Coronavirus Live Updates: US Coronavirus Cases Approach 50 Million – The Washington Post

Here’s what to know from news service reports about the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

• European Union health agencies are recommending mixing and matching coronavirus vaccines for both initial courses and booster doses. In a joint statement, the European Medicines Agency and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said evidence suggests that the combination of viral vector vaccines, such as the Johnson & Johnson-produced vaccine; and mRNA vaccines, such as the ones produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, produces good levels of antibodies against the virus.
• In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told cabinet members that early indications suggest the omicron variant is more transmissible than the delta variant. “The prime minister said it was too early to draw conclusions on the characteristics of omicron but that early indications were that it was more transmissible than delta,” Johnson’s spokesman told reporters Tuesday.
• In Austria, Chancellor Karl Nehammer said unvaccinated people will remain in lockdown when his country lifts its wider general lockdown next week. Last month, Austria became the first country in Europe to mandate the coronavirus vaccine for everyone eligible, as it reimposed a nationwide lockdown amid a surge in infections.
• In Germany, a prosecutor said a man killed his wife and three young children before taking his own life after authorities found that he faked a vaccination certificate. The man feared his children would be taken away from him when the forgery was discovered, the prosecutor said.

Gen Z is feeling the stresses of the pandemic more than any other age group, according to a U.S. survey released Monday.

Higher proportions of Americans between ages 13 and 24 say the pandemic has made their education, career goals and social lives more difficult, compared with millennials and Gen X.

About 45 percent of Gen Z respondents said maintaining ties with friends was harder, and 40 percent said their romantic relationships had become more difficult. Fewer Americans in older age groups reported the same difficulties, and they were less likely to say the pandemic had disrupted their education or careers, according to the survey.

The total number of reported coronavirus cases in the United States marched toward 50 million Monday, a mark that looms as the virus approaches two years of being detected in the country.

By late Monday, the United States had tallied 49.3 million coronavirus cases since the first infection surfaced in January 2020, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. There have been more than 786,000 deaths, and new cases were increasing by more than 118,000 per day, according to a seven-day average of the numbers.

Few of the new cases are likely to be caused by the newly discovered omicron variant — about which scientists are racing to learn and collect data — but regardless of which strain is responsible, the overall trend here and abroad is alarming.

Pharmaceutical companies Medicago and GlaxoSmithKline announced on Tuesday “positive efficacy and safety results” from a global trial using what they say is the world’s first plant-based coronavirus vaccine.

Studying 24,000 adults across six countries, the trial found that the overall efficacy rate of the vaccine candidate was 71 percent, rising to 75.3 percent against “COVID-19 of any severity for the globally dominant Delta variant.” However, the trial did not include the newly identified omicron variant.

The global Phase 3 placebo-controlled efficacy study used Medicago’s plant-based vaccine candidate in combination with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant, an ingredient that works to boost the immune response and efficacy of others’ vaccines.

The Canadian and British companies said they hoped their vaccine candidate would diversify the pool of shots available and said the trial had shown that it was “well-tolerated, with no related serious adverse events reported in the vaccine group.”

A British study has made the case for a more flexible approach to mixing and matching vaccine regimens, which is likely to support a swifter rollout in many countries still working to immunize their populations.

The study found that after a first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, using a second dose of a Moderna or Novavax shot generated a “robust” immune response, according to researchers at Britain’s University of Oxford.

The doses had a nine-week gap between the first and second shots, the Com-Cov study on more than 1,000 participants found. Its results were published in the Lancet medical journal Monday.

“This study therefore supports flexible use of these vaccines in primary immunisation schedules, which is crucial to help rapid deployment of these vaccines, especially in low- and middle-income countries where vaccine supply may be inconsistent,” it said.

The research showed that taking a Pfizer-BioNTech first dose and a Moderna second dose induced higher antibody and T-cell responses than the standard two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech schedule.

It also found that taking an Oxford-AstraZeneca shot followed by either a Moderna or Novavax injection also induced higher antibodies and T-cell responses than the “standard” two-dose Oxford-AstraZeneca regimen.

Matthew Snape, associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at Oxford and chief investigator on the trial, said in a statement that the results have been encouraging and helped offer a “more complete picture” of how different coronavirus vaccines could be used together.

“As well as providing evidence for flexibility in deployment, these results suggest this approach can also help generate better immune responses,” Snape added.

The study focused on the beta and delta variants of the virus, not the newly identified omicron variant, it said, and no safety concerns were raised.

The world should do more now to prepare for future pandemics, said Sarah Gilbert, one of the inventors of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.

“This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods,” Gilbert said as she delivered the 44th Richard Dimbleby Lecture, an annual address by an influential figure that will be aired Monday on the BBC. “The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both,” said Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at Oxford University.

“We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through, and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness,” Gilbert said, echoing earlier calls for more proactive funding for scientific research.

For companies whose employees are still toiling from their couches at home, the question of when to bring their full workforces back to the office has become even trickier.

In a pandemic when many decisions have hinged on risk tolerance, the coronavirus’s new omicron variant has complicated the process of calculating those hazards. Major corporations that had planned to shepherd all their employees back into offices in early 2022 now have to decide whether those dates make sense in light of further evidence of the pandemic’s unpredictability.

“There remains so much uncertainty, and uncertainty equals instability,” said Lars Schmidt, an author and podcast host who focuses on the future of work. “So when you’re trying to pretend that doesn’t exist and push people back into something they’re not ready for, you’re going to be met with resistance from employees.”

When he first learned he had tested positive for the corona­virus, President Donald Trump was already aboard Air Force One, en route to a massive rally in Middletown, Pa.

With him on the plane that Saturday evening were dozens of people — senior aides, Air Force One personnel, junior staffers, journalists and other members of the large entourage typical for a presidential trip — all squeezed together in the recirculating air of a jetliner.

“Stop the president,” White House physician Sean Conley told Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to a new book by Meadows set to publish Tuesday that was obtained by the Guardian newspaper. “He just tested positive for covid.”

But Meadows asserts in his book that it was too late to stop Trump and that a second rapid antigen test — apparently done using the same sample — came back negative. But under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump should have taken a more accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to confirm whether he had the coronavirus.

Wanderlust, and the money to fund it, made Alex Stow’s decision easy. After working a couple of years in an intensive care unit, he signed up to be a travel nurse, tripling his pay to about $95 an hour by agreeing to help short-staffed hospitals around the country for 13 weeks at a time.

“Travel” proved a bit of a misnomer. His current assignment is in Traverse City, Mich., only a few hours from his old full-time job in Lansing — close enough that he still works per-diem shifts at his previous hospital.

Now Stow, 25, is buying a truck and a camper and preparing to hit the road. He’ll work where he wants and take time off to see the country between nursing assignments.

“As soon as I found out that was a thing, I thought, ‘That’s got my name written all over it,’ ” said Stow, who agreed to discuss his new work life if the hospitals were not named.

If 2020 was the year travel nursing took off, with 35 percent growth over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, this year has propelled it to new heights, with an additional 40 percent growth expected, according to an independent analyst of the health-care workforce.