On a moonless summer night in Hawaii, krill, fish and crabs swirl through a beam of light as two researchers peer into the water above a vibrant reef.

Minutes later, like clockwork, they see eggs and sperm from spawning coral drifting past their boat. They scoop up the fishy-smelling blobs and put them into test tubes.

In this Darwinian experiment, the scientists are trying to speed up coral’s evolutionary clock to breed “super corals” that can better withstand the impacts of global warming.

For the past five years, the researchers have been conducting experiments to prove their theories would work. Now, they’re getting ready to plant laboratory-raised corals in the ocean to see how they survive in nature.

“Assisted evolution started out as this kind of crazy idea that you could actually help something change and allow that to survive better because it is changing,” said Kira Hughes, a University of Hawaii researcher and the project’s manager.

Speeding up nature

Researchers tested three methods of making corals more resilient:

Selective breeding that carries on desirable traits from parents.

Acclimation that conditions corals to tolerate heat by exposing them to increasing temperatures.

And modifying the algae that give corals essential nutrients.Hughes said the methods all have proved successful in the lab.

 

And while some other scientists worried this is meddling with nature, Hughes said the rapidly warming planet leaves no other options.

“We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future,” she said.

When ocean temperatures rise, coral releases its symbiotic algae that supply nutrients and impart its vibrant colors. The coral turns white — a process called bleaching — and can quickly become sick and die.

For more than a decade, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef.

So, researchers are focusing on those hardy survivors, hoping to enhance their heat tolerance. And they found selective breeding held the most promise for Hawaii’s reefs.

“Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors, but increasing temperatures are probably the most severe,” said Crawford Drury, chief scientist at Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab. “And so that’s what our focus is on, working with parents that are really thermally tolerant.”

A novel idea

In 2015, Ruth Gates, who launched the resilience lab, and Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science published a paper on assisted evolution during one of the world’s worst bleaching events.

The scientists proposed bringing corals into a lab to help them evolve into more heat-tolerant animals. And the idea attracted Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded the first phase of research and whose foundation still supports the program.

“We’ve given (coral) experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive,” Gates told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview.

 

Gates, who died of brain cancer in 2018, also said she wanted people to know how “intimately reef health is intertwined with human health.”

Coral reefs, often called the rainforests of the sea, provide food for humans and marine animals, shoreline protection for coastal communities, jobs for tourist economies and even medicine to treat illnesses such as cancer, arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease.

A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other research organizations concluded bleaching events are the biggest threat to the world’s coral reefs. Scientists found that between 2009 and 2018, the world lost about 14% of its coral.

Assisted evolution was not widely accepted when first proposed.

Van Oppen said there were concerns about losing genetic diversity and critics who said the scientists were “playing gods” by tampering with the reef.

“Well, you know, (humans) have already intervened with the reef for very long periods of time,” van Oppen said. “All we’re trying to do is to repair the damage.”

Rather than editing genes or creating anything unnatural, researchers are just nudging what could already happen in the ocean, she said. “We are really focusing first on as local a scale as possible to try and maintain and enhance what is already there.”

Millions of years in the making

Still, there are lingering questions.

“We have discovered lots of reasons why corals don’t bleach,” said Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist and professor at Stanford University. “Just because you find a coral that isn’t bleaching in the field or in the lab doesn’t mean it’s permanently heat tolerant.”

Corals have been on Earth for about 250 million years and their genetic code is not fully understood.

 

“This is not the first time any coral on the entire planet has ever been exposed to heat,” Palumbi said. “So the fact that all corals are not heat resistant tells you … that there’s some disadvantage to it. And if there weren’t a disadvantage, they’d all be heat resistant.”

But Palumbi thinks the assisted evolution work has a valuable place in coral management plans because “reefs all over the world are in desperate, desperate, desperate trouble.”

The project has gained broad support and spurred research around the world. Scientists in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany and elsewhere are doing their own coral resilience work. The U.S. government also backs the effort.

