Coronavirus outbreak

[Playoff Beered]

‘Tragic Battle’: On the Front Lines of China’s Covid Crisis

Medical staff are outnumbered and working sick as the nation’s health care system buckles under the strain of a spiraling crisis.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/world/asia/china-covid-hospital-crisis.html

 

 

Quote

 

Slumped in wheelchairs and lying on gurneys, the sickened patients crowd every nook and cranny of the emergency department at the hospital in northern China. They cram into the narrow spaces between elevator doors. They surround an idle walk-through metal detector. And they line the walls of a corridor ringing with the sounds of coughing.

China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But now with Covid spreading freely for the first time in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits.

The scenes of desperation and misery at the Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, captured on one of several videos examined by The New York Times, reflects the growing crisis. Even as Covid cases rise, health workers on the front lines are also battling rampant infections within their own ranks. So many have tested positive for the virus in some hospitals that the remaining few say they are forced to do the job of five or more co-workers.

To ensure enough staff members are on the floor, some facilities have given up requiring doctors and nurses to test themselves before work. One doctor in the central city of Wuhan said her hospital’s staff had been so depleted that a neurosurgeon in her department recently had to perform two operations in one day while fighting symptoms of Covid.

“The hospital was operating on the brink,” said the physician, Dr. Judy Pu, whose ward usually has 10 to 15 nurses and was down to just a pair. “About 80 to 90 percent of the people around me have been infected.”

China was the first country to experience the panic of Covid when it emerged from Wuhan in 2019. Then, for the past three years, the country largely suppressed the virus with a costly mix of mass testing, strict lockdowns and border closures. The government could have used the time to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units. It could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster. China did little of that, however, plunging into crisis mode again like in the early days of Wuhan.

The actual scale of China’s health emergency has been difficult to gauge — in no small part because the government did away with mass testing after abruptly lifting the country’s stringent “zero Covid” measures. The country’s inadequate vaccination levels as well as the lack of herd immunity have raised fears that death tolls could reach those seen earlier in the pandemic in places like the United States, Western Europe, and, more recently, Hong Kong.

Data released by local authorities in recent days seem to confirm that the virus is running rampant, with reports from several cities and provinces of hundreds of thousands of infections recorded daily. Questions also abound about the number of Covid-related deaths China is reporting because officials only count those who die from respiratory failure directly linked to a Covid infection. Officially, seven people have died from the virus since pandemic rules were relaxed on Dec. 7, a number that belies mounting anecdotal evidence from across the country — from the crush of hearses outside a crematory in Beijing to the overflow of yellow body bags at some funeral homes.

A Shanghai hospital predicted half of Shanghai’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected and warned its staff of a “tragic battle” in the coming weeks, according to a now-deleted statement the hospital posted last week on the social media platform WeChat.

“In this tragic battle, all of Shanghai will fall, and all the staff of the hospital will be infected! Our whole families will be infected! Our patients will all be infected!” the statement read. “We have no choice, and we cannot escape.”

Manpower is stretched so thin in some hospitals that retired doctors are being asked to return to work. Physicians and nurses are reportedly being pulled from the eastern provinces of Shandong and Jiangsu to fortify medical facilities in Beijing.

Medical students who work as resident doctors and interns at hospitals have protested the deteriorating working conditions. They demanded that students be allowed to return home for winter break if they wanted to, and asked for equal pay and better protection from the virus for those who chose to work. Such students are among the lowest-paid medical workers, despite being expected to work longer hours.

Their demonstrations coincided with the death on Dec. 14 of a 23-year-old medical student who had been working at the West China Hospital of Sichuan University in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The hospital said the student suffered a heart attack, but his classmates have disputed the claim, saying he collapsed because he was overworked while infected with Covid.

The staffing crisis is expected to worsen as the winter wears on and millions of migrant workers travel home ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in January. Health workers are already experiencing chaos behind the scenes marked by shifting policies, physical and mental exhaustion and widespread frustration over the government’s failure to give them time to prepare for the surge of patients.

“We got no notice at all beforehand. I found out about the easing of restrictions from the news,” Dr. Pu said.

Medical staff say they could have avoided the medicine shortages that have forced some facilities to ration drugs. There also could have been more time to set up a more effective triage system to avoid overcrowding. One of the fundamental problems with China’s health system is its overreliance on hospitals for even the most basic care. Large, urban facilities like the Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, by number, account for only 0.3 percent of all health care providers in China, but they handled nearly a quarter of all outpatient visits in the country last year, data from the National Health Commission show.

