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Omicron, Testing and Vaccines News: Covid-19 Live Updates - The New York Times
Jan 12, 2022 12 mins, 46 secs

The Biden administration promises millions of free virus tests to help schools stay open.

The White House on Wednesday said that it was considering a program to offer “high-quality” masks to Americans as the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads through the nation.

With virus cases and hospitalizations skyrocketing across the country, the White House is under pressure to reassure Americans that it is doing all it can to battle the Omicron variant.

Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said most Americans would be infected with the virus — a prediction that outside health experts have echoed.

Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, said Dr.

“We’re not going to eliminate that,” he said adding, “but we ultimately will control this.”.

Zients said the government has a stockpile of more than 750 million N95 masks — considered the highest quality — for health care and emergency workers.

The government is asking potential contractors to make 141 million of the masks each month at a “surge capacity,” she said.

The agency continues to emphasize that people should wear a mask that fits them well, she said, adding, “The best mask for you is the one that you can wear comfortably.”.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday said that he was reintroducing legislation co-sponsored by dozens of Democratic lawmakers that would offer everyone in the United States a package of three N95 masks.

Trump gave a full-throated endorsement of coronavirus booster shots on Tuesday night and said politicians who refused to say whether they had received one were “gutless.”.

The White House said Wednesday that it would distribute millions of free coronavirus tests to schools across the United States to try to keep classrooms open — a top goal of President Biden and Democrats who worry that tensions over pandemic-related school closures will hurt them at the polls.

Five million rapid antigen tests will be made available to K-12 schools across the country each month, the administration said, but states will have to apply for them.

The White House also promised to make lab capacity available for five million free polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., tests, facilitated through three federally-funded regional providers each month.

“Today the Biden-Harris Administration is doubling down on our commitment to keeping all schools safely open for full-time in-person learning,” the White House said in a fact sheet distributed to reporters.

recently announced a new “test to stay” strategy in which students exposed to the coronavirus will be able to stay in school if they test negative, as opposed to having to quarantine at home.

Many schools are using rapid antigen tests to screen students on a regular basis.

“These additional tests will help schools safely remain open and implement screening testing and test-to-stay programs,” the White House said.

The White House said it intends to use some of the $130 billion to advance the programs it announced on Wednesday, including helping schools set up their own testing programs.

The French government said on Wednesday that it would stick with its strategy of keeping the country open, despite record-shattering coronavirus case reports, growing public frustration over testing protocols in schools and the threat of strikes by teachers over Covid safety.

France is now averaging nearly 300,000 newly reported coronavirus cases a day, almost six times as many as a month ago and far more than at any earlier point in the pandemic.

“The pandemic is stronger than ever in our country,” Gabriel Attal, a government spokesman, acknowledged to reporters on Wednesday after a cabinet meeting.

While there is evidence that Omicron tends to cause less severe illness than previous coronavirus variants did, France was already being battered by a wave of Covid-19 cases attributable to the Delta variant when Omicron started to surge, compounding the pressure on French hospitals.

“Enough is enough!” the SNES-FSU, one of France’s leading teacher unions, said in statement announcing the strike.

France’s health minister, Olivier Véran, defended the government’s strategy on Wednesday.

The show is the seventh on Broadway to announce a temporary or permanent closing date since early December, when the Omicron variant sent coronavirus cases soaring in New York.

“The production is in advanced conversations with the Shubert Organization to open again in the spring,” they said in a statement.

While the governor is vaccinated and boosted, his office said in a statement, he awoke on Tuesday feeling congested, and soon developed a headache and fever.

test on Tuesday evening, and when that test came back positive, he began receiving a course of monoclonal antibody treatment, the governor’s office said.

Clay Marsh, the dean of health sciences at West Virginia University and the state’s coronavirus czar, said in the statement.

Nearly one in five coronavirus tests reported to the state are coming back positive.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, facing a potentially lethal threat to his leadership, apologized in Parliament on Wednesday for attending a Downing Street garden party in May 2020 while the country was under a strict coronavirus lockdown.

