New Covid-19 Viruses in the USA and Europe: The Scrabble Phenomenology of the U.S.

In the United States, these are BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, BA.4.6, BA.2.75 and BA.2.75.2. The XBB variant has been growing quickly in other countries, and it looks like it’s fueling new cases in Singapore. Cases are also rising in Europe and the UK, where these variants have taken hold.

Dr. Peter Hotez, who co-directs the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, says he thinks of them collectively as the Scrabble variants because they use letters that get high scores in the board game like Q, X and B.

While Covid-19 levels remain far below those of prior surges, trends are on the rise in parts of the US, new hospital admissions have jumped nearly 50% over the past month, and there is growing concern that case numbers could soar after the winter holidays.

The CDC estimates that BQ.1 and BQ.1.2 were responsible for about half of all new Covid-19 cases in the US. But so far, they’ve risen to predominance without much impact.

The bivalent booster vaccine, authorized in September, protects against the original strain of the coronavirus as well as the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.

The poor uptake of the new boosters, combined with the immune evasiveness of the new variants and the waning of population immunity, is almost surely a recipe for rising cases and hospitalizations in the weeks ahead.

Evolutionary challenges for the Covid pandemic: How early will the UK-Bayesian epidemic go in the early 2023 window?

Though they each descend from slightly different branches of the Omicron family tree, these new offshoots have evolved to share many of the same mutations, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

Covid lockdowns took place in 2020, vaccines occurred in 2021 and the year of worldwide reopening happened in 2022, among other things. 2023 will be the year of variant prediction. The first Covid variants of concern that were identified—from Alpha in the UK to Beta in South Africa—muddied the picture of where the pandemic would go next. Alpha was inherently better at transmitting, while Beta was able to evade preexisting immunity to some extent. How would evolution look in the long-term?

Concerns were raised about another winter surge when the strains are becoming dominant as winter is approaching and people are traveling and gathering for the holidays.

“That’s because with convergent evolution, perhaps several different lineages can independently obtain similar transmissibility levels versus a single new variant taking over.

“This is what predominantly happens for most pathogens, such as the flu and RSV,” Grubaugh wrote in an email. Most of the circulating stuff has high fitness, as the virus has adapted to human transmission.

Vaccination Predictions in the United States and Implications for Omicron Variants: a World Health Organization analysis of Covid-19

Maria Van Kerkhove, the Covid-19 response technical lead for the World Health Organization, said Wednesday that the large mix of new variants was becoming more difficult for WHO to assess because countries were dialing back on their surveillance.

“The risk of reinfection is definitely not trivial,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an author of the new study. “So going into the winter surge now people should do their best to try to prevent getting reinfected.”

Estimates released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that there have been two new omicron subvariants in the United States that have become dominant.

Fauci told CNN that most people think that they will be a substantial proportion and bumped BA.5 off as the dominant variant.

The variant are different from the others and are the result of genetic drift. So they share many parts of their genomes with that virus.

He said that with a lot of people now being boosted and vaccined and with people having immunity from Omicron infections, it is a very different population landscape for a variant to emerge in. The best part of the situation is not seeing the massive increases in cases.

If people would just get the vaccine, it would completely escape the protection that you would get from it.

The latest data from the CDC show that fourteen million people have received an updated bivalent booster six weeks into the campaign promoting it. It is less than 10% of the population that may be eligible.

Implications of the Covid-19 Epidemic for the Vaccine and Immunology Sectors and the Medical Costs of Antibody Therapy

“It’s probably going to be significantly bigger than the BA.5 wave, at least that’s what I expect,” said Mark Zeller, a project scientist who monitors variants at the Scripps Research Institute. Zeller doesn’t anticipate this winter’s surge to hit the heights of January’s Omicron wave.

The BQ subvariants of Omicron have risen to dominate transmission in the US. Some of the genes in BQ.1 and B Q. 1.1 are descendants of BA.5 and helps them evade immunity created by Vaccines and Infections. Because of these changes, they’re growing more quickly than BA.5 did.

People who have had their immune function decline due to drugs, disease or age are in the most need of antibody therapies. These are the same people whose bodies don’t respond robustly to vaccines.