Assisted evolution “is really impressive and very consistent with a study that we conducted with the National Academies of Sciences,” said Jennifer Koss, the director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program.

Major hurdles

There are still serious challenges.

Scalability is one. Getting lab-bred corals out into the ocean and having them survive will be hard, especially since reintroduction has to happen on a local level to avoid bringing detrimental biological material from one region to another.

James Guest, a coral ecologist in the United Kingdom, leads a project to show selectively bred corals not only survive longer in warmer water, but can also be successfully reintroduced on a large scale.

“It’s great if we can do all this stuff in the lab, but we have to show that we can get very large numbers of them out onto the reef in a cost-effective way,” Guest said.

Scientists are testing delivery methods, such as using ships to pump young corals into the ocean and deploying small underwater robots to plant coral.

No one is proposing assisted evolution alone will save the world’s reefs. The idea is part of a suite of measures – with proposals ranging from creating shades for coral to pumping cooler deep-ocean water onto reefs that get too warm.

The advantage of planting stronger corals is that after a generation or two, they should spread their traits naturally, without much human intervention.
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 Six years ago today, nearly 200 nations signed the Paris Climate Accord, where they agreed to keep the rise in global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Scientists say that threshold is an absolute minimum to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.”

As he wound up the recent COP26 in Glasgow, Guterres had that harsh warning for the 200 countries who had gathered to talk climate change — and how to slow it down.

Hanging over the summit was the deadline of 2030 for a drastic reduction of greenhouse emissions that was set six years ago at COP21 in Paris.

Former executive secretary of the U.N. Climate Convention, Christiana Figueres, remembers it as a historic event.

“It was a real breakthrough for the United Nations to have a completely unanimous, legally binding pathway for decarbonizing the global economy,” Figueres said.

Secretary of State at the time, John Kerry signed that agreement for the U.S.

“It really was an exciting moment when 195,196 countries come together simultaneously, all wanting to move in the same direction, understanding the stakes,” Kerry said. 

2015 was the hottest year on record. Scientists pointed to that as sure proof that global warming was real and serious.

But that record keeps on getting broken as the planet gets hotter year by year.

The World Meteorological Organization says the planet has been propelled into uncharted territory, with rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and “relentless” extreme weather events.

The WMO warns that “extreme” weather is the new normal.

Nonetheless, both Figueres and Kerry remain optimistic.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Figueres said. “The question is the timing, and I do feel that everyone came out of Glasgow with a renewed sense of timing.”

Kerry is now President Biden’s special envoy for climate.

He was back in Paris this week as part of a whistle stop tour of Europe to reassure leaders the U.S. is back in the game, after former President Donald Trump shut the door on climate issues.

“No one country can save this. Everybody has to act,” said Kerry.

That was also perhaps the main takeaway from the Glasgow summit — as developing nations pleaded with their richer neighbors not to be complacent with what has been achieved, but to keep pushing hard to meet that 2030 deadline, to save the planet.
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The eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin commercial space tourism rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age.

 

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn.

 

The crew capsule at the top of the fully autonomous, six-story-tall spaceship is designed to soar to an altitude of about 350,000 feet (106 km) before falling back to Earth, descending under a canopy of parachutes to the desert floor for a gentle landing.

 

The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, was expected to last a little more than 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight.

 

The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space—a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA’s original “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar surface.

 

Churchley was one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and co-anchor of ABC television’s “Good Morning America” show.

 

They were joined by four lesser-known, wealthy customers who paid undisclosed but presumably hefty sums for their New Shepard seats—space industry executive Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses made history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin.

 
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There’s no clear-cut definition for when a pandemic starts and ends, and how much of a threat a global outbreak is posing can vary by country.

“It’s somewhat a subjective judgment because it’s not just about the number of cases. It’s about severity and it’s about impact,” says Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief.

In January 2020, WHO designated the virus a global health crisis “of international concern.” A couple months later in March, the United Nations health agency described the outbreak as a “pandemic,” reflecting the fact that the virus had spread to nearly every continent and numerous other health officials were saying it could be described as such.

