new mayor. We’ll see where that goes,” Mulgrew said earlier Monday outside The American Sign Language & English Lower School in New York City.
The city distributed 1.5 million Covid test kits as well as KH95 masks to schools over the weekend.
Mulgrew also urged parents to get their children vaccinated. “We need your children vaccinated,” he said. “We need the vaccination rate to go up for our 5 to 11-year-olds.”
The number of positive coronavirus infection rates at the Capitol’s testing center have increased from 1% to 13%, according to a letter from the Office of the Attending Physician that was sent to congressional offices and obtained by CNN.
This comes as coronavirus cases have exploded in the DC area, which has the highest number of cases per population size in the country, according to the letter. Over a dozen lawmakers have announced breakthrough cases in recent weeks.
The Office of the Attending Physician (OAP) says most of the positive cases identified at the Capitol are breakthrough infections among vaccinated individuals and have not “led to hospitalizations, serious complications, or deaths, attesting to the value of coronavirus vaccinations.” So far, the OAP has administered booster vaccinations to more than 7,500 Capitol personnel.
The OAP advised offices to shift to a “maximal telework posture” and wear masks for any group activity indoors. The OAP also said “blue surgical masks, cloth face masks and gaiter masks must be replaced by the more protective KN95 or N95 masks.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t sugar coat it Monday when speaking about Covid-19 metrics, saying “We’re not in a good place, I’m going to be really honest with you.”
“This is the winter surge we predicted,” she said speaking at SUNY Rochester Educational Opportunity Center.
“Our numbers are misleading today,” the governor continued, reporting approximately 51,000 positive cases.
“They didn’t go from nearly 90,000 to 51,000,” she said, noting that the shift in latest case numbers is due to people not getting tested over the weekend.
“Unfortunately I’m going to say is a result of the holiday weekend. Those numbers are probably going to be much higher tomorrow,” the governor added.
She said the numbers are “rather shocking,” and while people are testing positive at a much higher rate “the severity of the illness is far less than we’ve seen before.”
She recalled the first Omicron case was reported on Dec. 2 and said “literally a month later we have enough data to say right now — we can say with certainty — that the cases are not presenting themselves as severely as they could have or we had feared. That is a silver lining…”
The state is also reporting an increase in hospitalizations – up at least 9,563. Hochul said the trend in hospitalizations is shooting up, and she’d “love to see it come straight down.”
The governor said beginning Tuesday, her team is going to poll hospitals to see how many people are being hospitalized for Covid-19 symptoms vs how many people are being hospitalized for other issues and develop Covid-19, to give more transparency.
“Hospital capacity is still hospital capacity, you either have beds for sick people or you don’t,” she said.
Speaking from northern New York, she said specifically the Finger Lakes hospitals had 2.8% bed capacity and Monroe County 1.8% bed capacity. “That’s a low number,” she said, reminding that the federal government has sent resources to assist, including nat guard members who are training.
Right now there are 21 hospitals that have elective procedures paused, something that happens when they are at only 10% capacity left. This is down from 32, she said.
Meanwhile, New York has obtained 37 million at-home test kits and has begun distributing them, in part to Rochester to be distributed to schools.
Hochul said 103 people were reported to have died from Covid-19 related complications, and she mentioned by name a 17-year-old from the Rochester community.
She also said SUNY schools were going to open additional testing sites to the public beginning tomorrow.
Maryland is mandating masks in all state-run facilities, according to an announcement Monday from Gov. Larry Hogan.
The effort is one of several announced Monday in the hope of slowing the state’s Covid-19 surge.
The state reported a seven-day positivity rate of 27% on Sunday, with 2,746 residents hospitalized with Covid-19 — more than any other time since the start of the pandemic.
Hogan also announced that state employees will be eligible for two hours of paid leave to receive a Covid-19 booster shot.
The state reports administering over 1.6 million booster doses so far.
Leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration did not formally consult their advisory board before expanding booster eligibility to children ages 12 to 15 on Monday, as the rapid rise in cases across the country made it clear that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweighed the risks, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said Monday during a call with reporters.
The agency used real-world data from Israel, including safety data from 6,300 children ages 12 to 15 who received a booster dose. There were no new cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported.
The FDA uses “discretion” when bringing questions to its advisory board, focusing on those that require public discussion, Marks said, and the current situation made the risk-benefit analysis clear.
“That’s not to say we don’t care about this and that – it’s not important. But what it is to say is that in the setting of a tremendous number of Omicron and Delta cases in this country, the potential benefits of getting vaccinated in this age range outweigh that risk,” Marks said. “It made sense to move as quickly as we possibly could.”
Marks said that data shows that the risk of myocarditis is lower with a booster dose than it is for the second dose among children ages 12 to 15, and cases have been generally mild with minimal long-lasting effects.
“The inference here is that the risk of myocarditis with third doses in the 12 to 15 year age range is likely to be quite acceptable given the potential benefits.”
Vaccine manufacturers are all working toward the possibility of an Omicron-specific vaccine, but it might not be necessary, leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration said Monday.
