New variants of omicron have once again increased hospital admissions and deaths in recent weeks, forcing states and towns to reconsider their responses to COVID-19 and the White House to step up its efforts. . .
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nick Barragan has a habit of wearing a mask because his job in the Los Angeles film industry has long demanded it, so he probably won’t be baffled if the nation’s most populous county reinstates regulations requiring face coverings due to some other spike in coronavirus cases across the country.
“I feel smart because I’ve used one quite consistently over the last few years. It’s a habit,” said Barragan, masked as he ran errands Wednesday.
Los Angeles County, home to 10 million people, faces a return to a broad indoor mask mandate later this month if existing trends in hospital admissions continue, county fitness director Barbara Ferrer said this week.
Nationally, the most recent outbreak of COVID-19 is due to the highly transmissible BA. 5 variant, which now accounts for 65% of cases, and its cousin BA. 4 contributes an additional 16%. The variants showed a remarkable ability to circumvent the coverage presented through vaccination.
As new variants of omicron increase hospitalizations and deaths in recent weeks, states and cities are reconsidering their responses and the White House is stepping up efforts to alert the public.
Some experts have said the warnings are too few and too late.
“It’s much later that the warning may have been issued,” said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who called BA. 5 “the worst variant yet. “
Global trends for any of the mutants have been obvious for weeks, experts said: They temporarily outperform older variants and push instances up wherever they appear. However, the Americans took off their masks and dived back into social gatherings. And they’ve largely ignored booster injections. , which opposes the worst results of covid-19. Courts have blocked federal orders for masks and vaccines, tying the hands of U. S. officials.
“We’re learning a lot about how the virus works elsewhere and applying the wisdom here,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of fitness metrics science at the University of Washington in Seattle.
White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha gave the impression on Wednesday morning television, urging booster injections and renewed vigilance. Still, Mokdad said federal fitness officials want to put more emphasis on indoor masks, early detection and antiviral activation. treatment.
“They’re doing everything they can,” Mokdad said.
The administration’s challenge, in the White House’s view, is its message, but the willingness of people to listen to it, due to pandemic fatigue and the politicization of reaction to the virus.
For months, the White House has encouraged Americans to use loose or reasonable immediate home tests to detect the virus, as well as the loose and effective antiviral remedy Paxlovid that protects against serious illness and death. On Tuesday, the White House reaction team called on all adults over the age of 50 to urgently receive a booster if they haven’t already done so this year, and deterred others from waiting for the next generation of vaccines expected in the fall when they can roll up their sleeves and get some coverage now.
Requiring the return of the mask “helps us decrease the risks,” Ferrer told Los Angeles County supervisors. He is expected to speak on the main points of the county’s possible new mandate at a public fitness briefing Thursday afternoon.
“I recognize that when we move back from universal inner masking to higher diffusion, for many, it will seem like a step backwards,” Ferrer said Tuesday.
For the peak of the pandemic, Los Angeles County has required masks in some indoor spaces, adding fitness facilities, subways and buses, airports, jails and homeless shelters. The new mandate would increase the requirement for all indoor public spaces, adding shared offices, production facilities, warehouses, retail stores, restaurants and bars, theaters and schools.
It’s unclear what the app would look like. Under previous mandates, officials liked to teach people other than contributions and fines.
Sharon Fayette took off her mask when she left a Lyft trip in Los Angeles on Wednesday and complained when she reported that another universal mask requirement could happen. “Oh, man, when is it going to end?” wondered about the pandemic.
Fayette said she grew tired of the regulatory update and doubted any other mandate would be followed through most residents. “I think other people are above that, above all the rules,” he said.
Barragan said he learned a hard lesson about the effectiveness of masks when he didn’t cover his face at a film industry meeting last month in Los Angeles. “I think it would be smart because we were all outside,” said Barragan, 35. A few days later, he began to feel ill health and, of course, tested positive.
He had avoided contracting the virus for more than two years because he was looking to mask himself. “The only time I kidnapped him, I hit him!” he laughs.
The country’s brief pause in COVID deaths has been reversed. Last month, daily deaths fell, never reaching last year’s low, and deaths are now rising.
The seven-day average of deaths in the U. S. The U. S. economy rose 26 percent over the past two weeks to 489 on July 12.
The coronavirus is rarely killing as many as it did last fall and winter, and experts don’t expect death to succeed in the previous grades anytime soon. But a lot of daily deaths from a summer respiratory illness would be impressive, Andrew Noymer said. , professor of public fitness at the University of California, Irvine. He noted that in Orange County, California, another 46 people died of COVID-19 in June.
“It would be everybody on deck,” Noymer said. People would say, ‘There’s this crazy new flu that’s killing other people in June. ‘”
On the other hand, undeniable and proven precautions are not taken. Vaccines, the addition of boosters for eligible people, the threat of hospitalization and death, even oppose newer variants. in four Americans over the age of 50 who are eligible to remember a moment won one.
“It was a failed recall campaign,” Topol said, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still uses the term “fully vaccinated” for other people who won two shots from Moderna or Pfizer. “They didn’t realize that two shots are absolutely insufficient,” he said.
Noymer said that if he lived up to the country’s COVID response, he would put himself on the stand of other Americans in an effort to get their attention in this third year of the pandemic. I would tell Americans to take it seriously, mask themselves inmates and “until we get bigger vaccines, there will be a new general of a disease that kills more than 100,000 Americans a year and affects life expectancy. “
That message would not be conveyed for political reasons, Noymer acknowledged.
Nor does it fly with other people tired of taking precautions after more than two years of pandemic. Valerie Walker of New Hope, Pennsylvania, is aware of the latest wave but is not alarmed.
“I was worried at the time,” she said of the beginnings of the pandemic, with photographs of frame bags on the evening news. “Now there is fatigue, things were getting bigger and there was a vaccine. scale between one and 10, I’m probably in four.
Even with two friends now in poor health from the virus and her recently recovered husband, Walker says she has bigger problems.
“Sometimes when I think about it, I still put on a mask when I walk into a store, but honestly, it’s not an idea for me,” he said.
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Johnson, the AP’s medical editor, reported from Washington state. Associated Press editors Bobby Caina Calvan in New York and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives information from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely to blame for all the content.
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