“We don’t have the money today, so even if we did get money, it would take us a long while to bring a monoclonal into the marketplace.”

The administration has been thinking about ways to commercialize some parts of the Covid-19 response – to get out of the business of buying vaccines and therapies – ultimately passing the costs on to consumers and insurers. The process has to be guided by the needs on the ground and realities of the virus.

He believes that the Biden administration will try to get Congress to pass more funding for new therapies because he thinks current realities require that.

The BQ. 1 and Bq. 1.1 Subvariant Overtakes the Delta Wave: Implications for U.S. Immunity and Beyond

The BA. 5 omicron subvariant that has dominated the US since the summer has been overtaken by the BQ. 1 and Bq. 1.1 subvariant which are among the most savvy at evading immunity from vaccination and previous infections.

“This time of year last year we were optimistic. When we came out of the delta wave we went into Thanksgiving to wake up to omicron. So there is this sort of déjà vu feeling from last year,” Luban says.

Recent studies show that Bq.1 and Bq. 1.1 are seven times more immune-evasive than BA.5.

But even if the new subvariants do surge this winter, most experts think any uptick in infections won’t hit as hard as the first two winter surges of the pandemic.

“We are hoping that the amount of immunity that has been induced either by prior infection or by vaccination” will protect most people from getting severely ill or dying, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House medical advisor, told NPR.

A new study has found that getting re-injected with the virus can pose significant risks, ranging from short term to long term effects, including hospitalization, and even death.

“The question is if the increase will be nationwide and how large it will be, or if it will be something like what we experienced with Delta and Omicron,” says Samuel Scarpino, vice president of Pathogen Surveillance for the Rockefeller Foundation.

One promising sign is that recent surges in other countries suggest that if the subvariants are involved in a new U.S. wave, any uptick could be short-lived. For example, while France experienced a surge involving the new subvariants, the increase in cases quickly receded.

Covid-19 Is Dominated among 18-24 Year Olds and Its Implications for Vaccines and the Epidemic Landscape

While some preliminary studies have questioned whether the new boosters are any better than the original vaccine at protecting against omicron, others have suggested they may be. Vaccine makers Pfizer and BioNTech recently released a statement saying their new booster stimulates much higher levels of antibodies that can neutralize the BA.5 omicron subvariant than the original vaccine.

Another concern is that these new subvariants are likely to render the last monoclonal antibody drugs useless, including one that people with compromised immune systems use to protect themselves.

Experts think Thanksgiving will stir up social networks and give people a reason to stay in touch with each other. After the holiday, cases and hospitalizations usually increase, as they have for the past two years.

“Covid positivity is going up,” said Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics and infectious disease at the genetic testing company Helix, which has been monitoring coronavirus variants. It is increasing the fastest among 18 to 24 year olds.

It can be an indication that the transmission is on the rise, if a greater percentage of Covid-19 tests return positive results.

“We should expect more cases,” Luo said. “Whether they’re measured in how we measure cases right now, I don’t know, but I think in general, you should see more people who are sick. I definitely am.”

If people are mostly testing at home and not reporting their results, cases may not be picked up as quickly by official counts.

The United States has a relatively stable state for covid-19, and the nation still sees about 350 deaths from the disease every day, said Dr. Jessica Justman, an associate professor of medicine in epidemiology.

Nobody knows what will happen to BQ. The Omicron variant has a peak of nearly a million new daily infections and many experts feel that we wont see the big waves of winters in the future.

First, there’s the experience of other countries like the UK, where BQ.1 has outcompeted its rivals to dominate transmission even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who directs the Center for Infections Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, notes that something similar happened in France and Germany.

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, thinks our behavior and our social contacts might be bigger determinants of whether cases will rise this go-round than whatever variant is in the lead.

He thinks the rise in cases may peak around the second week of January but that it won’t have a large effect on hospitalizations and deaths.

“It’s probably got a bit more of a fitness advantage, so what we’re seeing is gradual replacement without a massive change in the total number of Covid-19 cases,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that B Q.1 and B Q. 1.1 won’t have an impact. They’ve shown marked resistance to the antibodies that are available to protect and treat people who are vulnerable to severe Covid-19 infections. It is good for people to be cautious if they have weakened immune systems or are around someone who does.

