January 3 coronavirus pandemic and Omicron variant news

Los Angeles Unified students will now be required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test prior to returning to school after the winter break and will have an extra day to comply.

School was originally slated to resume on Jan. 10, but the district has deemed that a “Pupil Free Day” and students will return to the classroom on Jan. 11.

LAUSD becomes the largest district in the nation to require a negative Covid-19 test and is offering rapid self-tests for students to pick up at various locations across the county on Friday and Saturday.

Weekly testing —which has been in place since students returned to school in the fall — will continue, and masks are required both indoors and out. They will be provided if necessary.

Vaccinations and boosters are being strongly recommended, but will not be required until the Fall semester.

As the Omicron variant continues to spread in cities across the United States, Dr. Ala Stanford, founder and CEO of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, said Monday that she welcomes the federal government’s help after seeing a rise in cases at her health care facility in Philadelphia.

Last month, the White House's Covid-19 response team released a plan to support testing and treatment across the country.

Stanford, who is also a 2021 CNN Hero, saw how the pandemic devastated minority neighborhoods in her hometown of Philadelphia and brought testing and vaccines into hard hit communities.

“I'm glad FEMA is coming this week, looking forward to working with them," Standford said. "We need more personnel, we need more rapid tests. There's a place for it. When someone comes in and they look like they have Covid, to get that positive result, it lets everyone know they've been in contact, allows you to separate in your household, so it doesn't continue to spread, and do your best. Yes, I'm glad we are providing access, but do I need support? Absolutely, to be sustainable and for who we are serving, it's not just African-Americans, but all of Philadelphia.”

Children are being swept up in “a virus firestorm” with the arrival of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, “the king of transmissible Covid viruses,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Monday.

Part of the problem lies in vaccine misinformation, Hotez said. “I think in the southern part of the United States, where the adolescent vaccination rates are about half, what you’re seeing is there’s a lot of negative press around these vaccines, in terms of coming from even members of Congress and some of the red states here that are working to discredit vaccines. And so that’s working against us,” he said.

“And the same parents who have adolescents that they’re not vaccinating, well, guess what? Those adolescents have younger brothers and sisters, and the parents aren’t vaccinating them, either. So we’ve got this kind of spiraling situation. So we need to step up our vaccine advocacy for little kids.”

Hotez noted that there’s more to the pandemic than cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

“There’s too much of a narrative out there that says kids do really fine with this, don’t worry about it. We haven’t even spoken, Jake, about the long Covid symptoms that we’re seeing in kids. Great Ormond Street Hospital in the UK has done a pretty impressive study to show roughly 1 in 7 kids in London are going out to develop long Covid symptoms. We don’t know what that means for their neurodevelopment because in some adults, we’re seeing gray matter brain degeneration, cognitive declines,” Hotez said.

“We don’t know if that’s going to be a situation in kids," he added. "So this can haunt us for a long time, and the US needs to not only advocate better but bring up this situation and really start proactively doing some neurodevelopmental testing in these kids before and after their Covid.” 

Washington, DC reported more than 9,000 new Covid-19 infections and seven deaths over the past four days.

DC Health announced Monday that 9,201 positive Covid-19 cases were detected in the four-day period from Thursday to Sunday.

The new batch of cases brings the total number of infections in DC to 103,487 since the start of the pandemic. 

DC Health also reported seven new deaths over the same period, increasing the total number of Covid related deaths to 1,218.

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus accounted for 90% of cases at one Houston hospital system by mid-December, but patients are not as severely ill as those infected by previous variants, a team of doctors reported Monday. 

And while nearly half of all patients the doctors saw had been vaccinated, only 10% had gotten booster shots – which supports the value of boosters in fighting Omicron.

Dr. James Musser of the Houston Methodist Research Institute and colleagues reported on the cases of 862 Covid-19 patients treated at the hospital system between November 27 and December 18. The system sequences the genomes of most cases, so they have a good picture of which variants are involved.

“Compared to patients infected with either Alpha or Delta variants and cared for in our system, significantly fewer Omicron patients were hospitalized, and those who were hospitalized required significantly less intense respiratory support and had a shorter length of stay. We cautiously interpret our findings to be consistent with decreased disease severity among Houston Methodist Omicron patients,” they added.

Remember: It’s not clear that Omicron is less virulent, and the study was not designed to show that, they cautioned. “Many factors undoubtedly have contributed, including but not limited to increased vaccination uptake, population immunity, and patient demographics such as younger age. The extent to which our findings translate to other cities and other patient populations, including children, is unknown.”

But they could show how quickly Omicron took over. “The estimated case doubling time during this three-week period was approximately 2.2 days, which means that Omicron increased in frequency approximately three times faster than Delta had increased in our area, an unprecedented trajectory for SARS-COV-2 infections,” they wrote.

And they could show that Omicron evades the protection offered by vaccines, at least to some degree. “We found 430 of the 862 total Omicron patients (49.9%) for whom we have whole genome sequence data met the CDC definition of vaccine breakthrough cases,” they wrote. Just 9.9% of the patients had gotten a booster dose, they found.

The researchers could not find an easy way to measure whether the time since a person was vaccinated had an effect on their risk of a breakthrough infection. They also noted that their study represents just 5% of cases in the Houston metro region.

Public schools in Detroit are closed Monday through Wednesday as the city faces an all-time high Covid-19 infection rate, according to a letter sent to parents Friday from superintendent Nikolai Vitti.

No virtual classes will be offered as an alternative, Vitti said. Instead, employees will be required to take Covid-19 tests during the days off on Monday and Tuesday. Students are not required to test, but are encouraged, Vitti said, and 10 sites at schools across the city will offer free tests. 

Nearly 20 percent of school employees who took voluntary Covid-19 tests last week tested positive, Vitti said. The city's infection rate is even higher — at 36 percent. 

More than 100,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the US for the first time in nearly four months, according to the latest data from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Covid-19 hospitalizations reached a record high of more than 142,000 about a year ago, on Jan. 14, and they last topped 100,000 on Sept. 11. There have only been 67 days throughout the entire pandemic when more than 100,000 people have been hospitalized with coronavirus.

Currently, about three-quarters of hospital beds across the country are full, and one in seven are for Covid-19 patients.

There are more than 18,500 Covid-19 patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Nearly 78% of intensive care unit beds are currently occupied, and about a quarter of them are for Covid-19 patients.

Hospitalization rates are currently highest in New Jersey, Ohio and Delaware, where there are more than 50 Covid-19 hospitalizations for every 100,000 people. They’re lowest in Alaska and Wyoming, with less than 10 Covid-19 hospitalizations per 100,000 people.

Child hospitalizations are the highest they’ve ever been, with more than 500 children admitted each day over the week ending Dec. 31, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the latest data from the CDC, cumulative hospitalization rates through November are about eight times higher for unvaccinated adults and about 10 times higher for unvaccinated children ages 12 to 17. 

Here's a look at how US hospitalizations have changed over time, according to HHS data:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is scheduled to meet Wednesday.

The meeting follows Monday’s announcement by the US Food and Drug Administration that the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was expanded to include boosters for adolescents ages 12 to 15, reducing the time between completing an initial series and recommended booster from six months to five months, and allowing for a third dose of the primary series for some immunocompromised children ages 5 to 11.

The CDC’s vaccine advisers are scheduled to meet from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. ET Wednesday. 

The Chicago Teachers Union is planning to convene an emergency meeting to vote on whether its teachers would move strictly to virtual teaching amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, according to a union official, setting up a potential lockout with the school district.  

Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the country, resumed in-person learning Monday and has maintained its conditions are safe for in-person instruction. 

The union meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, would include a poll of the group's delegates, (elected union leaders for individual schools,) on if they support a return to remote learning until the pandemic is under better control.

The union will also be sending the same question electronically to its roughly 25,000 rank-and-file members Tuesday, according to the official. If rank-and-file members vote to return to remote learning, those teachers would notify their respective principals either Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning that they would be ready to teach, but remotely.

At that point, it would be in the hands of Chicago Public Schools to potentially lock teachers out of their remote classrooms, as the district has threatened to do under similar circumstances in the past.

At a union virtual town hall meeting Sunday, about 80% of the 8,000 members who attended indicated they did not want to return to work in-person under the current conditions, according to the union official.

It could trigger a “mass electronic lockout,” the official said.

Part of the union hesitation to return has come from a recent surge in Covid-19 cases among both students and in the community, along with uncertainty over the current picture of infection.

According to data released by Chicago Public Schools, 35,590 tests were completed by students and staff between Dec. 26 and Jan. 1, and 24,843 were declared invalid. Of those tests that were accepted, 18% tested positive for Covid-19.

In a statement to CNN, Chicago Public Schools wrote, “Over the holiday weekend, we learned from our vendors, ThermoFisher and Color, that more than half of the 40,000 submitted tests could not be validated. While we continue to seek answers, we are focused on increasing on-site testing opportunities for the impacted students and schools this week as part of our ongoing weekly testing.” 

Additionally, as the school district headed into winter break, it reported its highest weekly Covid-19 case count since the school year began. Citywide over the past two weeks, Chicago has reported its highest daily case counts of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

“Remote two-way live online instruction” is available for any students directed to quarantine.