The BA.5 Covid-19 subvariant is now the most dominant strain in the country; the highly infectious variant has caused an increase in cases and hospitalizations both in hotspots like New York and across the country, but the public health response and messages are less aggressive than in previous outbreaks.
BA.5 usually causes familiar symptoms such as fever, headache, muscle aches, cough, and sore throat, but can still cause serious illness, especially in people with pre-existing conditions. He has even entered the highest places of power, with President Joe Biden’s doctor saying in a letter on Saturday that Biden is likely infected with BA.5. But there has been little domestic focus to keep the subvariant under control, which the Biden administration rolled out on July 12.
Tracking the increase in BA.5 is somewhat complicated due to an increase in rapid home tests to confirm infection, rather than testing in clinical settings, which would travel to health authorities and paint a more full of data. While the number of cases is a far cry from the level of omicron infections last winter, total weekly hospital admissions have increased steadily overall over the past month, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Moreover, it is likely that the full magnitude of the BA.5 outbreak is not captured by the available data. In some places like San Diego that use sewage monitoring, sewage analysis has shown a massive increase in copies of the virus being released into community sewage – 15.5 million copies per liter of sewage Wednesday of last week, compared to 8 million copies per liter from the same location the previous week, according to Paul Sisson of the San Diego Union-Tribune. This trend directly contradicts available data from the San Diego County Health Department, which actually showed positive rates down 8.3% over the same period. For comparison, Sisson reported, there were 47.6 million copies per liter in the same location on January 9, 2022, during the omicron wave.
The advantage of BA.5 and its omicron BA.4 subvariant likely stems from a combination of increased transmissibility and mutations that enhance their ability to evade people’s immunity from previous infection or vaccination, Natalie Dean, an associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics and epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told Reuters. “You don’t even need an increase in transmissibility to explain the benefit,” she said.
Given data showing low rates of severe illness and death in many places and fatigue with Covid-19 restrictions, many health authorities are not tightening previously eased restrictions.
“I’m like everyone else: I hate wearing this mask. But more than that, I hate the thought that I might accidentally pass it on to someone else,” Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County Public Health Director, told The New York Times. “That’s my biggest fear – that we are so eager to end this virus that we become complacent.”
New York City is a hot spot. Does anyone care?
Throughout the pandemic, New York has been a hot spot; crowded living conditions and public transport facilitate the spread of the virus through the air. Although the city’s BA.5 infection rate is nowhere near what it was with previous waves, it continues to rise – and may even be much higher than available data shows.
As the Times report points out, New York City’s test and trace program was scrapped in April under Mayor Eric Adams – who contracted Covid-19 that month. Restaurants no longer require proof of vaccination to enter, and the city’s mask mandate ended in March, though masks are still required on public transit. Despite the city’s rise and his own health department’s recommendation that people mask indoors, Adams has repeatedly resisted bringing back the mask mandate.
“We are always reassessing our response efforts to ensure that we are providing New Yorkers with the best information possible and so that they can make the decisions that are right for them,” Adams press secretary Fabien Levy told Vox. in an email. However, as City & State, a media outlet covering New York and Albany politics, noted earlier this month, the New York City Department of Health has removed an alert system at color coded which included specific advice on how to deal with different levels of Covid. -19 epidemic, including public health measures to be adopted. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the system — which Adams unveiled in March — recommended the mayor require face masks inside and outside crowded places, and to bring back the vaccine requirement to enter restaurants and bars.
On Sunday, the website still says the administration is “reevaluating the city’s COVID alert system” and advising users to “come back here for updates in the coming weeks.” It also recommends New Yorkers “wear a high-quality mask in all indoor public places and around outdoor crowds” because “there are currently high levels of transmission of COVID-19 throughout the city.” .
Instead of bringing back such measures, Adams’ office promoted vaccination, home and community testing sites and antivirals to fight Covid-19.
“New York is the country’s leader in testing and treatment, and in the past six months alone, we’ve distributed more than 35 million home tests to New Yorkers and delivered approximately 90,000 Paxlovid,” Levy said in his email to Vox. “We are reviewing the numbers daily and will continue to follow the advice of health experts to keep New Yorkers safe and healthy.”
But New Yorkers continue to get sick, with reported cases of Covid-19 up 22% in the past two weeks, hospitalizations up 25% and deaths up 29%, according to the New York Times. Again, the numbers are still small in comparison; a daily average of 12 deaths is nothing like the daily averages of spring 2020. Vaccines and antivirals undoubtedly help prevent serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths – but they must be supplemented by others mitigating and supportive measures like masking, as Ed Yong highlighted in his piece for The Atlantic earlier this month.
Things aren’t so clear from the White House either.
Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, and although he is still working and has only mild symptoms, his age – he is 79 – puts him at increased risk of complications from the disease. It’s been boosted twice, as Vox’s Dylan Scott and Li Zhou wrote on Thursday, and is treated with paxlovid. In a short video address posted to Twitter, Biden assured the public that he was feeling good and doing a lot of work.
Although he shared that he had been vaccinated and fully boosted, he offered no advice to those watching – no urging to get vaccinated or boosted, or to wear masks indoors. “In the meantime, keep the faith,” he said. “It will be fine.”
This is not to say that the White House has made no effort lately to combat the prevalence of BA.5; on July 12, the administration rolled out new guidelines to handle the latest sub-variant of Covid-19.
A press release announcing the strategy acknowledged that BA.5’s apparent ability to evade at least some immunity “has the potential to cause an increase in the number of infections in the coming weeks”, particularly when people are not vaccinated or when vaccine immunity wanes.
To address this issue, the White House proposal includes increasing access to antiviral treatments like the one Biden is taking, as well as continuing to encourage the use of vaccines and boosters. Increasing availability and access to free testing is also a key tenet of the strategy, as are better ventilation, increased access to preventive treatment Evusheld for immunocompromised people, and ensuring access to ventilators. and a clear indication of the situations in which the wearing of the mask is advised.
This proposal presents at least a comprehensive – if not aggressive – approach to the new subvariant and “new normal” of living with Covid-19. As experts have warned throughout the pandemic, relying on vaccines as a silver bullet, especially when an omicron-specific vaccine booster is months away, will not stop Covid-19 and n will not prevent the formation of new variants. As Yong points out, we don’t know what these variants will look like, and we have no way of predicting the severity of the resulting disease, or how they will evade our immune responses in the future.
“Everyone is hoping to get a degree of what they call endemicity – living with the virus at a level that doesn’t disrupt society,” Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, told Barron’s in an interview on Thursday. “That’s where I think we’re going. I don’t think we’re going to eradicate that.