If a booster shot of the current vaccine appears to offer sufficient protection, there is less need for a variant-specific vaccine, said acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock.
“The last thing we want to do is just be going through and getting new vaccines and this and that if the current boosters look like they will really do the job against Omicron,” she said. “Then, we also have to consider that we might have additional variants, but we will be ready to switch if needed.”
More than 4 million children between the ages of 15 and 18 were vaccinated on Monday after the Indian government approved Covid-19 vaccines for the age group last month.
“Well done Young India! Over 4 million between 15-18 age group received their first dose of Covid-19 vaccine on the 1st day of vaccination drive for children. This is another feather in the cap of India’s vaccination drive,” India’s Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya tweeted Monday.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi also took to Twitter on Monday in praise of vaccinations for children ages 15 to 18, “Today we have taken an important step forward in protecting our youth against COVID-19. Congrats to all my young friends between the age group of 15-18 who got vaccinated.Congrats to their parents as well. I would urge more youngsters to get vaccinated in the coming days!”
India has been slow at issuing approval of vaccines for children and overall with the rollout of booster shots. Last month, during a Christmas Day address, Modi announced the start of limited shots of vaccines for children and booster shots for certain citizens.
Booster shots will be available for people aged 60 and older with pre-existing medical conditions, healthcare personnel and frontline workers starting on Jan. 10.
The third wave of Covid-19 has caused a surge in the number of reported cases in India, with the Ministry of Health reporting 33,750 new Covid-19 cases on Monday morning.
At least 3,800 frontline workers in Ireland are currently away from work on Covid-related leave, according to one of the country’s top health officials.
Speaking to RTÉ Radio 1’s “This Week” program Sunday, Dr. Colm Henry, chief clinical officer for the Health Service Executive (HSE), explained those 3,800 workers either have Covid-19 themselves or have had a close contact and added he expects this number to go “much higher.”
This comes as data revealed that Ireland recorded more Covid-19 cases during the Christmas period than all of 2020. An additional 16,986 cases were recorded on Monday by the health ministry.
It is understood that one in nine ICU staff in Ireland are currently off due to Covid-19.
One of the capital’s key hospitals, the Mater Hospital, is already under “severe trouble” with one in ten intensive care unit staff out of work due to Covid-19, according to Henry.
The Dublin based hospital put out a statement on Saturday, urging members of the public “where possible, to avoid its emergency department.”
This pressure has resulted in patients presenting themselves at ICUs with non-urgent conditions having to endure long waiting times, the statement added.
Anne O’Connor, the HSE’s Chief Operations Officer, told RTÉ Radio 1 on Dec. 29 that the Irish health service is seeing “some of our sites challenged” with beds not being able to open due to “staffing challenges.”
Hospitalizations in Ireland have risen by 43% over the course of the past week, according to health ministry data. There are currently 807 people in Irish hospitals with Covid-19.
Even before Omicron hit, the health service had instructed hospitals to “take whatever actions they needed to redeploy staff and to support essential service,” Henry said.
The health service is also invoking a derogation policy which allows close contact healthcare workers to come to work under supervision provided they aren’t presenting symptoms of the virus, Henry added.
The system will also “take advantage” of the reduction of the self-isolation period from 10 days to seven days for people who received the booster vaccine which came into effect Monday.
School districts across the US have diverged in their plans to return post-holidays this week as Omicron case numbers continue to surge.
While there is an intent across the board to have in-person learning, some districts have closed or shifted online in part due to staffing shortages. Others are delaying the return to allow for test pickup. Most are opening without incident.
More than 2,100 schools across the country have shifted to remote learning or delayed their return, according to data company Burbio, which aggregates closure information based on school calendars and other sources.
Here’s a sampling of the varying responses across some of the larger districts:
Shifting to online:
Delaying return:
Opening as scheduled:
The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday expanded the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine boosters for children ages 12 to 15.
The agency also shortened the time needed between an initial series of vaccine and a booster from at least six months after completion of an initial series to at least five months for everyone 12 and older.
Pfizer’s booster dose contains the same amount of the vaccine as the initial doses: 30 micrograms.
Adolescents in this age group became eligible to receive their initial series of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in mid-May, opening vaccinations up to about 17 million additional people.
Now, about half of the populations aged 12 to 15 – about 8.7 million – is fully vaccinated, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 5 million of them have been fully vaccinated for more than five months and are now eligible to receive a booster shot.
Children in this age group represent about 5% of the total US population. They account for about 4% of the fully vaccinated population in the US and about 3% of those eligible to receive a booster shot, according to the latest CDC data.
In October, the CDC recommended that everyone age 16 and up who completed their initial series of the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least six months ago receive a booster shot, along with those who received their initial Johnson & Johnson shot at least two months ago.
The FDA also authorized a third dose as part of the primary series for certain immunocompromised children ages 5 to 11, including those who have received an organ transplant.
Overall, about 68.8 million people are fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19. That’s less than half of the nearly 180 million people who are eligible to receive their booster shot and about a fifth of the total US population. And at least 69 million people ages 5 and up have not received their first dose of Covid-19 vaccine, according to the latest CDC data.