“In the U.S. people have their own primary physicians, but there are few ways in China to get care from the medical system except to go to an E.R. at a big hospital,” said Dr. Qiao Renli, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at the University of Southern California, who has taught and practiced medicine in both China and the United States.

To ease the burden on hospital workers, the government has been working to increase the number of “fever clinics” across the country. Such facilities are separate wings within hospitals or stand-alone clinics that are designated for treating patients with fevers, regardless of whether they have Covid. In the southern city of Shenzhen, officials set up fever clinics in booths that had previously been used to conduct Covid tests. In Beijing, the government said it converted empty stadiums and quarantine centers into similar facilities, raising the number of fever clinics to more than 1,000 in recent weeks.

The push to build more fever clinics highlights how quickly the government has tried to adapt to the fast-moving virus — though sometimes too quickly, some health workers say.

Adela Xu, a nurse at a cancer center in Shanghai, said before restrictions were eased, staff and visitors needed to present negative Covid tests to enter her hospital. Then starting about a week ago, the hospital, under government orders, began constructing a fever clinic to help screen out patients who might have Covid. But by the time it opened, the facility was already rendered obsolete because the city stopped requiring Covid testing to enter the emergency room. At the same time, more and more people were becoming infected.

“Last week, about 20 out of 700 of the E.R. patients tested were positive,” Ms. Xu said. “Now about 100 out of 700 are positive.”

The deluge of Covid patients is not the only challenge hospitals are facing. One of the ripple effects of the outbreak has been a widespread shortage of blood for transfusions because of the shrinking pool of eligible donors.

In the southwestern city of Kunming, a blood bank said in a statement that the city was getting a fraction of the 500 donors per day it needs to keep up with demand, and that the shortage had started to affect pregnant women and patients in intensive care units.

In response to the shortages, the National Health Commission revised its 2021 rules on blood donations this month, allowing people who have recovered from Covid to donate blood after seven days instead of six months. The new guideline also lifted restrictions that had been placed on potential donors who are close contacts of Covid patients.

Some hospitals in Hebei Province near Beijing are reportedly experiencing a dire shortage of ventilators, oxygen tanks and intensive care beds. In a video shot by The Associated Press, a medical worker at a hospital in Zhuozhou, a city in northern Hebei, could be heard urging a group of people to transfer a patient to a different hospital that was better equipped, saying that the facility was out of oxygen supplies.

“If you can’t even give him oxygen, how can you rescue him?” the worker said. “If you don’t want any delays, turn around and transfer him quickly!”

 

 

[Playoff Beered]

As Covid-19 Continues to Spread, So Does Misinformation About It

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/technology/covid-misinformation-online.html

 

 

Quote

 

Nearly three years into the pandemic, Covid-19 remains stubbornly persistent. So, too, does misinformation about the virus.

As Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths rise in parts of the country, myths and misleading narratives continue to evolve and spread, exasperating overburdened doctors and evading content moderators.

What began in 2020 as rumors that cast doubt on the existence or seriousness of Covid quickly evolved into often outlandish claims about dangerous technology lurking in masks and the supposed miracle cures from unproven drugs, like ivermectin. Last year’s vaccine rollout fueled another wave of unfounded alarm. Now, in addition to all the claims still being bandied about, there are conspiracy theories about the long-term effects of the treatments, researchers say.

The ideas still thrive on social media platforms, and the constant barrage, now a yearslong accumulation, has made it increasingly difficult for accurate advice to break through, misinformation researchers say. That leaves people already suffering from pandemic fatigue to become further inured to Covid’s continuing dangers and susceptible to other harmful medical content.

“It’s easy to forget that health misinformation, including about Covid, can still contribute to people not getting vaccinated or creating stigmas,” said Megan Marrelli, the editorial director of Meedan, a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and information access. “We know for a fact that health misinformation contributes to the spread of real-world disease.”

Twitter is of particular concern for researchers. The company recently gutted the teams responsible for keeping dangerous or inaccurate material in check on the platform, stopped enforcing its Covid misinformation policy and began basing some content moderation decisions on public polls posted by its new owner and chief executive, the billionaire Elon Musk.

From Nov. 1 to Dec. 5, Australian researchers collected more than half a million conspiratorial and misleading English-language tweets about Covid, using terms such as “deep state,” “hoax” and “bioweapon.” The tweets drew more than 1.6 million likes and 580,000 retweets.

The researchers said the volume of toxic material surged late last month with the release of a film that included baseless claims that Covid vaccines set off “the greatest orchestrated die-off in the history of the world.”

