The latest on the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant

England will remove all 11 countries from its red travel list amid the spread of the Omicron variant within the United Kingdom, UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid told the British Parliament on Tuesday. 

Javid said the government “isn't prepared to keep measures in place a moment longer than we need to.” 

This means that Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe will be removed from the red list starting at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday morning. 

People arriving into England from these countries will no longer need to complete a mandatory hotel quarantine period.

Javid told members of Parliament that he has asked for a review into whether people currently undergoing hotel quarantine stays may be released.  

The coronavirus variant Omicron has been growing rapidly over the last three weeks and has left the chief medical adviser of the UK's Health Security Agency concerned about the large volume of people infected daily.

Currently, 10 people are hospitalized in the UK, who tested positive before or on the day of admission for Omicron, said Hopkins. She explained that there aren't enough people in the hospital to give an understanding of the variant's severity. 

Discussing reinfections, Hopkins pointed out that there is a higher rate of reinfections with Omicron, “with a rate of three to eight times the reinfection risk for Omicron, compared to what we had seen with Delta.” 

Hopkins expects Omicron to displace the Delta variant. "But they are going to live together in parts of the country for longer. And we are going to continue to see hospitalizations from Delta for the next two weeks baked in from the numbers that we have and then we will start seeing the Omicron case numbers come into hospital," she said.

Early data about the Omicron coronavirus variant presents "a very strong argument for people getting their boosters," according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"Omicron is going to be a challenge because it spreads very rapidly, and the vaccines that we use — the regular two-dose mRNA — don't do very well against infection itself. But particularly if you get the boost, it is pretty good," Fauci told CNN.

In South Africa, where the variant was first identified, while there is "almost a vertical spike of infection," the country is not seeing severe hospitalizations, Fauci said.

"The real question is, is that an inherent diminution of virulence of the virus or is it because there are so many people in the population who have already been infected and now have residual post-infection immunity — which is not protecting them from getting infected, but is protecting them from getting severe disease?" Fauci said.

Fauci also said that even though it's been one year since vaccines became available in the US, 60 million eligible people still need to get their shots.

"We have got to be doing better than that if we want to get this thing over with," he said.  

Pfizer Chair and CEO Albert Bourla said that the company’s antiviral pill is a Covid-19 treatment, not prevention, and people still need to get vaccinated.

“This is a treatment, this is not something that we use for prevention at this stage,” Bourla said, when asked on CBS Mornings on Tuesday about how the pill could be a gamechanger for dealing with Covid-19.

“People that are getting sick, unfortunately some of them ending up in hospitals or ending up dying. With this pill, we have now proof that instead of 10 of them going to hospital, only one will go and, frankly, no one died in this study," he said.

Mortality should be prevented at very high levels, he said. 

Asked if the news about the treatment would encourage those who haven’t been vaccinated to think that they don’t need to be, Bourla said, “there is a risk to happen, what you said, and that will be a very big mistake. Vaccines are needed, people need to prevent getting sick. They should not take chances that they may not get seriously sick because there’s a pill that could treat them. People should prevent.” 

People need to get vaccinated to protect themselves and those that they love, he said. 

“But, unfortunately, there will be cases of Covid disease,” he said. “And now, this is the big news, when we have Covid surges, usually what is happening is that our hospitals are overwhelmed, people are in ICUs, hospitals need to change the normal procedure, sometimes they postpone elective surgeries. It’s a very big problem for the health care system. Right now, with this pill, instead of 10 going there, only one, nine will stay at home and hopefully nobody will die. This is a very big deal.” 

The World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa says it is necessary to “dispel” the notion that vaccines are being wasted in Africa, explaining less than 0.25% of doses made available to the continent have expired. 

“It’s necessary to dispel the impression that, even as we are expressing concerns over access to vaccine supplies, that there are millions of doses being wasted and expiring in Africa,” WHO’s regional director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, told journalists during a virtual news conference on Tuesday. 

“That is not the case,” she added.

Moeti went on to break down the number of vaccines received, administered and the ones which have expired in Africa.

“We have had about 434 million doses received in Africa, about 264 million doses administered in Africa, about 61% of those that have been received and 910,000 vaccines have expired in 20 countries,” she said. “That represents less 0.25% of the doses that have been received in Africa.”

Moeti explained that the main challenge in Africa continues to be “access to vaccine supplies,” but conceded that the planning operation for vaccine delivery in the continent, which has been largely dependent on donations of a wide variety of vaccines, had also been a factor. 

“Planning for the operation of vaccine delivery has been extremely challenging for African countries,” she said. “There is a great deal of concern now about ensuring that the vaccines that are being delivered in African countries have an adequate shelf life to enable the delivery operation to be undertaken in such a way that we minimize the expiry of vaccines and what might be considered the waste of vaccines.”

The science around whether the definition of "fully vaccinated" should change from two shots to three shots is still evolving, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on NBC’s Today on Tuesday.

She urged people to get the vaccine if they hadn't yet, and if eligible for a booster shot, to "get that boost because you’ll have more protection."

Asked again if fully vaccinated should be two or three doses, Walensky said that the science is evolving right now: “As that science evolves, we will continue to follow it for that question,” she said.

Pfizer's updated results for its experimental treatment for Covid-19 showed it cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms, the company announced in a news release Tuesday.

Pfizer hopes it can eventually offer the pills, under the name Paxlovid, for people to take at home before they get sick enough to go to the hospital. Paxlovid combines a new antiviral drug named nirmatrelvir and an older one called ritonavir.

After a month of follow-up, the study found five hospitalizations and no deaths among 697 people who received the drug within the first three days of symptoms. Among 682 who received placebo, 44 were hospitalized, including 9 who died. All of the adults in this study were unvaccinated.

If given within the first five days of symptoms, the efficacy was similar: 88%. These results hold up against a similar announcement from the company last month, when not all the data had come in yet.

The research also showed "an approximate 10-fold decrease in viral load at Day 5, relative to placebo," the statement said.

The company says it expects the drug to retain activity against variants like Omicron -- and it appears to do so in lab tests -- because the drug blocks an enzyme involved in viral replication. This is different from the spike protein on the virus' surface, whose numerous mutations have escalated the global concern around the variant.

Pfizer added that full study data are expected to be released later this month and submitted to a peer-reviewed publication.

France does not “expect” to introduce new restrictions despite a recent rise in cases attributed to the Omicron variant, said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.

“We have reinforced the restrictions at the border,” Attal told French radio Franceinfo on Tuesday. “In France, rules are not expected to change.”

Attal said there are currently 133 diagnosed Omicron cases but he admits that more may have gone undetected.

“We are certain that there are probably more cases than those which are sequenced, the 133 that I mentioned,” Attal said, adding that French health authorities were screening and then sequencing "a lot" of those positive Covid-19 cases detected in the country, but that the process takes time.

More than 10,000 cases have been sequenced per week, according Attal, who went on to say there is “strong concern” over the new variant.

The Omicron variant has been identified in at least 32 states on Monday.

Here's the full list: