4 more states report cases of new variant

Experts hustle to assess peril of omicron

A covid-19 test is administered Friday at a mobile site near Grand Central Terminal in New York. Five cases of the omicron variant had been detected in New York by Thursday, with more cases showing up in nine other states, so far.
(AP/Yuki Iwamura)
A covid-19 test is administered Friday at a mobile site near Grand Central Terminal in New York. Five cases of the omicron variant had been detected in New York by Thursday, with more cases showing up in nine other states, so far. (AP/Yuki Iwamura)


NEW YORK -- The omicron variant of covid-19, which had been undetected in the U.S. before the middle of this week, continued to spread Friday.

Omicron showed itself in Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Utah and Maryland, and it has now appeared in as many as three dozen countries.

President Joe Biden reiterated Friday that the administration's newest pandemic measures should be sufficient to blunt its spread.

Just a day after the first known U.S. case was found in California on Wednesday, tests showed that the omicron variant had infected at least five people in the New York City area, plus a man from Minnesota who had attended a convention in Manhattan in late November.

A Colorado woman who had recently traveled to southern Africa, a Hawaii resident with no recent travel history and another California resident who traveled to South Africa last month also were infected with the variant, officials said.

Much remains unknown about omicron, including whether it is more contagious, as some health authorities suspect, whether it can thwart vaccines and whether it makes people as sick as the original strain.

Health officials in each affected state said there was no cause for undue alarm.

The variant's spread, even among some people who haven't been away from home recently, indicates that it has likely been circulating in parts of the U.S. for some time.




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"We gotta assume there's a lot more behind that and that it has been here for a meaningful amount of time," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference with Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Omicron is classified by the World Health Organization as a "variant of concern" as scientists work to determine how it compares with the predominant delta variant.

Scientists in South Africa first reported it, but the samples came from several countries in southern Africa, and health officials in the Netherlands now say it was found there before the South Africa detection.

As people have become more comfortable traveling by air, it's inevitable that new variants like omicron will spread from country to country and state to state, said professor Danielle Ompad, an epidemiologist at New York University's School of Global Public Health.

"We shouldn't panic, but we should be concerned," she said.

Hochul said: "There is one way to address this -- New Yorkers, get vaccinated, get boosted and get ready."

NEBRASKA RESEARCH

Researchers in Nebraska had been sequencing six samples of the omicron variant, the most discovered anywhere in the United States, but they didn't know what it was until recent days.

In a closet-size room with two chairs and no windows, the scientists had extracted the genetic information from 64 new coronavirus samples, as they do every day, to determine whether any of those patients have the worrisome new variant. Hours later, Dr. Baha Abdalhamid opened an email and saw the results.




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"This batch, I was waiting for it," said Abdalhamid, assistant director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory. "Once I downloaded the results as an Excel sheet, I screened the 64 samples right away, and sure enough, six of them were omicron."

Nebraska officials announced the six cases, the state's first, Friday.

Around the world, scientists are racing to understand how widespread omicron is and how severe a threat it is. That has placed labs such as Abdalhamid's on the front lines of the fight.

Underscoring growing concerns about omicron, scientists in South Africa said Friday that the variant appeared to spread more than twice as fast as the delta variant, until now the most contagious version of the virus.

In the United States, a hunt for the variant began last week when South African researchers announced omicron's array of worrisome mutations. The search has intensified in recent days. Researchers are combing through wastewater samples for any sign of the variant. Contact tracers are ramping up efforts in places where cases have emerged.

And at sequencing labs such as the one in Nebraska, a state where case rates are already high and hospitals are already strained, scientists have sped up the screening of samples from international travelers.

Health officials in rural southeastern Nebraska said that among the cases Abdalhamid found, one person had recently traveled to Nigeria and was believed to have passed the virus on to the five others in the same household. None of the patients has had severe symptoms. Only one had been vaccinated.

Peter Iwen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, wondered, "Are we going to see the same wave? Or where this one falls out and this other one starts to take off?"




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Scientists in the United States diverted from their Thanksgiving weekends last month and began searching for clues about whether the variant was here. They looked back through old virus samples to see if omicron had been spreading quietly. They took a closer look at recent positive tests. They began studying omicron's mutations so they could detect it manually in the genetic code if their sequencing software did not.

Experts say knowing where and how extensively omicron is circulating is the best way to understand and respond to it. Scientists have expressed concern about omicron's mutations and the impact they could have on transmissibility, disease severity and the ability to dodge immunity.

So far, there is limited real-world data to appease those concerns.

That adds urgency to the work in the Omaha lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Each day, researchers extract RNA from 64 nasal swabs sent in from across the state and run that material through two machines that, after about 18 hours, produce a genetic sequence for each infection.

They focus on the highest-risk cases: those involving large outbreaks or children or international travelers. The results, which are uploaded into a global database, show them which variants are present in the state and whether individual cases are linked to one another.

It has been almost two years since the coronavirus emerged in the United States -- including in overseas travelers who quarantined on the same Omaha campus where the six omicron cases were detected this week.

QUESTIONS SWIRL

Omicron's rapid spread results from a combination of contagiousness and an ability to dodge the body's immune defenses, researchers said, but the contribution of each factor is not yet known.

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"We're not sure what that mixture is," said Carl Pearson, a mathematical modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led an analysis. "It's possible that it might even be less transmissible than delta."

Pearson posted recent results on Twitter. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal.

On Thursday, researchers reported that the new variant may partly dodge immunity gained from a previous infection. It's still unclear whether, or to what degree, omicron can evade protection conferred by the vaccines.

"It's scary that there are so many reinfections happening, which means that vaccine-induced immunity may also be impacted in similar way," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

The variant has quickly come to account for about three-quarters of new cases in South Africa.

"It is actually really striking how quickly it seems to have taken over," said Juliet Pulliam, director of an epidemiological modeling center at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who led the earlier research on immunity.

In a mathematical analysis, the researchers estimated how quickly omicron spreads and compared it with the metric for the delta variant. They found that omicron's speed is nearly 2½ times that of delta's.

That figure depends on not just how contagious omicron is, but also its ability to evade the body's immune defenses once it reaches a new host.

In the research published Thursday, Pulliam and her colleagues estimated the new variant's ability to evade immunity by looking at confirmed cases in the country through late November.

They reported an uptick in reinfections among people who had tested positive for the virus at least 90 days earlier, suggesting that the immunity gained from a previous bout is no longer as protective as it had appeared.

The researchers estimated that the risk of reinfection with the omicron variant is roughly 2.4 times the risk seen with the original version of the coronavirus.

Vaccines are thought to produce much higher levels of antibodies in the body compared with the levels produced from infection with the coronavirus. However, antibodies produced after an infection are capable of fending off variants that have a wider range of mutations, said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

If the new variant is reinfecting people who have recovered from covid-19, "I don't think that there will be much of a difference" in how omicron responds to vaccines, Krammer said. "It's not a good sign."

South African researchers did not have information about the severity of the first illness compared with the second. But the immune system should be able to prevent most severe symptoms in people who had previous infections or have been immunized, Iwasaki said.

"I suspect, and I'm hopeful, that these aren't all going to result in severe disease," she said. "Maybe there are lots of infections, but they may be milder."

NEW VACCINE

The head of BioNTech, the German vaccine partner to Pfizer, said Friday that a new vaccine could eventually be needed in the face of the omicron variant.

"I believe, in principle, we will at a certain timepoint need a new vaccine against this new variant. The question is how urgent this needs to be available," CEO Ugur Sahin said at a conference.

He also said the current vaccine could be adapted "relatively quickly," but cautioned that more research is needed.

Sahin also said omicron may still infect those who have been vaccinated, known as breakthrough cases. However, he said, vaccines should continue to provide protection against severe disease.

Sahin has urged people not to panic: "Don't freak out, the plan remains the same: Speed up the administration of a third booster shot," he said.

He said Friday that he could foresee a scenario in which coronavirus shots became annual, like flu shots.

Like Biden and U.S. health officials, Sahin also championed booster shots as a key defense.

"We know that viruses mutate, and this is nothing surprising," he said. "We are confident that individuals who have been not only vaccinated but also boosted will have sufficient protection," he said.

DELTA FIGHT GOES ON

Measures used to counter the delta variant should remain the foundation for fighting the pandemic, even in the face of omicron, World Health Organization officials said Friday, while acknowledging that the travel restrictions imposed by some countries may help.

"Border control can delay the virus coming in and buy time. But every country and every community must prepare for new surges in cases," Dr. Takeshi Kasai, the WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, told reporters Friday. "The positive news in all of this is that none of the information we have currently about omicron suggests we need to change the directions of our response."

That means continuing to push for higher vaccination rates, abiding by social-distancing guidelines and wearing masks, among other measures, said WHO Regional Emergency Director Dr. Babatunde Olowokure.

He added that health systems must "ensure we are treating the right patients in the right place at the right time, and so therefore ensuring that ICU beds are available, particularly for those who need them."

Kasai warned: "We cannot be complacent."

Information for this article was contributed by Michelle L. Price, Bobby Caina Calvan, Marina Villeneuve, Doug Glass, Dave Kolpack, Gretchen Ehlke, Jennifer Kelleher and Jim Gomez of The Associated Press; by Mitch Smith and Apoorva Mandavilli of The New York Times; and by Adela Suliman of The Washington Post.


  photo  Patients wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot at a mobile vaccination station on 59th Street below Central Park, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, in New York. Health officials say multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
 
 
  photo  Patients wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot at a mobile vaccination station on 59th Street below Central Park, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, in New York. Health officials say multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
 
 
  photo  Patients wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot at a mobile vaccination station on 59th Street below Central Park, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, in New York. Health officials say multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
 
 
  photo  A mobile COVID-19 vaccination and booster shot site operates out of a bus on 59th Street south of Central Park as patients wait on the sidewalk, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, in New York. Health officials say multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
 
 
  photo  In this image taken from video, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks during a virtual press conference, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, in New York. Multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, health officials said Thursday, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota. (AP Photo)
 
 
  photo  Zach Bakke, 8, of Minnetonka, Minn. poses for a photo on a selfie wall after getting a COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021 at Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. (Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)
 
 
  photo  Naomi Everman, 8, of Falcon Heights gets a band aid after getting a Covid Vaccine shot on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021 at Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. (Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)
 
 
  photo  Gregg Voreis, 9, Edina, Minn., wears a Santa hat while in line for a COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021 at Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. (Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)
 
 



  photo  People wait to receive covid-19 shots Friday in Orange Farm, South Africa. Scientists in South Africa said omicron appears to spread more than twice as fast as the delta variant, which until this week was deemed the most contagious version of the virus. (The New York Times/Joao Silva)
 JOAO SILVA 
 
 


  photo  A family waits Friday at Pearson International Airport in Canada for a flight to the United States. New travel testing and restrictions have been put in place because of the omicron variant. (AP/The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette)
 Nathan Denette 
 
 


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