Naomi Smith, a sociologist at Federation University Australia who helped conduct the research with Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at Queensland University of Technology, said Twitter’s misinformation policies helped tamp down anti-vaccination content that had been common on the platform in 2015 and 2016. From January 2020 to September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts over violations of its Covid misinformation policy.

Now, Dr. Smith said, the protective barriers are “falling over in real time, which is both interesting as an academic and absolutely terrifying.”

“Pre-Covid, people who believed in medical misinformation were generally just talking to each other, contained within their own little bubble, and you had to go and do a bit of work to find that bubble,” she said. “But now, you don’t have to do any work to find that information — it is presented in your feed with any other types of information.”

Several prominent Twitter accounts that had been suspended for spreading unfounded claims about Covid have were reinstated in recent weeks, including those of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, and Robert Malone, a vaccine skeptic.

Mr. Musk himself has used Twitter to weigh in on the pandemic, predicting in March 2020 that the United States was likely to have “close to zero new cases” by the end of that April. (More than 100,000 positive tests were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the last week of the month.) This month, he took aim at Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who will soon step down as President Biden’s top medical adviser and the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Mr. Musk said Dr. Fauci should be prosecuted.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. Other major social platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, said last week that they remained committed to combating Covid misinformation.

YouTube prohibits content — including videos, comments and links — about vaccines and Covid-19 that contradicts recommendations from the local health authorities or the World Health Organization. Facebook’s policy on Covid-19 content is more than 4,500 words long. TikTok said it had removed more than 250,000 videos for Covid misinformation and worked with partners such as its content advisory council to develop its policies and enforcement strategies. (Mr. Musk disbanded Twitter’s advisory council this month.)

But the platforms have struggled to enforce their Covid rules.

Newsguard, an organization that tracks online misinformation, found this fall that typing “covid vaccine” into TikTok caused it to suggest searches for “covid vaccine injury” and “covid vaccine warning,” while the same query on Google led to recommendations for “walk-in covid vaccine” and “types of covid vaccines.” One search on TikTok for “mRNA vaccine” brought up five videos containing false claims within the first 10 results, according to researchers. TikTok said in a statement that its community guidelines “make clear that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform.”

In years past, people would get medical advice from neighbors, or try to self-diagnose via Google search, said Dr. Anish Agarwal, an emergency physician in Philadelphia. Now, years into the pandemic, he still gets patients who believe “crazy” claims on social media that Covid vaccines will insert robots into their arms.

“We battle that every single day,” said Dr. Agarwal, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and serves as deputy director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health.

Online and offline discussions of the coronavirus are constantly shifting, with patients bringing him questions lately about booster shots and long Covid, Dr. Agarwal said. He has a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the Covid-related social media habits of different populations.

“Moving forward, understanding our behaviors and thoughts around Covid will probably also shine light on how individuals interact with other health information on social media, how we can actually use social media to combat misinformation,” he said.

Years of lies and rumors about Covid have had a contagion effect, damaging public acceptance of all vaccines, said Heidi J. Larson, the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“The Covid rumors are not going to go away — they’re going to get repurposed, and they’re going to adapt,” she said. “We can’t delete this. No one company can fix this.”

Some efforts to slow the spread of misinformation about the virus have bumped up against First Amendment concerns.

A law that California passed several months ago, and that is set to take effect next month, would punish doctors for spreading false information about Covid vaccines. It already faces legal challenges from plaintiffs who describe the regulation as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. Tech companies including Meta, Google and Twitter have faced lawsuits this year from people who were barred over Covid misinformation and claim that the companies overreached in their content moderation efforts, while other suits have accused the platforms of not doing enough to rein in misleading narratives about the pandemic.

Dr. Graham Walker, an emergency physician in San Francisco, said the rumors spreading online about the pandemic drove him and many of his colleagues to social media to try to correct inaccuracies. He has posted several Twitter threads with more than a hundred evidence-packed tweets trying to debunk misinformation about the coronavirus.

But this year, he said he felt increasingly defeated by the onslaught of toxic content about a variety of medical issues. He left Twitter after the company abandoned its Covid misinformation policy.

“I began to think that this was not a winning battle,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like a fair fight.”

Now, Dr. Walker said, he is watching as a “tripledemic” of Covid-19, R.S.V. and influenza bombards the health care system, causing emergency room waits in some hospitals to surge from less than an hour to six hours. Misinformation about easily available treatments is at least partly responsible, he said.

