China will no longer require a negative COVID-19 test result from incoming travelers starting Wednesday.
It is a milestone toward ending the virus restrictions imposed in China since early 2020.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin announced the change at a briefing Monday.
China ended its “zero-COVID” policy only in December, after years of draconian curbs that at times included full-city lockdowns and lengthy quarantines for people who were infected.
As part of those measures, incoming travelers were required to quarantine for weeks at government-designated hotels.
The curbs slowed the world’s second-largest economy, leading to rising unemployment and rare instances of unrest.
President Joe Biden said Friday that he is planning to request more money from Congress to develop another new coronavirus vaccine, as scientists track new waves and hospitalizations rise, though not like before.
Officials are already expecting updated COVID-19 vaccines that contain one version of the omicron strain, called XBB.1.5. It’s an important change from today’s combination shots, which mix the original coronavirus strain with last year’s most common omicron variants. But there will always be a need for updated vaccines as the virus continues to mutate.
It’s not clear exactly when people can start rolling up their sleeves for what officials hope is an annual fall COVID-19 shot. Pfizer, Moderna and smaller manufacturer Novavax all are brewing doses of the XBB update but the Food and Drug Administration will have to sign off on each, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must then issue recommendations for their use.
“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” Biden, who is vacationing in the Lake Tahoe area, told reporters on Friday.
He added that it’s “tentatively” recommended “that everybody get it,” once the shots are ready.
The White House’s $40 billion funding request to Congress on Aug. 11 did not mention COVID-19. It included funding requests for Ukraine, to replenish U.S. federal disaster funds at home after a deadly climate season of heat and storms, and funds to bolster the enforcement at the Southern border with Mexico, including money to curb the flow of deadly fentanyl. Last fall, the administration asked for $9.25 billion in funding to combat the virus, but Congress refused the request.
For the week ending July 29, COVID-19 hospital admissions were at 9,056. That’s an increase of about 12% from the previous week. But it’s a far cry from past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022.
New Zealand on Monday removed the last of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions, marking the end of a government response to the pandemic that was watched closely around the world.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the requirement to wear masks in hospitals and other healthcare facilities would end at midnight, as would a requirement for people who caught the virus to isolate themselves for seven days.
But as the pandemic wore on and more infectious variants took hold, the nation’s zero-tolerance approach became untenable. It eventually abandoned its elimination strategy.
Reflecting on the government’s response to the virus over more than three years, Hipkins said that during the height of the pandemic he had longed for the day he could end all restrictions, but now it felt anticlimactic.
He said about 3,250 New Zealanders from a population of 5 million had died with COVID-19 as a primary or secondary cause — about one-fifth of the mortality rate in the United States.
“While there were no doubt fractures in our collective sense of unity, I believe that New Zealanders can be enormously proud of what we achieved together,” Hipkins said. “We stayed home, we made sacrifices, we got vaccinated, and there is absolutely no question, we saved lives.”
Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said coronavirus case numbers and hospitalizations were low and had been trending down since June, and the publicly funded health system had faced less disruption from the virus this southern winter.
“We have been able to complete 16,000 more operations than we did last year, and so that is a very good indication our health system is on a much more even keel than it was,” she said.
The announcement comes two months before a general election.
David Seymour, the leader of the opposition ACT Party, said the government had been treating people like children for too long.
“They have been happy to impose high costs with little benefit and have taken their sweet time getting around to fixing it,” Seymour said in a statement.
Firefighter and paramedic Mike Camilleri once had no trouble hauling heavy gear up ladders. Now battling long COVID, he gingerly steps onto a treadmill to learn how his heart handles a simple walk.
“This is, like, not a tough-guy test so don’t fake it,” warned Beth Hughes, a physical therapist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Somehow, a mild case of COVID-19 set off a chain reaction that eventually left Camilleri with dangerous blood pressure spikes, a heartbeat that raced with slight exertion, and episodes of intense chest pain. Doctors were stumped until Camilleri found a Washington University cardiologist who’d treated patients with similar post-COVID heart trouble.
“Finally a turn in the right direction,” said the 43-year-old Camilleri.
He started to see a little improvement –- only to have a recent reinfection knock him down again.
Well into the pandemic’s fourth year, how profound a toll COVID-19 has taken on the nation’s heart health is only starting to emerge.
“We are seeing effects on the heart and the vascular system that really outnumber, unfortunately, effects on other organ systems,” said Dr. Susan Cheng, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
For up to a year after a case of COVID-19, people may be at increased risk of developing a new heart-related problem, anything from blood clots and irregular heartbeats to a heart attack –- even if they initially seem to recover just fine.