New research indicates that a country’s vaccination rate matters more than any other single factor when it comes to the effects of variants on a population.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Labs are studying what drives the effects of 13 different coronaviruses in over 200 countries. The study includes data up to the end of September and was published as a preprint ahead of peer review.

CDC Detection of Omicron Diagnosis in the U.S. During the Winter Wave: Bette Korber

The number of previous cases, masks worn, average income, and the percentage of the population older than 65 were all part of the equation.

How many other variants are in the mix when a new one rises is also an important factor, says senior study author Bette Korber, a laboratory fellow in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos.

By the time Alpha arrived, we were evolving our own versions out of California and New York that was very distinctive and had a competitive edge over what it had to contend with in England.

The CDC is keeping an eye on a soup of more than a dozen Omicron subvariants that have been causing cases in the US, and that variety may help counteract the winter wave.

Korber is not making any predictions. She says it’s just too difficult to know what’s going to happen, pointing to Asia as the source of her uncertainty.

She said, “To me, it’s a good time when it’s possible to wear masks.” Masks protect the wearer as well as others around them. “And get the booster if you’re eligible and it’s the right moment for you,” especially as we gather around the table to feast with our friends and family.

“It’s a time to exercise a little additional caution to prevent that wave that we don’t want to see happening, or at least make it a smaller bump,” Korber said

The impact of the country’s zero-Covid laws and pandemic censorship on workers and the public: “The world changed overnight,” said Echo Ding

Workers across China have dismantled some of the physical signs of the country’s zero-Covid controls, peeling health code scanning signs off metro station walls and closing some checkpoints after the government unveiled an overhaul of its pandemic policy.

But as many residents expressed relief and happiness at the obvious loosening of measures, some worried about its impact and questioned how the new rules would be rolled out.

“The world changed overnight, and that’s really amazing,” said Echo Ding, 30, a manager at a tech company in Beijing. I think we’re getting back to normal life. I need this because if I don’t get back to a normal life, I might lose my mind.

But Ding, like many across the country, also expressed unease with the rapid change. Even after much of the world relaxed pandemic restrictions, China continued to lock down entire cities and send all Covid-19 patients to central quarantine facilities, while restricting others merely for visiting an area where a positive case was detected.

The city of Shanghai is struggling through the December 7 pandemic: What to do if you’re infected with Omicron?

How can it change so quickly? “Do you want to?” Ding asked. I feel like we are like fools. It is up to them. They said it’s good, so then it’s good … that’s what I feel right now. It is so unreal, but I have no choice. All I can do is follow the arrangement.”

David Wang, 33, a freelancer in Shanghai, said although the changes were welcome, they had also sparked a feeling of disbelief in the city, which underwent a chaotic, more than two-month-long, citywide lockdown earlier this year.

He said that most of his friends are showing typical signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they just can’t believe it’s happening.

The Beijing health officials said that the changes to the rules were based on scientific evidence, and they include the spread of the milder Omicron variant and China’s experience responding to the virus.

Then, on December 7, the central government announced a drastic overhaul of approach, rolling back lockdowns, testing and allowing residents to isolate at home – effectively abandoning zero-Covid.

The government and state media had long emphasized the dangers of the virus and its potential long-term effects – and used this to justify the maintenance of restrictive policies.

Now, a flood of articles highlighting the more mild nature of Omicron and downplaying its risks have created a feeling of whiplash for some, and fall well short of the kind of public messaging campaigns that some other countries carried out before their own pandemic policy changes.

On China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo, topics and hashtags related to what to do if infected by Omicron trended high on Thursday morning, while there were numerous reports of panic buying of fever medications.

The government needs to be more clear on how to deal with a surge in infections. The Chinese health system will be tested.

Wang’s mother is now buying high- grade N95 masks and preparing for a “nuclear winter” until a potential initial wave of cases passed.

An African study of variant-specific surveillance: New results on COvid-19 in Beijing and implications for the Omicron virus in the U.S.

Many are watching to see how the guidelines will be applied in their cities after local authorities make adjustments to the guidelines.

People with a negative Covid-19 test are not required to eat at restaurants in Beijing even if they have a health code showing a negative test.