“If we had a larger uptick in vaccinations with the most recent vaccines, we probably would have a smaller number of people getting extremely ill with Covid, and that’s certainly going to make a dent in hospitalization numbers,” he said. “Honestly, at this point, we will take any dent we can get.”

 

 

 

[Playoff Beered]

Lack of info on China’s COVID-19 surge stirs global concern

https://apnews.com/article/health-china-disease-outbreaks-covid-19-pandemic-guangzhou-01318eb4fc58a0515d8e8bd1577e385d?amp=&utm_campaign=position_03&ref=upstract.com

[Alflives]

12 hours ago, Playoff Beered said:

As Covid-19 Continues to Spread, So Does Misinformation About It

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/technology/covid-misinformation-online.html

 

 

 

 

Lots of ignorant Americans, and (sadly) their stupidity has infected too many Canadians.  

Not vaccinated.  No medical care for Covid.  (With exceptions for children of stupid parents, of course) 

[Warhippy]

39 minutes ago, Playoff Beered said:

Lack of info on China’s COVID-19 surge stirs global concern

https://apnews.com/article/health-china-disease-outbreaks-covid-19-pandemic-guangzhou-01318eb4fc58a0515d8e8bd1577e385d?amp=&utm_campaign=position_03&ref=upstract.com

Who knew hiding information about this would be an issue.

 

Canada would do well to cancel all travel to China for the lunar new year.

[RUPERTKBD]

Three anti-vax (former) nurses has had their Defamation lawsuit dismissed:

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/ontario-judge-dismisses-puzzling-1m-libel-action-by-anti-vaxx-nurses/ar-AA15LFCX?cvid=21159954b4154901a5425db6a8ab1c0d

 

The article that prompted the lawsuit was from a small publication in Comox and it's a bit of an eye opener:

 

https://comoxvalley.news/quack-quack-these-pro-virus-nurses-have-dangerous-ideas/

[Playoff Beered]

China COVID deaths accelerate to 9,000 a day - UK research firm Airfinity

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-covid-deaths-accelerate-9000-day-uk-research-firm-airfinity-2022-12-29/

 

 

Quote

 

BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on Thursday, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago, as infections ripped across the world's most populous nation.

COVID infections started to sweep across China in November, picking up pace this month after Beijing dismantled its zero-COVID policies including regular PCR testing on its population and publication of data on asymptomatic cases.

 

Cumulative deaths in China since Dec. 1 likely reached 100,000 with infections totalling 18.6 million, Airfinity said in a statement. It says it uses modelling based on data from Chinese provinces before the recent changes to reporting cases were implemented.

Airfinity expects China's COVID infections to reach their first peak on Jan. 13 with 3.7 million cases a day.

That is in contrast to the several thousands of cases reported by health authorities a day, after a nationwide network of PCR test sites was largely dismantled as authorities pivoted from preventing infections to treating them.

Airfinity expects deaths to peak on Jan. 23 around 25,000 a day, with cumulative deaths reaching 584,000 since December.

Since Dec. 7 when China made its abrupt policy U-turn, authorities have reported 10 COVID deaths.

Health officials recently said they define a COVID death to be an individual who dies from respiratory failure caused by COVID-19, excluding deaths from other diseases and conditions even if the deceased had tested positive for the virus.

 

As of Dec. 28, China's official COVID death toll stood at 5,246 since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Airfinity expects 1.7 million deaths across China by the end of April, according to its statement.

According to its website, in 2020 it built "the world's first dedicated COVID-19 health analytics and intelligence platform".

China's chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou said on Thursday that a team at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention plans to assess fatalities differently.

The team will measure the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the number of deaths expected had the epidemic never happened, Wu told reporters at a briefing.

By calculating the so-called "excess mortality", China would be able to work out what could have been potentially underestimated, Wu said.

 

 

[Warhippy]

5 minutes ago, Playoff Beered said:

China COVID deaths accelerate to 9,000 a day - UK research firm Airfinity

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-covid-deaths-accelerate-9000-day-uk-research-firm-airfinity-2022-12-29/

 

 

 

The likely number is probably 2-3 times more.  people aren't going to hospitals and there's so may videos and stories about the CCP forces redirecting people from hospitals to "wellness camps" where they are not reported or treated and are just left to die before being cremated.

