Coronavirus Daily News Brief – Aug. 5: New Covid Wave’s More Transmissible Variants Overwhelming Japan, U.K. Gives Green Light to Pfizer 2024 Jab

A couple sitting for wedding photos in Kurashiki, Japan

Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,608th day.

In news we cover today, the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ended a program that started in early 2020 giving imprisoned illegal immigrants free phone and video calls, the United Kingdom approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s 2024 jab, and Japan is one of several countries experiencing a fast-growing wave of SARS-CoV-2 cases.

TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY

On August 5, 2020, the number of coronavirus cases worldwide moved rapidly towards the 19 million figure.

The dramatic increase in cases caused officials in New York City to set up checkpoints and major bridge and tunnel crossings that enter the city in order to inform travelers about the state’s 14-day quarantine.

Alaska Airlines modified its face mask policy to require that all passengers don masks on its flights “with no exceptions.”

Hilton Worldwide reported an 80% drop in revenue for the second quarter of 2020.

In Washington, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have agreed to work toward a deal on a relief package. White House officials and Democratic leaders acknowledged some progress on Wednesday, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, indicated he was open to a compromise measure that would include some programs he initially opposed, including an extension of the $600-per-week jobless benefit.

The governor of Mississippi announced that masks were now mandatory in public as well as in all retail spaces. They will also be required for students and teachers when schools reopen.

Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe stands at 18.8 million mark, after seeing an increase of over 256,000 people in the prior 24 hours, based on figures compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief. The death toll stood at over 706,000, an increase of almost 57,404 in the same period.

In the United States and its territories, the number of confirmed cases stood at 4.73 million, an increase of over 56,000 over the previous 24 hours, while the death toll stood at 159,183.

LONG COVID

A review examining psilocybin’s effect on the human consciousness, published in June 2024 by the Argentina-based Miguel Lillo Foundation, concludes that psilocybin not only influences an individual’s perceptions while under its effects, but shaped human consciousness as a whole over the thousands of generations that humans had been eating psychedelic fungi.

Psilocybin is currently being discussed as a potential for Long Covid-related cognitive symptoms. It is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi.

Early hominids – includes all the great apes including humans – began to pick and eat fungi containing psilocybin as far back as six million years ago. The practice likely influenced the development of human cognition and awareness, according to the study.

UNITED STATES

U.S. taxpayers can breathe a sigh of relief, now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement ended a program put into place in the earliest months of the pandemic. The program had given hundreds of free minutes of video calls to illegal immigrants in ICE custody, a move that is estimated to save taxpayers some $10 million a year.

The agency began to offer illegal immigrants in custody 520 minutes of free domestic and international phone and video calls per month starting in May 2020 given the visitation restrictions that were put into place as a consequence of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

A new study suggests that immunization with a mucosal coronavirus vaccine protects against cycles of respiratory transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and can potentially limit the community spread of the virus.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances, “Mucosal Immunization with ChAd-SARS-CoV-2-S Prevents Sequential Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to Unvaccinated Hamsters,” evaluated the impact of intramuscular vaccine immunization on airborne infection and transmission to reach this conclusion.

Syrian hamsters were used in the test as the Syrian hamster is a sensitive model that can be used to assess the impact of vaccination on airborne or direct-contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

GLOBAL

The Covid wave that’s just beginning in the Northern Hemisphere is arriving just as even more of the world behaves as if the pandemic were over.

The wave is being driven by the current dominant Covid variants which are far more transmissible than predecessors in recent memory. They are also blessed with the ability to evade vaccine-induced antibodies. The variants KP.3, LB.1, and KP.2.3 are descendants of the omicron sublineage JN.1 that was dominant around Christmastime last year.

The situation is particularly dire in Japan, where the National Institute of Infectious Disease reported that the average number of infected people per medical institution has been increasing rapidly since June. Okinawa prefecture has seen the highest number of newly hospitalized patients since reporting began in early 2020. Some experts believe that the virus is spreading at a rate that far exceeds the country’s last two big waves, namely in September 2023 and January 2024.

KP.3 has been rising elsewhere as well. In the United States, it rose to 25% of all cases in just several weeks so consider battening down the hatches wherever you are and finding those boxes of FFFP 2 or N95 face masks that are up there somewhere, perhaps behind the Golden Blossom honey.

The aforementioned variants are known as the FLiRT variants. This is because they all have a mutation in the spike protein that changes its 456th amino acid from phenylalanine (F) to leucine (L) and its 346th amino acid from arginine (R) to threonine (T).

A paper by the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo that was published earlier this year in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases noted that these variants are more transmissible than earlier mainstream variants and have a high ability to evade neutralizing antibodies.

In the United Kingdom, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said it had authorized Pfizer and BioNTech’s updated coronavirus vaccine that targets the JN.1 subvariant for use in infants, children and adults.

The agency gave the green light after reviewing the vaccine’s safety, quality and effectiveness.

SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

In his new HBO special filmed from his own comedy club in Austin,  comedian Joe Rogen playfully made light of his reputation as a conspiracy theorist.

“We lost a lot of people during Covid, and most of them are still alive,” he noted, sounding more like Groucho Marx than the 21st century Rogan.

After casting aspersions on coronavirus vaccines, he then made a very wise observation: “If you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?,” concluding that “the funniest way for me to die is if I die from Covid.”

OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS

The extinction of India’s vultures had far-reaching consequences for the humans who lived alongside the reviled birds. In just a few years, the species’ disappearance contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens.

A new paper published by Eyal G. Frank of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago  and Anant Sudarshan of the Department of Economics, University of Warwick found that the reviled birds, natural scavengers, functioned as a natural sanitation system for communities with a less developed infrastructure than the US or Europe. It was in this manner that, in India, they helped control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume.

PANDEMIC STATISTICS

GLOBAL FIGURES AT A GLANCE

Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe as of July 14, 2024 stands at 775,686,716, an increase of over 60,600 people in the prior 7 days, according to data compiled by KFF, a non-partisan health research organization.

The death toll stands at 7,054,093, an increase of 901 in the preceding seven days.

CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE

In the United States, in the week ending July 27, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on August 2 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 16.3%, an increase of 2 percentage points in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 2.2%, an increase of 0.3 percentage points.

The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 is now 3.1 per 100,000 members of the population, up from 2.9.

Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 1.5, a figure that is up 0.4 percentage point since the prior week.

VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT

Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine at press time, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.58 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and the seven-day-average of the number of daily doses of vaccine administrated was 2,396 as of July 29, 2024.

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Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this issue.

The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org

If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE.  The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.

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