Total Doses Distributed = 746,456,955. Total Doses Administered = 586,508,124. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 258,463,968. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 221,190,484.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
On a balmy Sunday night, residents of an upscale Shanghai compound took to the streets to decry lockdown restrictions imposed by their community. By the following morning, they were free to leave.
The triumphant story quickly spread on chat groups across the city this week, sparking one question in the minds of those who remained under lockdown: Shouldn’t we do the same?
By the end of the week, other groups of residents had confronted management in their complexes, and some had won at least a partial release.
While it’s unclear how widespread they are, the incidents reflect the frustration that has built up after more than seven weeks of lockdown, even as the number of new daily cases has fallen to a few hundred in a city of 25 million people.
They also are a reminder of the power of China’s neighborhood committees that the ruling Communist Party relies on to spread propaganda messages, enforce its decisions and even settle personal disputes. Such committees and the residential committees under them have become the target of complaints, especially after some in Shanghai and other cities refused to allow residents out even after official restrictions were relaxed.
More than 21 million people in Shanghai are now in “precaution zones,” the least restrictive category. In theory, they are free to go out. In practice, the decision is up to their residential committees, resulting in a kaleidoscope of arbitrary rules.
Some are allowed out, but only for a few hours with a specially issued pass for one day or certain days of the week. Some places permit only one person per household to leave. Others forbid people to leave at all.
“We have already been given at least three different dates when we are going to reopen, and none of them were real,” said Weronika Truszczynska, a graduate student from Poland who posted vlogs about her experience.
“The residential committee told us you can wait a week, we are going to reopen probably on June 1st,” she said. “No one believed it.”
Two days after the Sunday night breakout at the upscale Huixianju compound, more than a dozen residents of Truszczynska’s complex confronted their managers on a rainy Tuesday,
The residents, who were mostly Chinese, demanded to be allowed to leave without time limits or restrictions on how many per household. After the demands were not met, some returned to protest a second day. This time, four police officers stood watch.
On Thursday afternoon, community representatives knocked on the doors of each resident with a new policy: Write their name and apartment number on a list, take a temperature check, scan a barcode — and they were free to leave.
“We got the possibility of going out just because we were brave enough to protest” Truszczynska said of her fellow residents.
The Shanghai lockdown has also prompted resistance from people being taken away to quarantine and workers required to sleep at their workplaces. Videos on social media showed what were said to be employees of a factory operated by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer Inc. trying to force their way out of the facility in early May.
The party’s strict anti-virus campaign has been aided by an urban environment in which hundreds of millions of people in China live in gated apartment compounds or walled neighborhoods that can be easily blocked off.
The front line for enforcement are the neighborhood committees that are responsible for keeping track of every resident in every urban household nationwide and enforcing public health and sanitation rules.
Many tend to err on the side of over-enforcement, aware of the example made of public officials who are fired or criticized for failing in their pandemic prevention duties.
The importance of neighborhood committees dwindled in the 1990s as the Communist Party relaxed restrictions on the movement of citizens, but they have been undergoing a resurgence in an ongoing tightening of societal controls under President Xi Jinping.
The incident at Huixianju prompted others to speak out. In a series of videos that circulated this week, about two dozen people march toward the Western Nanjing Road Police Station, chanting “Respect the law, give me back my life.”
Residents of a compound in Jing’an district saw the gates of neighboring compounds open over the past month — yet theirs remained locked. On Wednesday, about two dozen gathered at the gate, calling out to speak with a representative.
“I want to understand what are the neighborhood leaders planning?” one woman asks in a video of the incident. Another woman chimes in: “Are you making progress?” A third resident points out that they should be free by now, since the compound has been case-free for a while. “Didn’t they say on television that things are opening up? We saw it on television,” an older man says.
The next day, the community issued one-day passes — residents were allowed out for two hours on Friday, with no word on what would happen after that.
Shanghai authorities have declared a June target for life to return to normal. But some people aren’t waiting, pushing the boundaries bit by bit.
On Thursday night, more than a dozen young people gathered for a street concert in the same district where Sunday’s protest took place. Video of the last song, “Tomorrow will be better,” was shared widely on social media.
A police car parked nearby with its flashing red and blue lights and headlights on. As the last song drew to a close, an officer wearing a face shield strode toward the group and said, “Okay you’ve had enough fun. It’s time to go back.” The crowd dispersed.
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Associated Press researcher Si Chen in Shanghai and writer Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
Total Doses Distributed = 744,812,955. Total Doses Administered = 586,008,740. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 258,394,333. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 221,128,528.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
The coronavirus mutant that is now dominant in the United States is a member of the omicron family but scientists say it spreads faster than its omicron predecessors, is adept at escaping immunity and might possibly cause more serious disease.
Why? Because it combines properties of both omicron and delta, the nation’s dominant variant in the middle of last year.
A genetic trait that harkens back to the pandemic’s past, known as a “delta mutation,” appears to allow the virus “to escape pre-existing immunity from vaccination and prior infection, especially if you were infected in the omicron wave,” said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. That’s because the original omicron strain that swept the world didn’t have the mutation.
The omicron “subvariant” gaining ground in the U.S. — known as BA.2.12.1 and responsible for 58% of U.S. COVID-19 cases last week — isn’t the only one affected by the delta mutation. The genetic change is also present in the omicron relatives that together dominate in South Africa, known as BA.4 and BA.5. Those have exactly the same mutation as delta, while BA.2.12.1 has one that’s nearly identical.
