Fauci Warns Against Complacency in Face of Omicron

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said a growing body of evidence suggested that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was causing less serious illness than its predecessors but he warned against complacency, saying the variant’s lightning-speed spread across the United States would likely lead to a perilous spike in hospitalizations among the unvaccinated and could overwhelm the country’s health systems.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Dr. Fauci said recent data out of Scotland, England and South Africa has been filling in the fragmentary portrait of Omicron, which has spread across much of the world and overtaken the Delta variant in the United States in the month since it was first identified by scientists in South Africa.

“Even though we’re pleased by the evidence from multiple countries — it looks like there is a lesser degree of severity — we’ve got to be careful that we don’t get complacent about that,” Dr. Fauci said, noting that there were still tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans. “Those are the most vulnerable ones when you have a virus that is extraordinarily effective in getting to people and infecting them the way Omicron is.”

Last week, scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland reported that people infected with Omicron were almost 60 percent less likely to be hospitalized than those infected with Delta. Another study from Imperial College London found that individuals infected by Omicron were 15 to 20 percent less likely to go to an emergency room with severe symptoms and 40 percent less likely to be hospitalized.

Despite such encouraging data, Dr. Fauci said the nation’s low vaccination rate — only 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated — would likely dilute the benefits of Omicron’s reduced virulence. “When you have such a high volume of new infections, it might override a real diminution in severity,” he said.

Nearly 71,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19, up 10 percent from the previous week but still well below previous peaks.

That said, the nation’s medical infrastructure is dangerously frayed two years into the pandemic as hospitals contend with staff shortages fueled by burnout and early retirements. Experts also worry about a coming wave of Omicron infections that could sideline an untold number of nurses and doctors.

Despite an alarming spike of cases in the United States — the seven-day average of new daily cases has surpassed 197,000, a 65 percent jump over the last 14 days — government data show that vaccination is still a strong protector against severe illness. Unvaccinated people are five times more likely to test positive and 14 times more likely to die of Covid than vaccinated patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hundreds of flights in the United States, and thousands globally, were canceled Sunday as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus sickened crews during one of the year’s busiest weekends for travel.

As of midday Sunday, more than 750 flights with at least one stop in the United States, and roughly 10 times as many around the world, had been canceled, according to FlightAware, which provides aviation data.

Sunday’s bleak track record followed thousands of global flight cancellations on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The cancellations threatened to disrupt travel plans at a time when many fly to spend the Christmas holiday with their families. In the United States, the tradition appeared to rebound this year: Roughly two million people passed through screening checkpoints each day last week, according to the Transportation Security Administration, and the numbers on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were nearly double the equivalent figures last year.

Ten percent of JetBlue flights, 5 percent of Delta Air Lines flights, 4 percent of United Airlines flights and 2 percent of American Airlines flights on Sunday had been canceled by midday, according to FlightAware.

Derek Dombrowski, a JetBlue spokesman, confirmed the approximately 110 cancellations reported by FlightAware. JetBlue, he said, entered the holiday season with its highest staffing levels since the onset of the pandemic but, he added, the airline has “seen an increasing number of sick calls from Omicron.”

A United spokeswoman confirmed the roughly 100 canceled flights reported by FlightAware, citing “crew staffing concerns.”

A spokeswoman said Sunday afternoon that Delta had cancelled 161 flights and anticipated canceling another 40, along with another 40 on Monday. Earlier this weekend, Delta attributed the spate of cancellations to “winter weather” and “the Omicron variant.”

A spokesman for American Airlines referred an inquiry to FlightAware, which reported 67 cancellations Sunday.

Southwest Airlines canceled just 56 flights, or 1 percent, but the cancellations were caused entirely by weather, said Dan Landson, a Southwest spokesman. “We haven’t had any operational issues related to Covid,” he said in an email. Along with United, Delta and American, Southwest is one of the four largest U.S. carriers.

As the Omicron variant makes itself the dominant form of the virus, the United States is experiencing a sharp rise in Covid cases. Its daily average on Christmas of roughly 201,000 daily cases, according to The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker, exceeds the average case load during this summer’s peak, which was attributed to an earlier variant of the virus known as Delta.

An airline trade group has asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to shorten the recommended isolation period for fully vaccinated employees who test positive to a maximum of five days from 10 days before they can return with a negative test.

“Swift and safe adjustments by the C.D.C. would alleviate at least some of the staffing pressures and set up airlines to help millions of travelers returning from their holidays,” said Mr. Dombrowski, of JetBlue. The flight attendants’ union, however, has urged that reductions in recommended isolation times should be decided on “by public health professionals, not airlines.”

The highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus has overtaken Delta in the United States, sending the daily caseloads soaring to levels higher than last year’s winter pandemic peak in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, among other places.

Hospitalizations are starting to tick up, too, although not at the same rate as cases. It is unclear if they will continue to follow the rise in cases, especially given evidence in South Africa and Europe that Omicron may cause fewer severe cases of Covid.