The pandemic may be widely considered over when WHO decides the virus is no longer an emergency of international concern, a designation its expert committee has been reassessing every three months. But when the most acute phases of the crisis ease within countries could vary.

“There is not going to be one day when someone says, ‘OK, the pandemic is over,'” says Dr. Chris Woods, an infectious disease expert at Duke University. Although there’s no universally agreed-upon criteria, he said countries will likely look for sustained reduction in cases over time.

Scientists expect COVID-19 will eventually settle into becoming a more predictable virus like the flu, meaning it will cause seasonal outbreaks but not the huge surges we’re seeing right now. But even then, Woods says some habits, such as wearing masks in public places, might continue.

“Even after the pandemic ends, COVID will still be with us,” he says.
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As the omicron variant sweeps through South Africa, Dr. Unben Pillay is seeing dozens of sick patients a day. Yet he hasn’t had to send anyone to the hospital.

That’s one of the reasons why he, along with other doctors and medical experts, suspect that the omicron version really is causing milder COVID-19 than delta, even if it seems to be spreading faster.

“They are able to manage the disease at home,” Pillay said of his patients. “Most have recovered within the 10- to 14-day isolation period.” said Pillay.

And that includes older patients and those with health problems that can make them more vulnerable to becoming severely ill from a coronavirus infection, he said.

In the two weeks since omicron first was reported in Southern Africa, other doctors have shared similar stories. All caution that it will take many more weeks to collect enough data to be sure, their observations and the early evidence offer some clues.

According to South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases:

Only about 30% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in recent weeks have been seriously ill, less than half the rate as during the first weeks of previous pandemic waves.
Average hospital stays for COVID-19 have been shorter this time -- about 2.8 days compared to eight days.
Just 3% of patients hospitalized recently with COVID-19 have died, versus about 20% in the country’s earlier outbreaks.

“At the moment, virtually everything points toward it being milder disease,” Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute, said, citing the national institute’s figures and other reports. “It’s early days, and we need to get the final data.

Often hospitalizations and deaths happen later, and we are only two weeks into this wave.”

In the meantime, scientists around the world are watching case counts and hospitalization rates, while testing to see how well current vaccines and treatments hold up. While delta is still the dominant coronavirus strain worldwide, omicron cases are popping up in dozens of countries, with South Africa the epicenter.

 

Pillay practices in the country’s Gauteng province, where the omicron version has taken hold. With 16 million residents, It’s South Africa’s most populous province and includes the largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria. Gauteng saw a 400% rise in new cases in the first week of December, and testing shows omicron is responsible for more than 90% of them, according to health officials.

Pillay says his COVID-19 patients during the last delta wave “had trouble breathing and lower oxygen levels. Many needed hospitalization within days,” he said. The patients he’s treating now have milder, flu-like symptoms, such as body aches and a cough, he said.

Pillay is a director of an association representing some 5,000 general practitioners across South Africa, and his colleagues have documented similar observations about omicron. Netcare, the largest private health care provider, is also reporting less severe cases of COVID-19.

But the number of cases is climbing. South Africa confirmed 22,400 new cases on Thursday and 19,000 on Friday, up from about 200 per day a few weeks ago. The new surge has infected 90,000 people in the past month, Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said Friday.

“Omicron has driven the resurgence,” Phaahla said, citing studies that say 70% of the new cases nationwide are from omicron.

The coronavirus reproduction rate in the current wave – indicating the number of people likely to be infected by one person — is 2.5, the highest that South Africa has recorded during the pandemic, he said.

“Because this is such a transmissible variant, we’re seeing increases like we never saw before,” said Waasila Jassat, who tracks hospital data for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

Of the patients hospitalized in the current wave, 86% weren’t vaccinated against the coronavirus, Jassat said. The COVID-patients in South Africa’s hospitals now also are younger than at other periods of the pandemic: about two-thirds are under 40.

