Vaccine Demand in the U.S. Rises as Omicron Fears Grow

“We’ve got to go to a system where we can manage expectations,” he said.

The Biden administration is trying to make getting vaccinated easier. In announcing actions Thursday to protect against Delta and Omicron, President Biden said the government would create hundreds of family-vaccination clinics, one-stop shops for first shots to boosters. Partners in a federal pharmacy program, including major chains like CVS and Rite Aid, will also make “family-based scheduling” available in the months ahead, according to the White House.

Since the emergence of the Omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that everyone ages 18 and older should get a booster shot, six months after a Pfizer or Moderna series or two months after a Johnson & Johnson shot.

Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said there are some pockets of the country where vaccines are expiring because demand is low and others where lines are longer than a month ago because of greater demand.

But, she said, demand will likely ease in a few weeks.

“Whenever there is a new recommendation, there are the early adopters who are extremely eager to want to get that booster right now,” she said, adding that “supply and demand will equilibrate in short order.”

Some states and counties have hosted mass-vaccination clinics to alleviate the burden on pharmacies and meet demand from residents.

Richard Clark, the director of emergency management for Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, said the county had been running vaccination clinics that would attract about 300 or 400 people each time. Mr. Clark said he kept hearing comments about people driving from counties an hour away to get their vaccine, because they were worried about the upcoming holidays and virus variants.

“We decided, let’s just do a large one,” he said, “and our 1,000 slots were filled within probably a day and a half.”

Gov. Charlie Baker, of Massachusetts, said this week that demand for vaccines skyrocketed after boosters became widely available.

“We are doing over 50,000 shots per day,” Mr. Baker said, according to a Boston 25 News story published on Tuesday, “and if we can find a way to work with our local colleagues in local government, we will come up with ways to put more shots on the table.”

“We’ve kept the data under review over the last week or so since we learned about Omicron,” Sajid Javid, the country’s health secretary, said during a news briefing. “And we’re seeing an increasing number of cases linked to travel.”

He stressed that the new containment measures are temporary, but he added that “before we learn more about Omicron, it’s right that we have these measures in place.”

Mr. Javid was also clear that the government was advising the British public to continue with life as usual while adhering to coronavirus guidelines.

“People should carry on with their plans, and make plans to enjoy Christmas as usual,” he said.

At the Anime NYC conference, focused around a popular animation style that originated in Japan, attendees were fairly compliant about wearing masks, the man told officials. But some rooms were very crowded, at capacity, with crowds standing shoulder to shoulder, he said.

Convention attendees were required to provide proof that they had received at least one vaccine shot and they had to wear masks, according to the convention website. The rules allowed entry “immediately after” a first dose. People are seen as having full vaccination protection two weeks after a second dose of a two-dose vaccine.

“Time will tell how large it becomes,” Ms. Como-Sabetti said. “It’s hard to say that it is a super spreader. Certainly we’re concerned about that.”

Officials cautioned that much remains unknown: The man and his friends could have been infected in other venues — at restaurants, hotels or other locations during their trips, or at another time.

Still, the prospect of a cluster of cases raised new questions about the nation’s virus detection capabilities and the limits of its contact-tracing efforts, which have been disparate and limited since the start of the pandemic.

Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that he was concerned about the contact-tracing ability of health departments across the country, given their strained resources and the public’s general lack of cooperation with investigators. Also worrisome, he said, is the small number of cases that are being tested for the Omicron variant.

“Very quickly we’re going to see a number of Omicron cases around the country in many locations, just as we’ve seen in Minnesota,” he said.

After Minnesota officials learned that the convention attendee had the Omicron variant, they informed the New York City Health Department. City health officials said that they had begun sending text messages and emails to tens of thousands of the anime convention’s attendees, urging them to get tested.

Dr. Ted Long, who oversees the city’s contact tracing program, said that he was aware of five positive cases so far among New York City residents who attended the anime convention. But he said it was not yet known if those people had been infected by Omicron or Delta, nor was the convention known to be the site where they had gotten sick.

“We haven’t found evidence of widespread transmission at the convention,” Adam Shrier, a spokesman for New York City’s contact tracing program, Test and Trace Corps, wrote in an email.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is assisting the Minnesota and New York City health departments in tracking any cases, a spokeswoman said.

Infectious disease specialists said that the first Omicron case to be linked to the anime convention was likely identified in Minnesota because that state’s health department has a robust genomic sequencing system, and not necessarily because the patient was the original index case.

Organizers of the convention stressed that it was uncertain where the man had contracted the virus.

“He was just one person who was at our event,” said Kelly Comboni, president of LeftField Media, which organized the convention. “There have been no other mass cases reported from our event, and we are now way past two weeks” since the convention’s end.

“I know the news is focused on Omicron, but we should remember that 99.9 percent of cases in the country right now are from the Delta variant,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press briefing on Friday. “Delta continues to drive cases across the country, especially in those that are unvaccinated.”

About 104,000 cases were being reported in the United States every day, compared with about 12,000 per day six months ago. States in the Midwest are recording some of the biggest spikes, while New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota lead the country in recent cases per capita.

On Friday, state health officials confirmed three cases in Maryland, all in the Baltimore area. Two of the cases are from the same household and include a vaccinated individual who had recently traveled to South Africa and an unvaccinated person who was deemed a close contact. The third case is unrelated, and the patient, who was vaccinated, has no known recent travel history.

Officials in Philadelphia said that they had found one case, a man in his 30s. The sole case identified in Utah was a vaccinated individual who had just returned from South Africa. In Missouri, officials identified a case linked to domestic travel.

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey said that a fully vaccinated woman who had recently traveled to South Africa tested positive for the Omicron variant after being treated at an emergency department in northern New Jersey. She was in isolation with mild symptoms, officials said.

On Thursday, officials in New York State announced that they had confirmed five cases of the variant: a 67-year-old woman in Suffolk County who returned from South Africa; two residents of Queens; one resident of Brooklyn; and another person in New York City who had traveled recently. The vaccination status of most of the individuals remained unknown.

A vaccinated Colorado resident who had recently returned from southern Africa was that state’s first confirmed case.

California reported several cases — the first being in San Francisco on Wednesday. In Alameda County, health officials confirmed five new cases of the Omicron variant that were “mildly symptomatic,” part of a cluster of 12 local coronavirus cases linked to people who attended a wedding in Wisconsin on Nov. 27. One of the individuals at the wedding had recently traveled internationally, the Alameda County Public Health Department said. Guests who tested positive had all had been vaccinated and none had been hospitalized. Genomic sequencing to detect the variant had not been completed on all 12 cases.

The authorities in Nebraska on Friday said that of the six cases involving the Omicron variant found there, only one was in a vaccinated person. One of the infected people had returned from Nigeria on Nov. 23, they said, and the other five were likely exposed through household contact. None had required hospitalization.

An Oahu resident with no history of travel is the first Omicron case in Hawaii.

“This is a case of community spread,” the state’s department of health said in a news release. The individual had previously been infected with the coronavirus but was never vaccinated.

The moves come after months of struggling attempts to halt the contagion through widespread testing and partial restrictions. Austria had originally placed a lockdown on only those who were unvaccinated.

Austria has also announced that vaccination would become compulsory as of Feb. 1, making it the first Western country to take that step, and one of only a handful around the world. Some critics, including the editorial board of The Financial Times, have said the plan exacts too high a price in terms of individual freedom and see it a sign of political failure.

On Saturday, Austria was averaging more than 9,000 new cases daily, and average daily Covid deaths had reached more than 58, after falling to near zero during the summer, according to the Our World in Data project at Oxford University. About 67 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, a lower level than many of its Western European neighbors, but higher than many in the former Eastern bloc.

7–day average

21,604

Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The daily average is calculated with data that was reported in the last seven days.

It’s too early to say how widespread the variant will become in the United States. As of Dec. 4, cases had been identified in more than a dozen states, but experts say that number is likely to increase in the coming days and weeks. The first person to have tested positive for the variant returned to San Francisco from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive on Nov. 29, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Should we be worried?

Omicron’s discovery has prompted considerable panic across the globe, with a number of countries banning flights from southern Africa, or — like Israel, Japan and Morocco — barring entry of foreign travelers altogether.

But public health experts have urged caution, noting that there is as yet no firm evidence that Omicron is more dangerous than previous variants like Delta, which quickly overtook its predecessors in the United States and other countries.

Omicron’s emergence is so recent that it may be a while before experts know whether it causes more severe illness. Covid hospitalizations lag new infections by two weeks or more.

Do vaccines protect against Omicron?

Scientists expect to learn much more in the coming weeks. At the moment, they say there is no reason to believe Omicron is impervious to existing vaccines, although they may turn out to be less protective to some unknown degree.

There’s another reason to remain calm: Vaccine makers have expressed confidence they can tweak existing formulations to make the shots more effective against new variants.

Also reassuring: Omicron’s distinctive mutations make it easy to quickly identify with a nasal swab and lab test.