On Friday, before holiday interruptions to data reporting began to affect the nation’s daily case totals, the seven-day national average of new daily cases surpassed 197,000, a 65 percent jump over the last 14 days, and hospitalizations reached a seven-day average of more than 70,000, an increase of 10 percent. Deaths also increased by 3 percent during that time, to a seven-day average of 1,345, according to a New York Times database.

The national all-time high for average daily cases is 251,232, which was set in January during a post-holiday surge.

The numbers do not yet give a clear picture of whether Omicron will cause more severe illness in the United States, but a few patterns are emerging.

On Sunday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said a growing body of evidence suggested that Omicron was causing less serious illness than its predecessors. But he warned against complacency, saying the variant’s lightning-speed spread across the United States would likely lead to a perilous spike in hospitalizations among the unvaccinated and could overwhelm the country’s health systems.

“When you have such a high volume of new infections, it might override a real diminution in severity,” Dr. Fauci said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency earlier this month and put elective surgeries on pause at many hospitals. This week, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts said he would activate up to 500 members of the National Guard to help in overburdened hospitals. Many other states have done the same.

From Dec. 5, there has been a fourfold increase of Covid hospital admissions among children in New York City, where the Omicron variant is spreading rapidly, the New York State Department of Health said in an advisory on Friday. About half were under the age of 5, and not eligible for vaccination. The city did not provide numbers, but state data showed a few dozen children under 5 were hospitalized across the state as of Thursday.

The jump in pediatric cases is evident in other states as well. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported last week that Covid cases were “extremely high” among those under 18 across the country. Citing data as of Dec. 16, the academy said that cases among those under 18 had risen by 170,000 from the prior week, an increase of nearly 28 percent since early December. Pediatric cases are higher than ever before in the Northeast and Midwest, the data show, and all regions of the country have significantly more such cases since schools reopened for in-person instruction in the fall.

Even with the rising cases, government data show that vaccination is still a strong protector against severe illness. Unvaccinated people are five times more likely to test positive and 14 times more likely to die of Covid than vaccinated patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Promising data out of South Africa and other European countries have also shown that Omicron surges have been milder and with fewer hospitalizations.

The new research is heartening, but experts warn that the surge coming to many countries still may flood hospitals.

“Each place has its own demographics and health care system access and, you know, vaccine distribution,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, said in an interview on Saturday. She added that people in England, Scotland and South Africa could have acquired enough immunity from other infections to be able to deal with this variant, or that there could be intrinsic differences in the pathogenicity of Omicron that results in fewer people needing to be hospitalized.

“We cannot assume the same things will happen to the U.S.,” Dr. Iwasaki said. “That is not a reason to relax our measures here, and we still need to vaccinate those pockets of people who are unvaccinated.”

NAIROBI, Kenya — In just the past three weeks, the percentage of Kenyans who tested positive for the coronavirus jumped from less than 1 percent to more than 30 percent — the country’s highest positivity rate yet.

In Uganda, nearly 50 lawmakers and their staff members, some of them vaccinated, tested positive this week after attending a sports tournament in neighboring Tanzania.

And in Zimbabwe, skyrocketing infections have pushed the government to institute new restrictions on businesses and incoming travelers.

Across Africa, countries are reporting a surge in Covid cases, and health officials worry about how the new Omicron variant will affect the world’s least-vaccinated continent. Omicron, which was first detected in southern Africa, remains highly contagious, but so far it is causing fewer deaths and hospitalizations than previous variants such as Delta.

The latest wave comes as many African countries were beginning to reopen and businesses were hoping for a robust holiday season — only for governments to reintroduce curfews and quarantines and impose new vaccine mandates.

Even as Britain and the United States lifted Omicron-related travel restrictions on southern African states in the past week, Africans faced new travel restrictions from elsewhere because of the rising infections. Beginning Saturday, the United Arab Emirates is suspending entry for travelers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, and imposing additional requirements for those traveling from Ghana and Uganda.

“We are unfortunately going to be celebrating the end-of-the-year holiday season in the middle of the fourth wave that’s sweeping across the continent,” Dr. John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference on Thursday.

At least 21 African countries are now experiencing a fourth wave of the pandemic, according to the Africa C.D.C. Three countries — Algeria, Kenya and Mauritius — are undergoing a fifth one.

Omicron is tearing through Africa, with 22 nations now reporting the variant. It is not known whether the highly contagious variant is the dominant one or the one driving the surge of infections across Africa. But health experts say that even in countries where genomic sequencing is not readily available, the sudden bump in cases could point to the spread of the Omicron variant.

And experts say overall Covid infections in Africa are likely higher given the lack of widespread testing in many countries.

Abdi Latif Dahir reported from Nairobi, and Jeffrey Moyo from Harare, Zimbabwe. Lynsey Chutelcontributed reporting from Johannesburg.

After more than a year without live performances before full audiences, many American orchestras returned with much fanfare to their concert halls this fall to play for grateful audiences, eager to bounce back from the turmoil of the pandemic.

But for some ensembles, the economic disruption wrought by the pandemic has compounded long-term problems, including the decline of the old subscription model in which patrons bought season tickets each year, dwindling revenues at the box office, an increasing reliance on donations and turnovers in leadership.

And with labor disputes persisting in some cities amid attempts to lower expenses, orchestras are grappling with fresh questions about their ability to survive the pandemic and beyond.

In Massachusetts, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra has been in labor negotiations with its players for more than a year. In Texas, although the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony had eagerly awaited the chance to play before full audiences, in late September they went on strike.

If the virus continues to pose a threat, and support from the government and donors wanes, orchestras could face more challenges over the next several years, and tensions between arts groups and unions could grow, labor experts said.

ENID, Okla. — On a hot night in July 2020, Jonathan Waddell, a city commissioner in Enid, Okla., sat staring out at a rowdy audience dressed in red. They were in the third hour of public comments on a proposed mask mandate, and Mr. Waddell, a retired Air Force sergeant who supported it, was feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

The parking lot was full, and people wearing red were getting out of their cars greeting one another, looking a bit like players on a sports team. As the meeting began, he realized that they opposed the mandate. It was almost everybody in the room.

At the end of the night, the mask mandate failed, and the audience erupted in cheers.

Mr. Waddell remembers calling his father, a former police officer, as he drove home. He said that people were talking about masks, but that it felt like something else. What, exactly, he did not know.

“I said, ‘This is honestly just crazy, Dad, and I’m not sure where it goes from here.’”

In the year and a half that followed, fierce arguments like this have played out in towns and cities across the country.

From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House. But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

In Enid, both sides in the mask debate believed they were standing up for what was right. Both cared deeply for their city — and their country — and believed that, in their own way, they were working to save it. And it all started as an argument over a simple piece of cloth.

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.

SEOUL — Three members of the global K-pop phenomenon BTS have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Big Hit Music, the group’s management company.

The company said that RM, 27, and Jin, 29, tested positive on Saturday after returning to South Korea from the United States this month. The day before, Big Hit Music announced that Suga, 28, who returned from the United States on Thursday, discovered that he was infected while in quarantine and after taking a P.C.R. test.

All three received their second dose of the coronavirus vaccine in August, the company said. Suga, the stage name for the artist Min Yoon-gi, had tested negative before traveling to the United States, the company said. RM (Kim Nam-joon) and Jin (Kim Seok-jin) initially tested negative on returning to South Korea.

The company previously said that Suga had no contact with the other members of BTS. He was not displaying any symptoms as of Friday, and he was isolating at home, the company said.

The news comes a month after another K-pop megastar, Lalisa Manoban, 24, of Blackpink, better known as Lisa, tested positive for the coronavirus. The other members of Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo and Rosé — tested negative, the production company, YG Entertainment, said in an emailed statement last month.

BTS has become a multibillion-dollar act, known for dynamic dance moves, catchy lyrics and fiercely devoted fans. In 2018, BTS became the first K-pop group to top the Billboard album chart, with “Love Yourself: Tear.” In September this year, the group gave a speech at the United Nations headquarters in New York, promoting coronavirus vaccinations and praising young people for their resiliency during the pandemic.

The band traveled to the United States in November and performed at the American Music Awards. Big Hit Music announced later that members of BTS would be taking an “extended period of rest.”

John Yoon contributed reporting.

As the Omicron variant continues to spread around the country, many more people, including those who have been vaccinated, will test positive for the coronavirus.

So what should you do if you’re one of them? We spoke to physicians and infectious disease experts about the steps you should take after a positive test or if you find out you’ve been in close contact with an infected person. Here’s their advice.

I just tested positive. What do I do now?

If you’re in public or around people when you get the bad news, put on a mask immediately. Then isolate yourself as quickly as possible, even if you don’t have symptoms. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends isolating for 10 days after you test positive.

What does it mean to isolate?

If you live with roommates or family, try to separate yourself from other people (and animals) as much as possible. “You should take yourself out of society,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco. “Wall yourself up in a cocoon.”

Should I take a second test to confirm the result?

If you tested positive after taking a rapid home test, you may want to take a second home test using a different brand or go to a testing center to confirm the result. False positives aren’t common with home tests, but they can happen. Even so, you should assume the positive result is correct, wear a mask and avoid close contact with other people until you get retested. If your positive test came from a laboratory, a second test isn’t necessary.

Can I find out if I got Omicron?

No. In most cases, you won’t know which variant of coronavirus you’ve caught and your lab test typically won’t tell you. In general, the guidance on isolation, monitoring and treatment does not change based on which variant infected you.

When can I stop isolating?

The C.D.C. recommends a 10-day isolation period for people who test positive, regardless of their vaccination status. To calculate your 10-day window, the C.D.C. advises that you consider day zero to be your first day of symptoms. Day one is the first full day after you develop symptoms. If you are asymptomatic, the C.D.C. counts day zero as the day of your positive test.

I’ve already had Covid. Am I at risk for reinfection?

Yes. The degree of protection you get from a previous infection varies widely. You’re more protected if you’ve also been vaccinated.