She said on Wednesday evening that her health code had turned yellow, meaning that she would usually be barred from most public places until she took a test that returned a negative result. She knew that with the new rules she could go out a lot, but she decided to remain at home.

The paper is not well-received by people, says a person who works at a University in Canada. Rasmussen is not convinced that the analysis rules out contamination during sample preparation and sequencing, which is a familiar problem for researchers in the field.

Research over the past year has supported the third theory, but the latest analysis suggests that Omicron could have evolved undetected in western Africa, where sequencing is rare.

More than 13,000 virus samples taken from people with COvid-19 were analysed by 22 laboratories in Africa as part of the study. These samples had not been sequenced at the time of collection. The team created a test to identify the Delta and Omicron subvariants. “This is a really cool way of doing variant-specific surveillance,” says Joshua Levy, an applied mathematician at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California.

The researchers found that by the end of December 2021, Omicron had taken over as the dominant variant across Africa, taking over in the north.

The Benin virus is no longer a zero-Covid virus – new sequencing rules for the monitoring, monitoring, and quarantine of infectious diseases in South Africa

But researchers who have reviewed the study and the virus sequences from Benin, which have been posted in a public repository, say that the sequences are probably false positives.

Another warning signal is that many of the sequences from Benin seem to carry several mutations specific to Delta, says Levy. “It’s very unlikely that these mutations would have popped up in a non-Delta sample.”

Researchers theorize that the reason for some of these observations is either due to extensive recombination by the virus, or the result of lab-caused contamination. Richard Neher, a Computational Biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, thinks that recombination isunlikely and not consistent with what has been observed.

An alternative explanation that needs further investigation is that samples with very small amounts of Delta variant were contaminated with Omicron, says a computational biologist who works at the University of Cape Town.

Several researchers asked for detailedSequencing data from the paper’s authors, but many are still withholding judgement until they have examined the raw data. Drexler says they are preparing to upload those data to a public repository.

Ultimately, the study points to the importance of genomic sequencing for tracking infectious diseases. The strength of the South Africa research team’sgenomics was highlighted in this paper as they detected Omicron early, said a bioinformatician who helped to sound the alarm.

Mass testing in entire cities isn’t required anymore according to national guidelines. Instead of shutting down cities, the government says movements should be restricted in high-risk communities. For those in high-risk settings, such as nursing homes, people no longer need to show proof of a negative test to travel between regions. And the guidelines prioritize boosting the low rates of vaccination among older people.

As an unprecedented wave of infections – and deaths – sweeps the country, many have questioned why after sacrificing so much under zero-Covid and waiting for so long to reopen, the government ultimately let the virus rip through a population with little prior warning or preparation.

Some aspects of the new rules are open to interpretation and include when and where people can be tested during an outbreak, and what defines high-risk areas.

Furthermore, the guidelines do not lift testing and quarantine requirements for international travellers, which “doesn’t have a rationale if the objective is no longer zero COVID”, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.

There are many people in densely populated high-rise buildings where it will be hard to limit transmission. Allowing people to quarantine at home will contribute to viral spread, says George Liu, a public-health researcher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. This could cause a lot of problems for hospitals.

The death toll of the US is close to a million, and some studies think that China may have caused nearly a million deaths.

China does not have a strong system for primary medical care and some people go to hospital for just mild conditions, according to the president of the Chinese Medical Association.

Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent, says that the alleviated restrictions won’t help businesses in the long run if they don’t have additional support. I fear that the health and socio-economic risk will be passed on to individuals.

Cowling says urgent guidance is needed on how to curb transmission during a surge, such as through mask mandates, work from home policies and temporary school closures. There is not a clear way for officials to track whether the cities have passed the peak of the wave of infections or not.

Researchers are concerned that hasty changes will not leave enough time to ramp up vaccination among older people. Around 70% of people that are 60 or older and 40% of people that are 80 or more have had a third dose of the vaccine.

What are the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis? An update on the progress of the Beijing Emergency Center and how it affects the rest of the world

Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. This is the place for you to sign up.

Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.

The system, which is separate from the health code scanning system still required in a reduced number of places in China, had used people’s cell phone data to track their travel history in the past 14 days in an attempt to identify those who have been to a city with zone designated “high-risk” by authorities.

But as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.

The China Youth Daily reported on the hours-long lines at the clinic in central Beijing and called for residents not to go to hospitals unless necessary.

There was a jump in emergency calls in the capital with a hospital official appealing to residents with no symptoms of illness to not call the emergency services line.

The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.

Covid was “spreading rapidly” driven by highly transmissible Omicron variants in China, a top Covid-19 expert, Zhong Nanshan, said in an interview published by state media Saturday.

It will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain even though prevention and control is strong, according to Zhong who has been a public voice since the first days of the Pandemic in 2020.

The two-month lockdown became a glaring symbol of the economic and social costs of zero-Covid. Residents in the country’s wealthiest and most glamorous city were subject to a number of problems including shortages of food, lack of emergency medical care, and forced disinfection of their homes. The draconian measures triggered wave after wave of outcry, severely eroding public trust in the Shanghai government.

Outside experts have warned that China may be underprepared to handle the expected surge of cases, after the surprise move to lift its measures in the wake of nationwide protests against the policy, growing case numbers and rising economic costs.

With China’s lunar New Year coming up next month, Zhong said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, specifically for the elderly and others at risk, especially with a peak travel time when urban residents visit elderly relatives.

China’sNational Health Commission said in a statement that there will be measures to be undertaken, such as increasing intensive care beds and medical staff for intensive care.

Meanwhile, experts have warned a lack of experience with the virus – and years of state media coverage focusing on its dangers and impact overseas, before a recent shift in tone – could push those who are not in critical need to seek medical care, further overwhelming systems.

Bob Li, who was a graduate student in Beijing, was positive for the viruses on Friday, but his mom stayed up all night worrying about him. Li said that the woman finds the virus very frightening.

Does the Congo’s epidemic of Ebola return with a vengeance this year? An infectious disease expert tells us what to expect in future genomic studies

China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crackdown on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.

People who tested positive for Covid 19- but didn’t have any symptoms should not have to take medication, according to a doctor in Beijing cited in a state media interview over the weekend.

People who have no symptoms need no medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition ,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.

Health authorities in China have “noticeably increased” the number of coronavirus genome sequences and other related data they are submitting to the global database GISAID, an initiative that maintains databases for scientists around the world to share data on flu viruses and coronaviruses.

Researchers are worried that donor and government investment in genomic surveillance will dry up. Philanthropic funders typically don’t support long-term surveillance, says Senjuti Saha, a molecular microbiologist at the Child Health Research Foundation in Dhaka.

When a case of Ebola was identified in Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), earlier this year, samples from the person were taken some 240 kilometres to a lab in Goma for testing and sequencing, avoiding the delay of transporting them across the country to the capital Kinshasa, more than 1,600 km away. The lab quickly identified that the Ebola sequences were linked to those circulating a couple years earlier in the region and did not represent a new spillover event. The laboratories in the DR are able to sequence samples rapidly because of the reagents and equipment that is available.

Every country has its own priorities, and there are many of them. One of the reasons why some are driven is because the disease outbreak that was caused by the P.H. had been neglected. “Dengue is back with a vengeance this year.”

The increased interest in sequencing is generating more data, which can be used for new treatments and vaccines. But there is a shortage of people who can interpret sequencing data such as bioinformaticians and epidemiologists. This poses a challenge for the research team at the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Thailand, where Olivo Miotto is based.

Many people have been trained in how to interpret COVID-19 data, but they don’t know how to apply this to other diseases, says Karlsson. “There’s still a global paucity of trained workforce.”

Pathogen Sequencing: The Challenges of World Warfare and the Rise of Infectious Vaccines in Asia PgI

Sequencing machines cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to maintain. Reagents can be expensive and can also be more expensive in regions without established supply chain, which is why it will be priority for Asia PgI.

In some places, it can take months to get a technician to repair a broken machine, says David Blazes, who leads work on pathogen genomic sequencing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is necessary to develop standardized processes for the analysis of other pathogens, and to bring costs down, according to researchers.

We will see the pattern in 2023 and onwards if this evolutionary trajectory continues. It is a similar dynamic to the seasonal coronaviruses that have been causing epidemics for decades. A 2021 study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that coronaviruses gradually evolve over time, so prior immunity is less effective.