But both China’s heavy-handed approach and new coronavirus outbreaks around the country — including locally transmitted cases of the fast-spreading Omicron variant — are adding to the uncertainty ahead of the Beijing Olympics, a marquee event for China that has already been hit by diplomatic boycotts by the United States and some of its allies.

Djokovic also said he had participated in an interview and photo shoot last month in his native Serbia even after testing positive for the coronavirus, an apparent breach of the country’s rules.

Djokovic said on Instagram on Wednesday that he had taken a P.C.R.

He also took a rapid antigen test, he said, which came back negative.

test did not come back positive until after that event, but the documents provided to Australian officials as he tried to enter the country said that the result had been returned the day before.

In the statement on Wednesday, he apologized for what he said he now realized was a mistake.

On Wednesday, he said his agent had made an “administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect box.”.

The Women’s Tennis Association on Wednesday issued a statement in support of Voracova, saying, “The complications experienced over the past few days where athletes have followed the approved and authorized process of receiving a medical exemption for entry into the country are unfortunate.”.

A high court in London ruled on Wednesday that it was unlawful for the British government to give preferential treatment to two companies vying for lucrative contracts to provide personal protective equipment during the pandemic.

“Never again should any government treat a public health crisis as an opportunity to enrich its associates and donors at public expense,” the Good Law Project said in a statement after the ruling.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said that the organization was “pleased the court has ruled that our industry call to arms was open and transparent.”.

“The ruling says it is highly likely these offers would have been awarded if they were processed through other channels also used to process offers,” the statement said.

Gallup said last month that cases of anxiety and depression had grown significantly as a result of the pandemic, and that the United States had seen “spikes in deaths from suicide and ‘deaths of despair.’” And a recent survey conducted by The New York Times found that American therapists were finding themselves on “the front lines of a mental health crisis.”.

The latest coronavirus wave has left millions of Americans scrambling for tests, braving long lines in the cold at pop-up sites or searching furiously online for kits to use at home.

And tests have become the latest example of how a tool to battle the pandemic can exacerbate social and economic divides.

Jesus Caicedo-Diaz, who owns Skal, a restaurant in Brooklyn, said his employees were struggling to get virus test results before the business opened at 10 a.m.

Rapid antigen testing kits have flooded into supermarkets, online shops and pharmacies around the world as countries race to keep up with the Omicron variant’s swift pace of transmission, marking a shift to the self-administered tests from P.C.R.

But there is no definitive international guideline for the use of antigen tests for Covid-19, and a global patchwork of policies has emerged as each country weighs the advantages and risks of the alternative testing method.

Britain has used at-home rapid antigen tests to fight outbreaks since 2020, even before Omicron, and makes them freely available.

The Biden administration recently said that it planned to make 500 million tests available free and that Americans could request that tests be sent to their homes.

Singapore has allowed people to leave isolation if they get a negative antigen test result after 72 hours.

Israel is asking people to swab their throats when using rapid antigen tests, not just their nostrils, to increase the chances of detecting the virus even if it goes against the manufacturer’s instructions.

“There are hugely variable approaches into where, when and how antigen tests are used across different countries,” said Deborah Williamson, a professor of public health at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

The lack of consistency in how antigen tests are deployed raises a question of how the world should monitor the severity of the pandemic, she said, when some countries are identifying every single case and others are prioritizing severe ones.

In addition, while promising quicker results, antigen tests are significantly less reliable in detecting infection than the P.C.R.

tests, studies have shown.

The self-swab in an at-home antigen testing kit, which is meant to reach the inside of the nostril, is less than 30 percent capable of detecting a positive coronavirus case compared with the nasopharyngeal swab used in a P.C.R.

test, which reaches the wall at the end of the nasal cavity, said Dr.

Accordingly, health experts at the Infectious Diseases Society of America said that P.C.R.

