COVID News for Americans Who Care

This piece is by Maryn McKenna at Wired:  "When the Next Covid Wave Breaks, the US Won’t Be Able to Spot It"

"Lab programs are closing. Home testing has shrunk the pool of publicly reported data. Will we still see the next surge before it arrives?

Lines on charts can tell you something about the state of the Covid pandemic in the United States. Deaths: declining, even with the looming milestone of the millionth US death. Hospitalizations: at historically low levels, but ticking back up. Cases: rising, particularly in the Northeast, reliably a harbinger for the rest of the country.

What you can't do with those lines is use them to map your way forward—because at this point, we’ve reached the choose-your-own-adventure stage of the pandemic. Most mask mandates have been lifted. Testing programs have been cut back, here and in other countries. Congress has declined to fund big chunks of the White House’s Covid agenda. Knowing where you are at risk is more confusing than ever, and likely to get more challenging as predicted new variants arrive.

All the indicators suggest the US is likely poised for a new surge of Covid; in some parts of the country, that surge may already be arriving. But in our zeal to declare the pandemic over, we may have maneuvered ourselves into a position where it is now harder to detect a coming wave. 'More and more, the relaxation of public health requirements, mandates, has placed responsibility on the individual and the employer,' says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and an assistant professor at George Mason University. 'But I've noticed that when we relax these mandates, we're doing that at times that are really inopportune, when case numbers are already increasing.'

And cases are increasing in the US."

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I came across this article on Twitter. The nightly news programs rarely discuss COVID any more, unfortunately, so Twitter has become a good alternative for information.

From Fortune:  "BA.4 and BA.5, two new Omicron variants sweeping South Africa, detected in U.S."

"BA.4 and BA.5 appear to be more infectious than BA.2, also known as “stealth Omicron,” which was more infectious than the original Omicron, BA.1, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing South African COVID expert Tulio de Oliveira, the head of the institutes at the universities of KwaZulu-Natal and Stellenbosch.

The two new variants have 'mutations in the lineages that allow the virus to evade immunity,' he told Bloomberg. 'We expect that it can cause reinfections and it can break through some vaccines, because that’s the only way something can grow in South Africa, where we estimate that more than 90% of the population has a level of immune protection.'

Cases are surging in South Africa despite the fact that almost all South Africans have been vaccinated or had COVID, he said, signaling that these strains are more likely to be capable of evading the body’s defenses."