When it comes to selecting influenza vaccines, teams use a range of data, from the growth rates of circulating variants in genomic data to tests of their immunological properties. There is variability in what populations have previously been exposed to. Some countries may have more immunity than others, which means that there’s more of an advantage to be had. In different countries there are different Influenza Viruses.

Further into the future, there is hope for progress on “universal” coronavirus vaccines, which will be highly effective against a wide range of variants. It is not seen as certain that success for other universal vaccines, such as for Influenza, is guaranteed. The coming year will be the start of a long game of cat- and-mouse, pitting vaccine updates against an evolving virus. Solving this prediction question—and rolling out the resulting vaccines—will be one of the major health challenges of 2023.

Rejoinding Chinese citizens after the reopening in the Xuebola outbreak: “Everyone can (live) their normal life”

China’s partial reopening has been met with an outpouring of joy and relief from citizens — both the hundreds of millions isolated inside the country for the past three years and those overseas separated from their loved ones.

The border remains largely closed to foreigners, apart from a limited number of business or family visits — though the government signaled Monday this could loosen, too.

“Finally, everybody can (live) their normal life,” said one Chinese national living in New York, who hasn’t been home for four years. She said that it was difficult to leave her family and her pet dog, which had died during that time.

Her family “missed (my graduation). They missed so many things,” she said. I missed many things for my family. All my friends, they got married during the pandemic. Even some of them had babies. I missed a lot of important points in their lives.

May Ma has not been able to go home for over three years. The worst thing about the requirements was the fact that she couldn’t go back in time to say goodbye if something happened to her grandparents.

She said the scariest thing was not knowing where the end is or when she will be able to return. “I definitely feel very happy, I can finally see the end.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-border-quarantine-travel-reax-intl-hnk/index.html

Travel booking site traffic during Lunar New Year holiday season has been booming since Covid-19 kicked : Chinese people have a rough time

People in China are anticipating and celebrating outbound travel. Most have not left the country for several years and are now flooding booking sites to plan long-awaited vacations.

The peak in online searches for outbound flights and hotels was seen at Trip.com, a Chinese travel booking website. Searches for popular destinations increased tenfold within half an hour of the announcement, with many people searching for outbound group tours during the Lunar New Year holiday season in late January, data shows.

Macao, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom were among the website’s top 10 destinations with the fastest growth in search volume since the announcement.

Over-the-counter cold and fever medicines – which had been restricted from purchase under zero-Covid – sold out instantly at pharmacies and on online shopping sites. Huge lines formed outside the clinics and the emergency room overflowed with elderly patients. Crematoriums are struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies.

It is a black hole in terms of genetic data regarding coronaviruses in China for the public to look at. Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported last week.

“I feel like right now, it’s totally a mess,” said the Chinese national in New York. “Everybody is sick. I think it’s not a good time to visit my family. Maybe two or three months later.”

The Communist Party’s Olympic Bubble and the First Omicron Outbreak in Tianjin, China During the January 2022 Winter Olympics

Some overseas destinations are on guard. They asked the Malpensa airport in Milan to test all arrivals from China until the end of January because it was one of the largest airports in Italy.

“It doesn’t matter if I can get back in time for Spring Festival,” said Ma in South Korea, referring to Lunar New Year. I can’t bear waiting more than a little while longer.

2022 was supposed to be a triumphant year for China and its leader Xi Jinping, as he began his second decade in power with a pledge to restore the nation to greatness.

A crisis that threatens to undermine the Communist Party is being caused by a hallmark of the policy, which has turned into a source of legitimacy.

In its tightly sealed, meticulously managed Olympic bubble, the face mask, endless spraying of disinfectant, and rigorous daily testing paid off. The Winter Olympics were largely free of Covid even though the Omicron variant was raging around the world, because any visitors arriving in the country were quickly identified and their cases contained.

The success added to the party’s narrative that its political system is superior to those of Western democracies in handling the pandemic – a message Xi had repeatedly driven home as he prepared for a third term in power.