 

I don't believe anything I see on social media but I also do not discount hundreds of videos, stories and literal evidence showing the exact same things 

 

This does not mean I agree with or believe the anti vaxx crowd in Canada who literally only use the exact same single story and video over and over and over.  But when there are hundreds of such showing the same thing over the government narrative then there's something worth looking in to 

[Gurn]

A vid on COVID, and heart problems:

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/medical/new-study-finds-link-between-pots-and-long-covid/vi-AA15LVXi?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=7852af1ee1d043d0adf6fa5455c5c93f&category=foryou

[Maninthebox]

On 12/29/2022 at 11:59 AM, Playoff Beered said:

China COVID deaths accelerate to 9,000 a day - UK research firm Airfinity

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-covid-deaths-accelerate-9000-day-uk-research-firm-airfinity-2022-12-29/

 

 

 

 

Probably more than what they guessed a week before eh..?

 

Almost 2400 pages. Impressive.

[-DLC-]

https://globalnews.ca/news/9380748/canada-china-travel-rules-covid/?utm_source=%40globalbc&utm_medium=Twitter

 

Canada will require COVID-19 testing for flights from China as virus surges

[Warhippy]

2 minutes ago, -DLC- said:

https://globalnews.ca/news/9380748/canada-china-travel-rules-covid/?utm_source=%40globalbc&utm_medium=Twitter

 

Canada will require COVID-19 testing for flights from China as virus surges

With lunar new year and some major travel dates coming up for people of Chinese heritage; it might not be bad to actually just halt flights in and out of china all together.  Know it isn't possible but; really.  The numbers are really kind of scary

[-DLC-]

25 minutes ago, Warhippy said:

With lunar new year and some major travel dates coming up for people of Chinese heritage; it might not be bad to actually just halt flights in and out of china all together.  Know it isn't possible but; really.  The numbers are really kind of scary

As a school admin with students set to return (many of whom have traveled abroad/"home" for the holidays), I'm quite relieved to see these measures being put into place.

[Gurn]

New variant takes over the Us eastern seaboard, and heading this way:

good news- doesn't seem more dangerous.

bad news maybe more contagious.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/new-covid-19-subvariant-spreading-through-u-s-asia/vi-AA15U1Em?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a7f55f70445f41c48d80c129af7df699&category=foryou

 

[bishopshodan]

Mum said Enlgand is getting hit hard again.

Advising mask wearing. 

[Bounce000]

[Gurn]

On 1/2/2023 at 3:28 PM, Gurn said:

New variant takes over the Us eastern seaboard, and heading this way:

good news- doesn't seem more dangerous.

bad news maybe more contagious.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/new-covid-19-subvariant-spreading-through-u-s-asia/vi-AA15U1Em?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a7f55f70445f41c48d80c129af7df699&category=foryou

 

It is here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/omicron-subvariant-b-c-xbb-1-5-1.6702447

"XBB 1.5 now accounts for over 40% of new cases in U.S., having caused 1.3% of new cases only a month ago

B.C. health officials are watching closely as a new, likely more transmissible Omicron subvariant spreads south of the border.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the XBB 1.5 subvariant accounts for more than 40 per cent of new cases in the country, having caused 1.3 per cent of new cases only a month ago. 

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says XBB 1.5 was identified in about five people in B.C. before Christmas, and she expects that number to rise.

"It's not increasing rapidly here, but it is one of the subvariants that we know can take off, particularly in areas where you have lower vaccination rates," she told The Early Edition host Stephen Quinn.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Brian Conway suggested this new variant will soon "dominate" the COVID-19 pandemic at this stage.

"It will likely cause an increase in the number of cases that we're going to be seeing in the community going forward, and this will be on a worldwide basis," he said.

While there is little known about XBB 1.5 at this point, Henry says it can spread quickly. Unlike earlier strains of COVID-19, which attached deep in your lungs, newer variants attach to upper airways, meaning the virus doesn't need to travel as far, she said. 

In the last month, hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have gone up slightly, but Henry says XBB 1.5 hasn't increased hospitalization rates — instead, she said, more people are getting less seriously sick. 

"That's one of the things we look for: is it causing more people to get more severe illness? Is it evading that protection that we have from vaccine or previous infection or some combination of those? And so far there's no evidence of that," Henry said. 

"But we have to keep watching."

Reducing the spread

Conway said the new subvariant is a good reminder for British Columbians to continue to reduce the spread of illness by staying home when sick, wearing masks and ensuring they're up to date on their vaccinations. 

"These are the measures we're going to need to take long term. If we do that for this variant and the next one to come, we will be in as good a position," he said.

As illnesses, including this new subvariant, continue to spread, Henry said people should continue wearing masks when appropriate. 