Jassat said that even though the early signs are that omicron cases are less severe, the volume of new COVID-19 cases may still overwhelm South Africa’s hospitals and result in a higher number of severe symptoms and deaths.

“That is the danger always with the waves,” she said. 

 
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The eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard is set for a ride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin commercial rocket ship on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, is one of six individuals due for liftoff at 8:45 a.m. Central time (1445 GMT) from Blue Origin’s launch site outside the rural west Texas town of Van Horn.

They will be flying aboard the crew capsule of a fully autonomous, 6-story-tall spacecraft dubbed New Shepard, designed to soar to an altitude of about 106 kilometers before falling back to Earth for a parachute landing on the desert floor.

The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, is expected to last a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight.

The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space — a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA’s original ‘Mercury Seven’ astronauts.

A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar surface.

Churchley is one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and co-anchor of ABC television’s Good Morning America show.

They are joined by four lesser-known, wealthy customers who paid undisclosed but presumably hefty sums for their New Shepard seats — space industry executive Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses are set to make history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin.

Saturday’s flight is expected to reach a maximum height of about 106 kilometers – just above the internationally recognized boundary of space, the Karman Line, which is roughly 100 kilometers above Earth.

The launch marks the third space tourism flight for Blue Origin, the company Bezos – founder and executive chairman of retail giant Amazon — formed two decades ago, and the company’s first with a crew of six passengers.

Bezos himself tagged along on Blue Origin’s inaugural flight in July, joining his brother, Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daeman, a Dutch high school graduate and beneficiary of a $28 million auction sweepstakes.

Actor William Shatner, who embodied the promise of space travel in his role as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the 1960s TV series Star Trek, joined the second New Shepard crew in October to become the oldest person in space at age 90.

British billionaire Richard Branson beat Bezos to the punch by nine days when he rode along on the first fully crewed voyage of his own space tourism venture Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, soaring to the edge of space over New Mexico in a rocket plane released at high altitude from a carrier jet.

A third player in the burgeoning space tourism sector, fellow billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, inaugurated his SpaceX citizen-astronaut service in September with the launch of the first all-civilian crew ever to reach Earth orbit. 

 
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More U.S. states desperate to fight COVID-19 are calling on the National Guard and other military personnel to assist virus-weary medical staffs at hospitals and other care centers.

Unvaccinated people are overwhelming hospitals in certain states, especially in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. New York, meanwhile, announced a statewide indoor mask order, effective Monday and lasting five weeks through the holiday season.

“We’re entering a time of uncertainty, and we could either plateau here or our cases could get out of control,” Governor Kathy Hochul warned Friday.

In Michigan, health director Elizabeth Hertel was equally blunt: “I want to be absolutely clear: You are risking serious illness, hospitalization and even death” without a vaccination.

The seven-day rolling average for daily new cases in the U.S. rose over the past two weeks to 117,677 by Thursday, compared to 84,756 on Nov. 25, Thanksgiving Day, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has soared to about 54,000 on average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, the country is approaching a new milestone of 800,000 COVID-19 deaths. More than 200 million Americans, or about 60% of the population, are now fully vaccinated.

In Maine, which hit a pandemic high this week with nearly 400 COVID-19 patients in hospitals, as many as 75 members of the National Guard were being summoned to try to keep people out of critical care with monoclonal antibodies and to perform other non-clinical tasks.

Maine has one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the country – 73% – but that rate lags in many of the state’s rural pockets.

The New York National Guard said it had deployed 120 Army medics and Air Force medical technicians to 12 nursing homes and long-term care facilities to relieve fatigued staff.

Dr. Paolo Marciano, chief medical officer at Beaumont Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan, said it was a “tremendous lifeline” to get assistance from the Defense Department, which has more than 60 nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists assigned to the state.

“It allowed us to be able to care for the COVID patients and at the same time still maintain the level of care that cancer patients require or people with chronic illnesses,” Marciano said. “Where we are today is really just keeping our heads above water.”