It also boosted China’s confidence that its well-honed zero-Covid playbook of lockdowns, quarantines, mass testing and contact tracing could build an effective defense against highly transmissible Omicron and contain its spread. In the lead-up to the Games, these measures worked in January to tame the country’s first Omicron outbreak in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing.

The economy was wreaked havoc by the lock-up. China’s GDP shrunk by 2.6% in the three months ending in June, while youth unemployment hit a record high of nearly 20%.

And so instead of vaccinating the elderly and bolstering ICU capacity, authorities wasted the next crucial months building larger quarantine facilities, rolling out more frequent mass testing, and imposing wider lockdowns that at one point affected more than 300 million people.

Migrant workers abandoned a locked-down Foxconn factory en masse, walking for miles to escape an outbreak at China’s largest iPhone assembling site. A 3-year-old died of gas poisoning after he was unable to be taken to a hospital quickly. A delayed medical care caused the death of a baby in a hotel.

In late November a deadly apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi sparked public anger that had been simmering for months. Despite official denials, many believed that the measures hampered rescue efforts.

There was a huge wave of protests across the country. Crowds gathered on city streets and university campuses to demand an end to Covid tests, with some decrying censorship and demanding greater political freedoms.

Protesters demanded that the country’s most powerful and authoritarian leader step down, an act of political defiance toward him.

The challenge posed by the nationwide demonstrations was unprecedented. Omicron had spun out of control, with the nation logging a daily record of more than 40,000 infections and the economy starting to feel the pinch, as governments ran out of cash.

The ease of restrictions has left the public in a state of shock and unprepared for their own survival.

Now, the true scale of the outbreak and deaths could deal a serious blow to the credibility of a government that had justified years of painful restrictions on the grounds that they were necessary to save lives.

Imposing New Covid-19 Measures for Travellers from China During the Omicron Bulge: A U.S. Embassy Announces the Measurements

The US is considering imposing new Covid-19 measures for individuals traveling from China amid concerns over a rise in Covid-19 cases in the country and a “lack of transparent data,” US officials said.

Japan and India have instituted Covid-19 measures for travelers from China because of concerns over an increase in cases. Japan is requiring individuals traveling from China be tested for Covid-19 upon arrival starting December 30. Travelers who test positive for Covid-19 on their arrival to India will have to show proof of a negative test in order to enter the country.

“The US is following the science and advice of public health experts, consulting with partners, and considering taking similar steps we can take to protect the American people,” the officials said.

A positive test result can no longer be used to replace a negative test result for documentation of recovery from the virus.

The CDC said in a news release that if there were less sharing of viral genomes and less testing in China, it’d delay the identification of new variant of concern.

Passengers also flying through South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, Toronto Pearson International, and Vancouver International will be required to provide a negative test if they have been in China in the last 10 days.

“These three transit hubs cover the overwhelming majority of passengers with travel originating in the PRC and the Special Administrative Regions,” the CDC said.

The CDC has announced that it is increasing the number of airports that participate in the Genomic Program to include Seattle and Los Angeles with about 500 weekly flights from at least 30 countries.

“During the initial weeks of the Omicron surge, TGS detected two Omicron subvariants, BA.2 and BA.3, and reported them to the global database weeks before they were reported elsewhere, demonstrating that the program is able to detect variants early,” the CDC said.

Testing people before they go on a plane will not answer the question of whether China is producing more variant infections that might be of particular concern to us.

“I don’t think we’re going to see much benefit, honestly,” he said of the travel requirements. “The most important thing we need right now is, we need the Chinese to have more transparency and tell us exactly what’s going on, and that is pretty much a diplomatic decision. This is about diplomacy.”

Improving Covid Genome Sequencing in China: An Update on the Development in Vaccines and Bioinformatics in the United States

It is vital that you have lots of Covid cases to ensure that the virus can start to accumulate new copies of the genes that allow it to evade detection.

A situation like what is happening in China, where millions of people are going to get infections, is good for the virus to find a random variation that could make it better at infecting people. The Chinese population has been using less-than-optimal vaccines and have not been as good about putting boosters into their population as other countries have been.

GISAID said in an email to CNN on Wednesday that China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and several regional centers in the country, “have noticeably increased the number of submissions of genome sequence and associated metadata from samples taken in recent days.”