This genetic change is bad news for people who caught the original omicron and thought that made them unlikely to get COVID-19 again soon. Although most people don’t know for sure which variant caused their illness, the original omicron caused a giant wave of cases late last year and early this year.
Long said lab data suggests a prior infection with the original omicron is not very protective against reinfection with the new mutants, though the true risk of being reinfected no matter the variant is unique to every person and situation.
In a twist, however, those sickened by delta previously may have some extra armor to ward off the new mutants. A study released before it was reviewed by other scientists, by researchers at Ohio State University, found that COVID patients in intensive care with delta infections induced antibodies that were better at neutralizing the new mutants than patients who caught the original omicron.
“The omicron infection antibody does not appear to protect well against the subvariants compared to delta,” said Dr. Shan-Lu Liu, a study author who co-directs the viruses and emerging pathogens program at Ohio State.
But Liu said the level of protection a delta infection provides depends partly on how long ago someone was ill. That’s because immunity wanes over time.
People who got sick with delta shouldn’t think of themselves as invulnerable to the new subvariants, especially if they’re unvaccinated, Long said. “I wouldn’t say anyone is safe.”
One bright spot? Booster shots can provide strong protection against the new mutants, Liu said. In general, vaccines and prior infection can protect people from the worst outcomes of COVID-19. At this point, scientists say, it’s too early to know if the new mutant gaining ground in the U.S. will cause a significant uptick in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Scientists are still trying to figure out how virulent these new mutants are. Long said he hasn’t seen anything that answers that question for him, but Liu said emerging data points toward more serious illness. Liu said the subvariants have properties suggesting they spread more efficiently cell-to-cell.
The virus “just hides in the cell and spreads through cell-to-cell contact,” Liu said. “That’s more scary because the virus does not come out for the antibody to work.”
Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute, said the new mutants certainly don’t appear less virulent than previous versions of omicron, and whether they are more virulent or not “will become clear in the months ahead.”
In the meantime, scientists expect the latest powerhouse mutants to spread quickly, since they are more transmissible than their predecessors.
Though home testing makes it tough to track all U.S. COVID cases, data from Johns Hopkins University shows that cases are averaging nearly 107,000 a day, up from about 87,000 two weeks ago. And new hospital admissions of patients with COVID-19 have been trending upwards since around mid-April, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I’m hopeful that we don’t see a similar increase in hospitalizations that we’ve had in prior waves,” Long said. “But with COVID, any time you have lots of people being infected, it’s just a numbers game. Some of those people are going to be severe. Some of those people are going to need hospitalization. Some of them, unfortunately, are going to pass away.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
The number of new coronavirus cases and deaths are still falling globally after peaking in January, the World Health Organization said.
In its latest weekly assessment of the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said there were more than 3.7 million new infections and 9,000 deaths in the last week, drops of 3% and 11% respectively. COVID-19 cases rose in only two regions of the world: the Americas and the Western Pacific. Deaths increased by 30% in the Middle East, but were stable or decreased everywhere else.
WHO said it is tracking all omicron subvariants as “variants of concern.” It noted that countries which had a significant wave of disease caused by the omicron subvariant BA.2 appeared to be less affected by other subvariants like BA.4 and BA.5, which were responsible for the latest surge of disease in South Africa.
Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious diseases expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said it appeared that South Africa had passed its most recent wave of COVID-19 caused by the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants; the country has been on the forefront of the pandemic since first detecting the omicron variant last November.
Karim predicted that another mutated version of omicron might emerge in June, explaining that the large number of mutations in the variant meant there were more opportunities for it to evolve.
Meanwhile in Beijing, authorities in the Chinese capital ordered more workers and students to stay home and implemented additional mass testing Monday as cases of COVID-19 continue to rise. Numerous residential compounds in the city have restricted movement in and out, although lockdown conditions remain far less severe than in Shanghai, where millions of citizens have been under varying degrees of lockdown for two months.
China is vowing to stick to a “zero-COVID” policy despite the fact that the WHO describes the policy as “unsustainable,” given the infectious nature of omicron and its subvariants.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
Japan will open its borders to foreign tourists in June for the first time since imposing tight pandemic travel restrictions about two years ago, but only for package tours for now, the prime minister said Thursday.
Beginning June 10, Japan will allow the entry of people on tours with fixed schedules and guides, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said.
Tourists from areas with low COVID-19 infection rates who have received three vaccine doses will be exempt from testing and quarantine after entry.
Japan this week is hosting small experimental package tours from four countries, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and the United States. That experiment, which involves only 50 people who received special visas, not tourist visas, is to end May 31.
After facing criticism that its strict border controls were xenophobic, Japan began easing its restrictions earlier this year and currently allows entry of up to 10,000 people a day, including Japanese citizens, foreign students and some business travelers.
Japan will double the cap to 20,000 a day from June 1, which will also include package tour participants, said Makoto Shimoaraiso, a Cabinet official in charge of pandemic measures.
The scale of the package tours and other details will be finalized after officials evaluate the results of the current experimental tours, he said.
It will take some time before foreign visitors can come to Japan for individual tourism, Shimoaraiso said.
Japan’s tourism industry, hit hard by the border controls, is eager for foreign tourism to resume. COVID-19 infections have slowed in Japan since earlier this year and the government is gradually expanding social and economic activity.
Kishida said during a visit to London earlier this month that he planned to ease the border controls as early as June in line with the policies of other Group of Seven industrialized countries, but gave no further details.
Foreign tourist arrivals fell more than 90% in 2020 from a record 31.9 million the year before, almost wiping out the pre-pandemic inbound tourism market of more than 4 trillion yen ($31 billion).