The COVID-19 virus continues to spread worldwide, with the U.S. reporting a daily average of 782,000 new cases per day as the Omicron variant continues its winter surge.
More than 150,000 infected individuals are currently hospitalized, a pandemic high as it strains resources.
Dr. Hans Kluge, regional director of WHO Europe, describes the Omicron variant as more infectious than previous variants, leading to “previously unseen transmission rates.”
ZOE Global Limited, the startup company which created the COVID Symptom Tracker app, has found no clear difference in symptom profiles between the Omicron variant and the preceding Delta variant. The most prominent symptoms include a runny nose, headaches, fatigue, sneezing, and a sore throat. Roughly half of Omicron cases recorded by ZOE experienced the fever, cough, and loss of smell and taste associated with COVID-19.
“The unvaccinated are really quite vulnerable to getting infected and getting into serious trouble,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Eyewitness News. Fauci went on to say that boosting with current vaccines will offer the best protection, and that while infection is still possible, the severity of the illness will be lessened.
On Jan. 15, the U.S. federal government introduced a reimbursement program for at-home COVID-19 tests. Insured Americans will be covered for up to eight at-home tests a month. Blue Cross Blue Shield president Kim Keck told ABC that the program may be slow-going in responses at first, but she assures the public that their reimbursement is a priority.
“Keep that receipt and you’ll be reimbursed for that purchase,” Keck said. “I just think it’s going to be potentially a little bit bumpy here in the next, maybe even several weeks.”
On Jan. 13, the Supreme Court blocked a vaccine and testing mandate from President Joe Biden aimed at large businesses, which the president hoped would encourage more individuals to get vaccinated. However, the Supreme Court did allow a smaller scale vaccine mandate, aimed at health care workers, to go into effect.
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the ruling stated. “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category.”
“I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has chosen to block common-sense life-saving requirements for employees at large businesses that were grounded squarely in both science and the law,” Biden said in a public response to the ruling. “It is now up to States and individual employers to determine whether to make their workplaces as safe as possible for employees, and whether their businesses will be safe for consumers during this pandemic by requiring employees to take the simple and effective step of getting vaccinated.”
On Jan. 7, Biden announced the purchase of 500 million at-home testing kits to be distributed to Americans, free of charge. The kits will be delivered in batches, with the first batch being shipped “in the coming weeks,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients told PBS.
In spite of Omicron’s surge, several medical experts see an end to the pandemic on the horizon, with the virus devolving from a global pandemic into a perennial disease like the flu. “In the next few weeks, we expect that the numbers are going to start to drop off pretty soon in California, and there’s evidence that that’s happening elsewhere also,” Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology at Stanford Medicine, told ABC.
“The end game is really bringing down the virus to low levels where we just live with it,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, Professor of Medicine at University of California, told ABC in the same interview. “And what omicron will do is bring the virus down to low levels in the community because it’s causing so much immunity. So after this surge, we should be in the end game of the pandemic and into endemic.”