New York’s mask order covers all indoor public places unless a business or venue has a vaccine requirement. The state reported more than 68,000 positive tests for the virus in a seven-day period that ended Wednesday, the most for any seven-day stretch since February.

New York City and several upstate New York counties already have mask mandates. Critics, however, said the governor’s announcement was another burden for businesses.

“Government overreach at its worst,” said Republican Assemblyman Mike Lawler.

Michigan is sending more ventilators to hospitals and asking for even more from the national stockpile. Infection rates and hospitalizations are at record levels, 21 months into the pandemic. The first case of the omicron variant was confirmed Thursday in the Grand Rapids area.

The largest hospital system in Indiana enlisted the National Guard for support this week after the number of COVID-19 patients in the state more than doubled in the past month. The state’s COVID-19 hospitalizations are now higher than Indiana’s summer surge that peaked in September and are approaching the pandemic peak reached in late 2020.

 
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Lung cancer is the deadliest form of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. But it doesn’t get nearly the same amount of research dollars as breast or prostate cancer. That may be changing, thanks to one man’s efforts and new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. VOA’s Saba Shah Khan reports.
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South Korea, widely seen as a global model of coronavirus containment, faces its biggest pandemic challenge yet, as COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise after the country began removing pandemic related restrictions.

Daily caseloads surpassed 7,000 Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That is quadruple the daily numbers reported at the beginning of November, when South Korea pivoted toward its living with COVID-19 plan.

In the Seoul metropolitan area, where more than half the country’s population resides, intensive care hospital beds are full. The country has also hit new daily highs for the number of severely ill COVID-19 patients, which stood at 857 Thursday.

Although South Korea has tallied only a fraction of the cases and deaths of other developed countries such as the United States and Britain, its fatality rate rose to 1.4% over the past week. That is the ninth highest among 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.

South Korea’s deteriorating situation demonstrates the challenges of returning to life as normal, complicated by the delta variant that undermined government projections, even in a country that had until now been spared the worst of the pandemic.

Grim warnings

Government officials, who have been careful not to raise unnecessary alarms as they sought to keep businesses open, are now sounding a grimmer tone.

At a meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters on Friday, Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum, who oversees the pandemic response, judged that the country’s medical response capability was quickly burning out, warning that stricter social distancing measures may need to be enforced if the “risky situation” does not soon turn around.

The prime minister again placed heavy emphasis on vaccination, including for minors. He announced the interval between the second vaccine shot and boosters would be shortened to three months.

The government paused its “living with COVID-19” transition Monday, replacing it with an expanded “vaccine pass” mandate. The new plan requires people who gather in limited groups at restaurants and cafes to show proof of vaccination or a very recent negative PCR test result upon entry. This usually takes the form of a smartphone application, called COOV. The mandate extends to other public facilities, including gyms, study rooms and bars.

Risk control

The figure that health officials are watching closely is the number of severe COVID-19 patients, especially as hospitals are taxed. A recent projection by the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences put that figure as likely to exceed 1,000 by next week, and the overall daily caseload could reach the 12,000 level by the end of the month.

That is an alarming prospect for hospital staff, who are already exhausted by the unrelenting stream of COVID-19 patients.

“Non-COVID patients are not able to access the ER.” Dr. Chon Eun-mi, a pulmonologist at Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital, told VOA.

“The ER is clogged with COVID patients, leaving people with other symptoms no choice but to wait it out at home. Surgeries are also being delayed,” she said.

It’s a similar picture at other major hospitals across Seoul, nearby Incheon and the surrounding Gyeonggi province.

Kim issued an administrative order for 1,700 more hospital beds to be secured outside of the capital.

Those 60 years and older, with waning vaccine immunity, have made up most of the severe breakthrough cases as the delta variant spreads in the country.

“The government didn’t expect this many severe COVID cases since we had made vaccination progress,” Chon said, referring to South Korea’s 92% vaccination rate among adults.

“It broadly adopted its ‘living with COVID’ transition, more people moved about, and those who were immunocompromised or elderly became reinfected. But, this time, they had to wait at home because there were no available hospital beds. Their conditions worsened and they died before they could get real help,” she said.