"If I'm the only one on the bus and the windows are open and I'm feeling perfectly fine, then no, I probably wouldn't," she said. 

"If the bus is crowded or somebody at home is sick or I'm finished at the end of a cold and I'm no longer infectious, I wear a mask."

Protect Our Province B.C., a group of health-care professionals and policy experts who analyze COVID-19 data and advocate for evidence-based policies, believes the province needs to do several things to address the dynamic situation with COVID-19 variants, including bringing back a mask mandate.

Last month, the group penned an open letter calling on the province to increase access to Paxlovid, an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19.

Paxlovid is a course of pills that can be taken at home, but in order to get the drug in B.C. patients have to fit a certain profile.

"In B.C., we are underusing a very effective treatment for COVID-19 which can potentially not only decrease hospitalizations, critical care admissions and deaths, but also prevent long COVID disability and the development of chronic diseases ..." the letter reads. 

"Given that our health-care system can barely cope as it is, limiting further burden becomes imperative."

 

[Alflives]

4 minutes ago, Gurn said:

It is here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/omicron-subvariant-b-c-xbb-1-5-1.6702447

"XBB 1.5 now accounts for over 40% of new cases in U.S., having caused 1.3% of new cases only a month ago

B.C. health officials are watching closely as a new, likely more transmissible Omicron subvariant spreads south of the border.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the XBB 1.5 subvariant accounts for more than 40 per cent of new cases in the country, having caused 1.3 per cent of new cases only a month ago. 

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says XBB 1.5 was identified in about five people in B.C. before Christmas, and she expects that number to rise.

"It's not increasing rapidly here, but it is one of the subvariants that we know can take off, particularly in areas where you have lower vaccination rates," she told The Early Edition host Stephen Quinn.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Brian Conway suggested this new variant will soon "dominate" the COVID-19 pandemic at this stage.

"It will likely cause an increase in the number of cases that we're going to be seeing in the community going forward, and this will be on a worldwide basis," he said.

While there is little known about XBB 1.5 at this point, Henry says it can spread quickly. Unlike earlier strains of COVID-19, which attached deep in your lungs, newer variants attach to upper airways, meaning the virus doesn't need to travel as far, she said. 

In the last month, hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have gone up slightly, but Henry says XBB 1.5 hasn't increased hospitalization rates — instead, she said, more people are getting less seriously sick. 

"That's one of the things we look for: is it causing more people to get more severe illness? Is it evading that protection that we have from vaccine or previous infection or some combination of those? And so far there's no evidence of that," Henry said. 

"But we have to keep watching."

Reducing the spread

Conway said the new subvariant is a good reminder for British Columbians to continue to reduce the spread of illness by staying home when sick, wearing masks and ensuring they're up to date on their vaccinations. 

"These are the measures we're going to need to take long term. If we do that for this variant and the next one to come, we will be in as good a position," he said.

As illnesses, including this new subvariant, continue to spread, Henry said people should continue wearing masks when appropriate. 

"If I'm the only one on the bus and the windows are open and I'm feeling perfectly fine, then no, I probably wouldn't," she said. 

"If the bus is crowded or somebody at home is sick or I'm finished at the end of a cold and I'm no longer infectious, I wear a mask."

Protect Our Province B.C., a group of health-care professionals and policy experts who analyze COVID-19 data and advocate for evidence-based policies, believes the province needs to do several things to address the dynamic situation with COVID-19 variants, including bringing back a mask mandate.

Last month, the group penned an open letter calling on the province to increase access to Paxlovid, an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19.

Paxlovid is a course of pills that can be taken at home, but in order to get the drug in B.C. patients have to fit a certain profile.

"In B.C., we are underusing a very effective treatment for COVID-19 which can potentially not only decrease hospitalizations, critical care admissions and deaths, but also prevent long COVID disability and the development of chronic diseases ..." the letter reads. 

"Given that our health-care system can barely cope as it is, limiting further burden becomes imperative."

 

I notice dr. Bonnie said this sub variant could really do damage in the areas with high numbers of unvaccinated. The unvaccinated will once again clog up our hospitals.  

[D.B Cooper]

2 hours ago, Alflives said:

I notice dr. Bonnie said this sub variant could really do damage in the areas with high numbers of unvaccinated. The unvaccinated will once again clog up our hospitals.  

Dr.Bonny says a lot of things…..

[WeneedLumme]

11 hours ago, D.B Cooper said:

Dr.Bonny says a lot of things…..

As do the willfully ignorant. Speaking of which, where did you get your medical degree?