Preliminary data suggest omicron is more transmissible, causes milder cases than delta, WHO says

When Djohariah Singer was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer two years ago, she fully expected to beat the disease — despite long odds.

But the pandemic hit just a few months after her first surgery, to remove her reproductive organs. The cancer had spread throughout her body, complicating Singer’s battle to stay alive even as she endured debilitating chemo and further surgeries. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she has sheltered in place with her partner and teenage daughter at their home in Middletown, Md., venturing out only for her medical appointments and emergencies.

Singer, 52, has been fighting a two-front battle for two years — trying to heal her body from the ravages of cancer and outlast the pandemic, which shows no sign of abating. But she says she has come to see her fight more as a dance than a war.

“I see myself fighting in a different way,” she said. “My life isn’t about beating cancer, my life is going to be how do I live with cancer. And the more I can learn to dance with this, the more gracefully I dance with it, the longer I will live.”

Some 4.2 million Americans quit their jobs in October as churn in the labor market continued to mark the economic recovery nearly two years into the pandemic, according to a report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The number of people who left jobs for other opportunities in October made up 2.8 percent of the workforce, the BLS said in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey.

A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September. Workers took advantage of the surge in job openings across the country. August’s numbers, at 4.3 million, were also a record at the time. In contrast, in February 2020, before the big wave of pandemic-related layoffs began, 2.3 percent of workers quit their jobs.

It was Saturday evening when Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin learned that a Cabinet colleague and close contact had tested positive for the coronavirus. That information, however, did not derail her weekend plans and the leader proceeded to party at a Helsinki nightclub until the wee hours, with photos showing her maskless in a crowd.

Marin, who is fully vaccinated, later apologized for what she described as an indiscretion, yet images from that night have since gone viral, prompting both outrage at what critics deemed irresponsible behavior and international admiration for the stamina of the world’s youngest prime minister, who stayed out until 4 a.m., according to one report.

Even though Marin did not break any laws, she now joins a lengthy list of public officials — spanning the globe and the political spectrum — who have flouted pandemic best practices and faced accusations of hypocrisy and recklessness. Experts warn that leaders with tarnished credibility could undermine governments’ response to the pandemic just as the omicron variant presents a new and formidable challenge.

Dozens of elementary school students in California were forced to quarantine over the Thanksgiving holiday because one family sent a child to school after the child tested positive for the coronavirus, public health and school district officials said.

The child attended Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera, near San Francisco, for seven days in November while infected, said Brett Geithman, superintendent of Larkspur-Corte Madera School District in Marin County. As a result, about 75 students had to quarantine, and seven of them tested positive for the virus — the child’s sibling and six other schoolmates, he said.

Geithman said there were no severe cases of the disease, “but it could have been a lot worse.” And it meant that a number of families had to cancel holiday plans because of quarantine protocols, he said.

“This family’s decision to send their children to school — knowing that one of them had covid — was reckless. It jeopardized the health and safety of our entire school community,” he added.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization Wednesday for AstraZeneca’s antibody drug — an alternative coronavirus prevention treatment for people with compromised immune systems.

The drug Evusheld consists of laboratory-brewed monoclonal antibodies that have been engineered to stick around in the blood for a long time, with the idea that they could provide a shot of long-term protection, similar to a vaccine.

“Vaccines have proven to be the best defense available against covid-19,” Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a news release. “However, there are certain immune compromised individuals who may not mount an adequate immune response to covid-19 vaccination, or those who have a history of severe adverse reactions to a covid-19 vaccine and therefore cannot receive one and need an alternative prevention option.”

One dose of the treatment — administered as two consecutive intramuscular injections — may be effective for pre-exposure prevention for six months, the federal agency said. The drug has been authorized only for people older than 12 with moderate to severely compromised immune systems who may not otherwise develop an adequate immune response from the coronavirus vaccine. Those with a history of adverse reactions to the coronavirus shot or its components also are eligible.

Biotechnology company Regeneron has released data showing that its monoclonal antibody cocktail, authorized as a treatment for people infected or recently exposed, remains about 80 percent effective against symptomatic infections eight months later, bolstering the case for its use as a preventive for people who don’t respond well to coronavirus vaccines.