Among the unknowns: Who’s most likely to experience these aftereffects? Are they reversible — or a warning sign of more heart disease later in life?
“We’re about to exit this pandemic as even a sicker nation” because of virus-related heart trouble, said Washington University’s Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, who helped sound the alarm about lingering health problems. The consequences, he added, “will likely reverberate for generations.”
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Heart disease has long been the top killer in the nation and the world. But in the U.S., heart-related death rates had fallen to record lows in 2019, just before the pandemic struck.
COVID-19 erased a decade of that progress, Cheng said.
Heart attack-caused deaths rose during every virus surge. Worse, young people aren’t supposed to have heart attacks but Cheng’s research documented a nearly 30% increase in heart attack deaths among 25- to 44-year-olds in the pandemic’s first two years.
An ominous sign the trouble may continue: High blood pressure is one of the biggest risks for heart disease and “people’s blood pressure has actually measurably gone up over the course of the pandemic,” she said.
Some of these patients have what’s known as long COVID, the catchall term for dozens of symptoms that often include fatigue and brain fog. The National Institutes of Health is beginning small studies of a few possible treatments for certain long COVID symptoms, including a heartbeat problem.
But Cheng said patients and doctors alike need to know that sometimes, cardiovascular trouble is the first or main symptom of damage the coronavirus left behind.
“These are individuals who wouldn’t necessarily come to their doctor and say, ‘I have long COVID,’” she said.
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Camilleri first developed shortness of breath and later a string of heart-related and other symptoms after a late 2020 bout of COVID-19. He tried different treatments from multiple doctors to no avail, until winding up at Washington University’s long COVID clinic.
There, he saw Dr. Amanda Verma for worsening trouble with his blood pressure and heart rate. Verma is part of a cardiology team that studied a small group of patients with perplexing heart symptoms like Camilleri’s, and found abnormalities in blood flow may be part of the problem.
How? Blood flow jumps when people move around and subsides during rest. But some long COVID patients don’t get enough of a drop during rest because the fight-or-flight system that controls stress reactions stays activated, Verma said.
Some also have trouble with the lining of their small blood vessels not dilating and constricting properly to move blood through, she added.
Hoping that helped explain some of Camilleri’s symptoms, Verma prescribed some heart medicines that dilate blood vessels and others to dampen that fight-or-flight response.
Back in the gym, Hughes, a physical therapist who works with long COVID patients, came up with a careful rehab plan after the treadmill test exposed erratic jumps in Camilleri’s heart rate.
“We’d see it worse if you were not on Dr. Verma’s meds,” Hughes said, showing Camilleri exercises to do while lying down and monitoring his heart rate. “We need to rewire your system” to normalize that fight-or-flight response.
Camilleri said he noticed some improvement as Verma mixed and matched prescriptions based on his reactions. Then he developed even more health problems after a second bout of COVID-19 in the spring, a disability that forced him to retire.
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How big is the post-COVID heart risk? To find out, Al-Aly analyzed medical records from a massive Veterans Administration database. People who’d survived COVID-19 early in the pandemic were more likely to experience abnormal heartbeats, blood clots, chest pain and palpitations, even heart attacks and strokes up to a year later compared to the uninfected. That includes even middle-aged people without prior signs of heart disease
Based on those findings, Al-Aly estimated 4 of every 100 people need care for some kind of heart-related symptom in the year after recovering from COVID-19.
Per person, that’s a small risk. But he said the pandemic’s sheer enormity means it added up to millions left with at least some cardiovascular symptom. While a reinfection might still cause trouble, Al-Aly’s now studying whether that overall risk dropped thanks to vaccination and milder coronavirus strains.
More recent research confirms the need to better understand and address these cardiac aftershocks. An analysis this spring of a large U.S. insurance database found long COVID patients were about twice as likely to seek care for cardiovascular problems including blood clots, abnormal heartbeats or stroke in the year after infection, compared to similar patients who’d avoided COVID-19.
A post-infection link to heart damage isn’t that surprising, Verma noted. She pointed to rheumatic fever, an inflammatory reaction to untreated strep throat –- especially before antibiotics were common — that scars the heart’s valves.
“Is this going to become the next rheumatic heart disease? We don’t know,” she said.
But Al-Aly says there’s a simple take-home message: You can’t change your history of COVID-19 infections but if you’ve ignored other heart risks –- like high cholesterol or blood pressure, poorly controlled diabetes or smoking -– now’s the time to change that.
