California Unveils Plan to Treat Coronavirus as Manageable Risk
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California health authorities unveiled a “next phase” pandemic playbook for the most populous U.S. state on Thursday that will treat the coronavirus as a manageable risk that “will remain with us for some time, if not forever,” rather than an emergency.
The plan, which includes measures to promote vaccines, stockpile medical supplies and mount an aggressive assault on disinformation, will be a new chapter in responding to the coronavirus, which has infected at least one in five Californians and claimed the lives of more than 83,000 state residents.
It is also an acknowledgment that “we’re going to live with this,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an interview preceding the announcement.
“We’re not in denial of the hell that has been the last two years,” he said. But, he added, “This is not like World War II, where we can have a ticker-tape parade and announce the end.”
A towering spike in new coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant peaked in the state in mid-January and has since receded, leaving the daily average about where it was late last summer, at about 25,000 new cases a day. The fading of the surge has been taken as a signal to ease restrictions around the country.
- Cases
- Hospitalizations
- Deaths
400% of last winter’s peak
About this data
Sources: State and local health agencies (cases, deaths); U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (hospitalizations).
Earlier this week, Mr. Newsom loosened California’s indoor mask requirements for vaccinated people, and state health officials said they would reconsider school mask mandates at the end of February. Los Angeles County lifted its outdoor mask mandate, Disneyland and other businesses eased their mask rules for vaccinated people, and the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals announced that they would not require attendees to wear masks, be vaccinated or take a test when the events take place this spring.
California’s new view of the virus, outlined in a briefing by the state’s top health official, Dr. Mark Ghaly, will continue to emphasize vaccines and boosters, with expansions in school-based vaccination, preparations to vaccinate children younger than 5 when they become eligible, and potential reassessment of vaccine requirements to account for the possibility of some natural immunity from a prior infection, among other targets. Scientists have cautioned that protection may wane over time, and future variants may be better able to sidestep defenses.
Mask requirements would be eased or tightened as required, depending on the severity and trajectory of infections, according to the new plan. Strategic stockpiles would be modernized and bolstered.
The plan would expand wastewater surveillance testing and genomic sequencing; expand access to Covid-19 treatments; and create a special office of community partnerships that would send hundreds of workers into immigrant, disadvantaged and other hard-to-reach communities to combat disinformation and offer access to care.
The governor said that for now, the state would continue to operate under emergency authorization, allowing health officials to move swiftly if there is a new surge. But he said his goal was to unwind the state of emergency as soon as possible.
Other priorities would include addressing worker shortages at hospitals and nursing homes, studying the virus’s effect on communities, expanding the use of smartphone technology to alert people about possible virus exposure; and offering incentives for innovations in testing and air filtration.
Though 70 percent of the state’s residents have been fully vaccinated, that is a far cry from achieving “herd immunity,” a level where so few people remain vulnerable to the virus that it cannot readily spread. Most experts think herd immunity to the coronavirus is now most likely out of reach.
Statewide surveys show Californians generally support the governor’s pandemic policies, which have limited Covid deaths to a per capita rate substantially lower than in Florida, Texas or the United States as a whole.
But public patience has frayed since Mr. Newsom announced the nation’s first stay-at-home order in 2020, starting a wave of restrictions. A local recall election, fueled by anger over pandemic rules and amplified by disinformation, put members of a far-right militia in apparent control of the board of supervisors in rural Shasta County. And a poll released this week by the University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies found that Mr. Newsom’s overall approval rating had slipped to 48 percent now from 64 percent in 2020.
“Right now, we’re really anxious,” said Mr. Newsom. “A lot of us are distrustful. And it’s affecting us in profound ways across our entire existence, not just this pandemic.”
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SEOUL — South Korea, which is experiencing its largest Covid-19 wave yet, will set aside a 90-minute window just for voters with the coronavirus to cast their ballots at polling stations next month.
The recent surge in coronavirus cases had raised questions about how the country’s tight presidential election would be held. Lawmakers agreed this week to reserve 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on March 9, Election Day, for voters with Covid. The rest of the electorate will vote from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“Protecting everyone’s right to vote is paramount,” Dr. Jung Jae-hun, a professor who is a Covid-19 policy adviser to the prime minister, said in an interview. “It’s entirely possible to do so while preventing outbreaks.”
The National Election Commission reported on Thursday that interest in voting in the upcoming election was at its highest since 2012, demonstrating that the surge in coronavirus infections might not dampen turnout.
Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party and Yoon Suk-yeol of the opposition People Power Party are neck and neck.
About 44 million eligible voters reside in South Korea, according to the election commission. But at the rate that infections are going, as many as one million might have Covid by Election Day, according to Dr. Jung, who is also a professor of preventive medicine at Gachon University near Seoul.
The government’s health protocols require people with Covid to remain in isolation at home. The special time window on Election Day would allow them to leave for the purposes of casting their ballot.