But they added that antigen tests could help identify cases when P.C.R.

test only if they had received a positive antigen test result.

The demand for antigen tests has become so overwhelming in Australia that the government last week began prohibiting price gouging on the tests and said it would limit the number that people can buy.

And the state of New South Wales ordered residents to report their positive rapid antigen test results starting on Jan.

“Omicron has been a game changer,” Professor Williamson said, adding that it “has really catalyzed the shift to large-scale rapid antigen testing.”.

A court in Spain has ordered a regional government to compensate doctors who worked on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic without adequate protective gear like masks, gowns or surgical gloves.

The ruling by a regional court in Valencia, in eastern Spain, was the first to be issued in a raft of lawsuits brought by doctors and nurses, who have said that when they confronted the coronavirus in early 2020, they were sometimes not supplied with protective equipment, or had to make their own basic gear.

By the end of March 2020, at least 12,000 Spanish health care workers were infected with Covid-19, and the government had declared a state of emergency.

The regional health ministry in Valencia said it would appeal the ruling.

The policy, ordered on Tuesday by the transportation minister, Arthur Tugade, will apply to the capital, Manila, and surrounding townships that the government has placed under lockdown to stem a rapid increase of Covid-19 cases fueled by the Omicron variant.

Jacqueline Ann de Guia, a spokeswoman for the Commission on Human Rights, said in a statement that the measure restricted the rights of people who cannot afford private cars.

“The reality is that ordinary Filipinos continue to rely on public transportation in attaining basic needs, such as for food, work and accessing health services,” she said, adding that “even those exempted under this policy may be restricted in accessing essential goods and services for having no or limited access to private vehicles.”.

New York officials say the state will no longer require local health departments to trace the contacts of new coronavirus cases, a practice that was once considered vital to slowing the spread of the virus but that has become increasingly difficult to sustain as the highly contagious Omicron variant fuels a deluge of cases.

Kathy Hochul said at a news conference on Tuesday that a sharp increase in cases across the state in the past few weeks had made it “almost impossible to do contact tracing the way we have been in the past.” And Dr.

Mary Bassett, the state’s acting health commissioner, said the variant’s contagiousness and its short incubation period left “a very short window for intervention to disrupt transmission.”.

“The big change for New Yorkers is that if you test positive, you should no longer expect a call from your health department,” Dr.

During the process, people who have tested positive receive a call from their local health department to determine who they may have exposed so those people can also seek a test.

Last week, Arkansas said that its health department would no longer trace contacts for adults, and would instead focus on children.

In South Africa, one of the first countries to identify Omicron, the government dropped contact tracing after cases skyrocketed, and said it would focus on vaccinations instead.

Gigi Gronvall, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that for health departments struggling to balance resources, vaccinations must be the priority.

Gronvall said, adding that to improve contact tracing, “you have to narrow the scope,” for example by focusing on groups that are most at risk

Chan School of Public Health, said that New York’s announcement on Tuesday was a reaction to “the sheer number of cases.”

“At some point, because the numbers of contacts are also growing exponentially along with the cases, it becomes a waste of resources,” he said of contact tracing

Hochul said local health departments were free to continue contact tracing on their own, and in New York City, Dr

Long said in a statement on Tuesday night

Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, noted in a statement on Tuesday that the city’s program helps New Yorkers who test positive to connect with isolation hotels and get access to meals and care packages

Gronvall said that in some cases, people who test positive may need to notify friends and co-workers themselves

The World Health Organization admonished countries not to relax their guard against the coronavirus pandemic, just because the Omicron variant tends not to cause hospitalizations and deaths as often as earlier variants did

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said Wednesday at a news conference in Geneva

The French government said on Wednesday that it would keep the country open despite record-shattering virus cases, growing public frustration over testing protocols in schools and the threat of strikes by teachers over Covid safety

And in the United States, a group of health experts who advised President Biden’s transition team published a series of articles last week calling on the White House to reset its response to Covid in a way that would acknowledge the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely

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