“These are the ones we can do something about. And I think they’re more important now than they were in 2019,” he said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Here we go again: COVID-19 hospital admissions have inched upward in the United States since early July in a small-scale echo of the three previous summers.
With an updated vaccine still months away, this summer bump in new hospitalizations might be concerning, but the number of patients is far lower than before. A look at what we know:
HOW BAD IS THE SPIKE?
For the week ending July 29, COVID-19 hospital admissions were at 9,056. That’s an increase of about 12% from the previous week.
But it’s a far cry from past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022.
“It is ticking up a little bit, but it’s not something that we need to raise any alarm bells over,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It’s likely that infections are rising too, but the data is scant. Federal authorities ended the public health emergency in May, so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many states no longer track the number of positive test results.
WHAT ABOUT DEATHS?
Since early June, about 500 to 600 people have died each week. The number of deaths appears to be stable this summer, although past increases in deaths have lagged behind hospitalizations.
HOW ARE WE TRACKING THE VIRUS?
The amount of the COVID-19 virus in sewage water has been rising since late June across the nation. In the coming weeks, health officials say they’ll keep a close eye on wastewater levels as people return from summer travel and students go back to school.
Higher levels of COVID-19 in wastewater concentrations are being found in the Northeast and South, said Cristin Young, an epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, the CDC’s wastewater surveillance contractor.
“It’s important to remember right now the concentrations are still fairly low,” Young said, adding it’s about 2.5 times lower than last summer.
“There are a couple that we’re watching, but we’re not seeing anything like delta or omicron,” Young said, referencing variants that fueled previous surges.
And mutations in the virus don’t necessarily make it more dangerous.
“Just because we have a new subvariant doesn’t mean that we are destined to have an increase in bad outcomes,” Dowdy said.
WHEN IS THE NEW VACCINE COMING?
This fall, officials expect to see updated COVID-19 vaccines that contain one version of the omicron strain, called XBB.1.5. It’s an important change from today’s combination shots, which mix the original coronavirus strain with last year’s most common omicron variants.
It’s not clear exactly when people can start rolling up their sleeves for what officials hope is an annual fall COVID-19 shot. Pfizer, Moderna and smaller manufacturer Novavax all are brewing doses of the XBB update but the Food and Drug Administration will have to sign off on each, and the CDC must then issue recommendations for their use.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, the new CDC director, said she expects people will get their COVID-19 shots where they get their flu shots — at pharmacies and at work — rather than at dedicated locations that were set up early in the pandemic as part of the emergency response.
“This is going to be our first fall and winter season coming out of the public health emergency, and I think we are all recognizing that we are living with COVID, flu, and RSV,” Cohen told The Associated Press last week. “But the good news is we have more tools than ever before.”
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AP Medical Writers Lauran Neergaard and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Cyprus’ veterinarians association on Friday lauded a government decision to allow its stock of human coronavirus medication to be used on cats to fight a local mutation of a feline virus that has killed thousands of animals on the Mediterranean island.
The association said in a statement that it had petitioned the government for access to the medication at “reasonable prices” from the beginning of this year, when the mutation that causes lethal Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) began to noticeably crop up in the island’s cat population.
“We want to assure that we will continue to investigate and control the rise in case of FCov-2023,” the association said.
Cyprus Veterinary Services head Hristodoulos Pipis told the state broadcaster Friday that cat owners can receive medication in pill form at 2.5 euros ( $2.74) for each pill at their local veterinarian’s office following a formal examination and diagnosis.
Local animal activists had claimed that the mutation had killed as many as 300,000 cats, but Association President Nektaria Ioannou Arsenoglou says that’s an exaggeration.
Arsenoglou had told The Associated Press that an association survey of 35 veterinary clinics indicated an island-wide total of about 8,000 deaths. Pipis corroborated those findings.
According to Arsenoglou, FIP is nearly always lethal if left untreated, but medication can nurse cats back to health in approximately 85% of cases in both the “wet” and “dry” forms of the illness.
What made FIP treatment difficult was the high price of the medication that activists said put it out of reach of many cat care givers.
Spread through contact with cat feces, neither the virus or its mutation can be passed on to humans. The feline coronavirus has been around since 1963. Previous epidemics eventually fizzled out without the use of any medication, Arsenoglou said.
Measures have already been enacted to prevent the export of the mutation through mandatory medical check-ups of all felines destined for adoption abroad.
It’s unclear how many feral cats live in Cyprus, where they are generally beloved and have a long history dating back thousands of years.