Here’s what to know from news service reports about the coronavirus pandemic:

• South Africa reported nearly 20,000 new covid-19 cases Wednesday — a record since the omicron variant was detected — and 36 new covid-related deaths. It was not immediately clear how many of the infections were caused by omicron, given that only a fraction of samples are sequenced, but experts think the new variant is driving South Africa’s fourth wave of infections.
• France’s Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, says all hospitals are activating an emergency plan due to the strained covid-19 situation. The plan includes stepping up the number of ICU beds and, if necessary, rescheduling non-covid-19 treatment to free up capacity.
• In Finland, Prime Minister Sanna Marin apologized after she and two other ministers shrugged off recommendations over the weekend to avoid close contacts with other people after being exposed to covid-19. “I did wrong. I should have considered the situation more carefully,” Marin said in a television interview by public broadcaster Yle on Wednesday night.
• In Britain, an adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned after a video surfaced of her laughing and joking about a Christmas party at 10 Downing Street during a covid-19 lockdown last year when such festivities were banned. Allegra Stratton, who most recently served as Johnson’s COP26 spokeswoman, was his press secretary at the time the video was recorded in December 2020.
• Botswana has not seen a rise in covid-19 hospitalizations despite being one of the first countries to detect the omicron variant, its health minister said. The southern African nation has fully vaccinated 71 percent of its 1.3 million eligible population.
• Romania will ease some social restrictions Wednesday, removing a night curfew and a requirement to wear face masks outdoors ahead of the winter holidays, officials said. Face masks will continue to be mandatory on public transportation and in indoor public spaces.
• The African Union has called for an urgent end to travel restrictions imposed on some of its member states, including by the United States and much of Europe. The body said the restrictions penalize governments for timely data sharing in line with international health regulations.

Nearly two years into a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people, every country, including the United States, remains dangerously unprepared to respond to future epidemic and pandemic threats, according to a report released Wednesday assessing the efforts of 195 countries.

Researchers compiling the Global Health Security Index — a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a D.C.-based nonprofit global security group, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health — found insufficient capacity in every country, which they said left the world vulnerable to future health emergencies, including some that might be more devastating than the coronavirus.

The assessment of each country’s ability to prevent, detect and respond to health emergencies in 2021 was based on public information. Researchers also weighed other factors, such as public confidence in government. The average country score for 2021 was 38.9 out of a possible 100 points, essentially unchanged from 2019. No country scored above 75.9.

The United States, with its vast wealth and scientific capability, maintained its top overall ranking — it was also No. 1 when the first index was released in 2019. But the United States also scored lowest on public confidence in government, a key factor associated with high numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths. That factor may explain why other countries that received top marks in 2019 also responded poorly during the pandemic.

World Health Organization officials said Wednesday that preliminary data suggest that the omicron variant — which has been reported in 57 countries — presents a rapid increase in transmission but causes milder cases of covid-19 than the delta variant, which is still spreading across the globe.

Although the emerging data is a cause for relief, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is too early to draw conclusions and that more data and time is needed to have a complete picture of the risks and impact of the variant.

Given omicron’s virulence and high number of mutations, Thedros said it is undeniable that it “could have a mayor impact in the course of the pandemic,” urging countries to keep their guard up, accelerate vaccine access and ramp up efforts to keep transmissions down.

“The steps countries take today and in the coming weeks will determine how omicron unfolds,” Thedros said. “Complacency could cost lives.”

Some studies — including one in South Africa — found that omicron partially evades protection of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, but WHO scientists warned Wednesday that these preliminary results were drawn from a small number of samples and have not been peer reviewed.

They emphasized that the significant drop in the level of antibodies found in some of the samples don’t necessarily translate into a reduction in vaccine efficacy.

“It is premature to conclude that this reduction in neutralizing activity would result in a significant reduction of vaccine effectiveness,” Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist said. “We do not know that.”

WHO officials contend that vaccines produce a wide-ranging immune response, with levels of antibodies being only one element of it, and said these experiments offer an incomplete picture on the efficacy against severe disease or death from omicron.