Chon said COVID-19 patients should be centralized at a large facility such as a stadium, convention hall or borrowed hotel, where those with mild symptoms can receive antibody or remdesivir treatment before their conditions worsen. She said the current approach of remotely treating mild patients from home is not working.

The omicron factor

South Korea has detected at least 63 cases of the omicron variant, 48 of which were linked to community spread.

Omicron, which the World Health Organization last month designated a variant of concern, was first reported by South Africa. Health experts fear it may be more transmissible, but it is not yet clear if it causes more or less severe symptoms.

Seoul has limited arrivals from a growing list of African countries, most recently Ghana and Zambia. It also instituted a mandatory 10-day quarantine on all international arrivals, regardless of their vaccination status.

Dr. Chung Jae-hoon, adviser to the prime minister’s office and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, recently offered this assessment to a local newspaper.

“Expect to stay in this COVID-19 reality for at least another three years. Delta has taught us that vaccination alone will not end the crisis. The first half of next year will be even harder for medical staff. Bigger challenges remain,” he said.

Lee Juhyun contributed to this report.
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The United States rushed millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses for children ages 5-11 across the nation, but demand for inoculations for younger kids has been low, more than a dozen state public health officials and physicians said.

Of the 28 million eligible U.S. children in that age group, around 5 million have received at least one dose, according to federal data, likely satisfying initial pent-up demand from parents who were waiting to vaccinate their kids.

At the current pace, fewer than half of U.S. children ages 5-11 are expected to be fully vaccinated in the coming months, state officials told Reuters. Some states, including Mississippi, said thousands of vaccine doses are sitting idle.

“We are concerned that the demand is not going to be as quick and as great as it was for the adult population,” said Karyl Rattay, director of Delaware’s division of public health.

A smaller dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 5-11 received U.S. authorization last month, with the first shots going into young arms on Nov. 3.

Vaccine hesitancy among adult caregivers has affected the vaccination rate for this age group more than other groups, physicians told Reuters.

“I think parents are nervous. There’s probably a cohort of parents who felt comfortable vaccinating themselves… but are hesitant to vaccinate their children,” said Dr. Matthew Harris, a pediatrician leading COVID-19 vaccinations for the Northwell Health hospital system in New York.

The push to vaccinate children has taken on fresh urgency amid concerns that the new Omicron variant of the virus, first identified in southern Africa and Hong Kong in late November, will spread quickly in the United States, causing a surge in infections already back on the rise from the easily transmitted delta variant.

Given the pervasiveness of delta and prospects of new variants spreading in the United States, “having as much immunity in the population as possible is critical,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

While serious illness and death from COVID-19 among children is relatively rare, cases among unvaccinated people under age 17 have increased in recent months. Infected children can also pass COVID-19 to other people at higher risk of serious illness, including those who have already been vaccinated.

Some parents have been concerned about reports of heart inflammation, a rare vaccine side effect seen in young men at higher rates than the rest of the population.

On Tuesday, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said the agency has been scouring its database of adverse events and has not found any reports of the condition among 5- to 11-year-old recipients of the vaccine.

The children’s vaccine rollout may also be hampered by staffing shortages at healthcare providers, and greater reliance on pediatricians as opposed to larger and more efficient mass vaccination centers, said Sean O’Leary, a professor of pediatrics at University of Colorado.

Fewer than 20% of U.S. children ages 5-11 have gotten at least one shot so far, compared to around 80% of U.S. adults, according to federal data. Of particular concern is that the number of U.S. children getting COVID-19 shots may already be plateauing.

In the past week, more children have been receiving a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine than a first, according to government data. That suggests a slowdown in demand aside from those who were anxious to get their kids vaccinated at the first opportunity.

“I think what we were hoping for was that parents would have these meaningful conversations with pediatricians and that would provide them confidence to vaccinate their kids,” Northwell’s Harris said. “I’m not sure that that’s really come to fruition.” 

 

 

 
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Health officials in the United States, Israel and other nations have for months been pushing for COVID-19 booster shots among older populations, and those calls are now growing worldwide.  The issue was discussed at an extraordinary meeting at World Health Organization in Geneva convened by SAGE, the 15-member Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on vaccination.

Current data show that vaccines against COVID-19 provide a robust level of protection against severe forms of disease. However, emerging evidence indicates vaccines begin to lose their effectiveness about six months after they have been administered. This puts older adults and people with underlying conditions at particular risk. 

Chair of SAGE, Alejandro Cravioto, says the group of experts agrees a booster shot would provide a greater level of protection for people at risk.  However, he notes vaccines are in short supply in many parts of the world.  He says the wide administration of booster doses risks exacerbating inequities in vaccine access.

He notes most current infections are among unvaccinated people, the majority of whom live in poor, developing countries.  He says SAGE believes they should receive these life-saving vaccines instead of further doses being provided to people who already are fully inoculated against the coronavirus.

“For the time being, we continue to support — one, the need for equity in the distribution and allocation of vaccines and, two, the use of third doses only on those that we have previously recommended.  Those that have received inactivated vaccines and those that are immuno-compromised, which are the two groups that we feel should be protected further by a third dose of the primary process,” he said.  

Cravioto said meeting participants also discussed the feasibility of mixing and matching different vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna to achieve full immunity against COVID.

“WHO supports a flexible approach to homologous or a single platform versus a heterologous mix and match schedules. We still believe that the best approach is to use the same vaccine for the two primary doses,” Cravioto said.

For national immunization programs, however, he said a different vaccine can be used for an additional third dose.  This, if the vaccine used for the two primary shots is in short supply and unavailable. 
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As cases of COVID-19 caused by the omicron variant soar in South Africa, hospital officials monitoring the outbreak say patient reports offer compelling evidence the variant causes illness that is less severe than previous forms of the disease.

“Most of the people we’re seeing are having mild or moderate form of COVID-19, and not the severe form that requires hospitalization and may lead to death,” said Dr. Richard Friedland, the chief executive of Netcare, one of South Africa’s largest private hospital groups, based in Johannesburg.

“Patients present with mild to moderate flu-like symptoms, a scratchy or sore throat, a headache, or a runny or blocked nose,” he said.  

Similar symptoms are being reported nationwide as hospitals monitor patients.

World health authorities caution that the patient information is preliminary, and they say it is not known how omicron will behave as it spreads more widely.

The World Health Organization says the variant has been found in more than 50 countries. Anecdotal information from countries including the United States so far indicates less severe symptoms than exhibited in previous variants, echoing findings in South Africa hospitals.

“We certainly have information from South Africa that many of the patients that are identified with omicron have a milder course of disease, but it does take time for people to go through the full course of their infection,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19.

South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases reported 20,000 new COVID-19 cases and 36 COVID-19 related deaths Wednesday, the highest numbers since the omicron variant was first detected. 

NetCare’s Dr. Friedland said the company’s hospitals are seeing far fewer admissions, however, than in the nation’s earlier phases of COVID-19 and most patients are not suffering enough to need oxygen.

“Ninety percent of the patients we have in the hospital now need no oxygen at all,” he said. “They’re on room air. All they have is mild upper respiratory tract infections.

“So, it’s a very, very different clinical picture,” he said. “That contrasts to 100% of patients that we admitted during the first, the second and the third wave, who were very sick, and all required oxygen therapy.”

Most omicron-positive people in NetCare’s hospitals are what Friedland called “incidental” COVID-19 patients, who come to the hospital because of other emergencies, or to have a surgical procedure, and are subsequently diagnosed with coronavirus.

Roughly 75% of people in NetCare hospitals diagnosed with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, Dr. Friedland said. He added that patient admission data appears to be “clear evidence” that current vaccines offer some protection against omicron.

Some 36% of South Africans are fully vaccinated and the government is strongly urging citizens to get the shots.

Some information in this report came from Reuters. 
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