The daily caseload in South Korea was 93,135 on Thursday. By comparison, in the last nationwide election of the coronavirus era, in 2020, the government reported fewer than 40 new infections a day.
7–day average
73,788
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.
The Omicron variant has overwhelmed South Korea’s public health system so much that the government abandoned its use of mobile QR codes for contact tracing purposes this week, leaving individuals responsible for alerting their close contacts if they test positive.
Some legal experts and officials said the government should provide more ways for people with the coronavirus to vote. Young-Soo Chang, a professor of law at Korea University, said the government should have allotted two time slots instead of one.
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There will soon be no statewide mask mandates on the mainland United States, if all goes according to plan.
Two of the last states with mandates announced Thursday that they would be dropped. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat, said in a surprise announcement that the state would immediately lift its indoor mask mandate, including for schools.
Ms. Lujan Grisham cited declining rates of hospitalizations and the success of vaccine mandates. “Having the vaccine mandates work,” she said. “That’s putting us in a position to lift the mask mandate.”
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, a Democrat, also said he would eliminate the state’s mask mandates, including for schools, at the end of March.
That leaves Hawaii as the only state left to announce any plans to relax mask requirements. Puerto Rico, the largest U.S. territory, also has yet to announce any changes to its island-wide mandate.
Washington State had largely maintained a cautious approach, like other blue states. But in recent days, there has been a quick succession of states governed by Democrats reversing their mask requirements. Many had once been relaxed as vaccines became widely available, only to be reinstated as variants surged across the country.
States like California, New Jersey, New York and Oregon have quickly moved to ease the requirement. But mask mandates in schools remain the last wrinkle in several states — the requirements are inconsistent state-by-state and hotly contested.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics continue to support masks in schools as a key tool to keeping schools open safely. Some experts say that children learn better without masks and that making them optional will help restore a semblance of normalcy.
Both New Mexico and Washington State left the decision to require masks in schools up to local districts, as have states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut.
By contrast, California and New York have yet to announce an end to their school requirements. And school mask mandates in Illinois and Maryland are being contested in court.
Despite standing firm on the need for masking this month, the director of the C.D.C. said on Wednesday that the agency would soon issue new guidelines, including on face coverings, based on factors like hospital capacity, not just new coronavirus cases.
“We want to give people a break from things like mask wearing when these metrics are better and then have the ability to reach for them again,” the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at a coronavirus news briefing.
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At a glance, it might appear that Maine recently had a superspreader event: The state announced on Wednesday that 3,556 new coronavirus cases had been reported, almost three times the figure from last Friday.
But it wasn’t a spike in infections that caused the tally to jump so much — it was a push by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to clear a backlog of tens of thousands of unreviewed positive coronavirus tests.
The agency began falling behind in late November, about when the Omicron variant emerged, agency officials have said. Since then, Maine’s daily case counts have revealed more about how many lab results the staff could process in a day than about how quickly the virus was spreading.
The processing delays sometimes made the daily case data look as though Maine, alone among the 50 states, was somehow managing to avoid an Omicron surge that was much worse than last winter’s wave.
By early this month, the backlog stood at 58,000 positive results awaiting review, and the agency decided to attack it with technology.
“We’ve been doing this through a series of newly programed A.I. tools, or bots,” Dr. Nirav D. Shah, the director of the Maine C.D.C., said at a news briefing on Wednesday. “This process of utilizing these bots to plow through the backlog will continue over the next several days.” He said the pile had already been shrunk to 30,300 cases.
Like other states that have struggled with floods of testing data, Maine is using automation to speed up processing of results for patients in low-risk categories, freeing up human case investigators to concentrate on those in higher-risk groups, an agency spokesman said. Positive lab results must be checked to see if they reveal new cases or duplicate earlier test results.
Ohio and Wisconsin each recently reported outsize single-day totals of new cases as they cleared out backlogs. Other states, like Idaho and Minnesota, release daily estimates of how many test results are awaiting processing.
In Maine, the raw number of positive tests reported to health officials and the overall proportion of tests coming back positive both peaked in mid-January, according to the state’s dashboard. That was about when the Omicron surge peaked nationally, but a little later than its peak in the Northeast.
Across the United States, many public health officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, have been placing less emphasis on case counts, in part because more Americans are using at-home tests, whose results are not usually reported to state officials. There were also test shortages in some areas as Omicron surged.
With the backlog problem clouding the daily case counts’ usefulness as a barometer in Maine, Dr. Shah said he was focusing more on deaths, hospitalizations and data from wastewater screening, which has been added to the state’s Covid data page.
“The trends are encouraging, and the trends are favorable,” Dr. Shah said, though the backlog-clearing work may obscure that for a little while.
“In short, the bullet train that is Omicron is slowing down, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “But we don’t let off the brakes while the train is still moving.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/18/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine
