Tag Archives: COVID-19

U.S. Supreme Court rejects religious challenge to New York vaccine mandate

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected challenges brought by a group of Christian doctors and nurses and an organization that promotes vaccine skepticism to New York’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to the state’s mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Acting in two cases, the justices denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to permit religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate’s legality continues in lower courts. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction.

The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges to vaccine mandates including one focusing upon Maine’s lack of a religious exemption for healthcare workers.

The New York challengers said the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on religious discrimination by the government, or a federal civil rights law requiring employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. A lower court rejected their bid for an injunction.

New York’s Department of Health on Aug. 26 ordered healthcare professionals who come in contact with patients or other employees to be vaccinated by Sept. 27. That deadline was delayed to Nov. 22.

The state has said that under the policy employers can consider religious accommodation requests and employees can be reassigned to jobs such as remote work.

The state said it allows a narrow medical exemption for the small number of people with a serious allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccines. It said longstanding healthcare worker vaccine mandates for measles and rubella also have no religious exemptions.

One lawsuit was brought by a group of 17 doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers, most of whom are Catholic, who sued under pseudonyms, denouncing “medical dictatorship.” Sixteen said they were fired or suspended under the policy, while one nurse agreed to be vaccinated to keep her job.

In a dissent in that case, Gorsuch said the mandate seemed based “on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs.” Joined by Alito, Gorsuch chastised the court for not protecting the challengers, saying that it “is always the failure to defend the Constitution’s promises that leads to this court’s greatest regrets.”

The other case involved a challenge by three Christian nurses, who are members of We the Patriots USA, a Connecticut-based group that is also a plaintiff. The group opposes vaccine mandates and advocates for various causes including what it called “medical freedom.”

In a video on the group’s website, co-founder Brian Festa said, “We were fighting against vaccine mandates. We were fighting to reveal the truth about what’s in these shots, long before COVID was even a thing.”

These plaintiffs are represented by Norman Pattis, a lawyer known for defending conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, founder of the right-wing website Infowars, against defamation lawsuits after he falsely called a 2012 Connecticut school mass shooting a “hoax.”

According to government data, about 84% of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 72% are fully vaccinated. A minority of Americans has declined to get the shots.

In legal filings, the New York challengers said that they believe abortion is “evil” and object to any COVID-19 vaccine whose development relied on cell lines from aborted fetuses.

The three COVID-19 vaccines authorized for U.S. use do not contain aborted fetal cells. Laboratory-grown cells that descended from the cells of an aborted fetus obtained decades ago were employed in testing during the vaccine development process. Drug efficacy and safety testing using such cell lines is routine.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

Austria allows broad lifting of lockdown, but many provinces hold off

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria will let a wide range of businesses, from non-essential shops to theatres, restaurants and hairdressers reopen when its COVID-19 lockdown ends on Sunday, the government said on Wednesday, but many regions will open up more cautiously.

The move means switching from a single set of rules for the whole country to a patchwork varying between nine provinces. Adding to the confusion, those opening up the fastest included the western provinces of Vorarlberg and Tyrol, which have the highest and fourth-highest infection rates in the country.

“Some (provinces) will act gradually over time, and Burgenlend, Vorarlberg and Tyrol will (immediately) adopt this federal arrangement,” Tyrol’s governor, Guenther Platter, told a joint news conference with Chancellor Karl Nehammer and Health Minister Wolfgang Mueckstein.

Vorarlberg and Tyrol are Alpine provinces that rely heavily on winter tourism. Hotels across Austria have been closed to tourists during lockdown, though ski lifts are open.

Austria went into lockdown two weeks ago to counter a surge in daily coronavirus infections to record levels. Infections have plunged but intensive-care bed occupancy is still rising. The government pledged when the lockdown was introduced that it would last no longer than 20 days, until this Sunday.

The list of businesses that can reopen from Sunday applies provided the local province is not keeping tighter restrictions. The province of Upper Austria, which long had Austria’s highest infection rate and borders both Germany and the Czech Republic, plans to stay in lockdown until Dec. 17.

Vienna will only let cafes and restaurants fully reopen a week after the national lockdown lifts, while non-essential shops and Christmas markets will reopen from Monday. Austrian media said three other provinces would take a similar approach, only letting hotels and restaurants reopen on Friday, Dec. 17.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Catherine Evans and Alex Richardson)

Factbox: Latest on the worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the last of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for businesses, saying the government exceeded it authority with a requirement that millions of employees of federal contractors be inoculated.

EUROPE

* EU health ministers discussed measures to try to halt the spread of the Omicron variant, with the Netherlands calling for negative tests for incoming travelers from outside the bloc and France urging tests even for those arriving from EU states.

* Britain reported 45,691 new COVID-19 cases and 180 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, government statistics showed.

* France on Tuesday registered a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations as a rise in new infections in mid-November led to an increase in patient numbers.

* Portugal’s health authority DGS gave the green light for the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children between the ages of five and 11.

* The party is over for Poles this holiday season with nightclubs set to close in the face of high COVID-19 case numbers, the government said, with the exceptions of, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

* The Norwegian government introduced stricter rules on Tuesday to limit the spread of COVID-19, including a cap on the number of visitors in private homes and shortening the hours bars and restaurants can serve alcohol.

AMERICAS

* Canada will soon crack down on COVID-19 mandates, forcing banks, telecommunications companies and all other federally regulated workspaces to ensure their employees are inoculated.

* President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa for proposing a vaccination requirement for travelers arriving in the country to help prevent the spread of new coronavirus variants.

* Mexico City officials will begin offering a third vaccine dose to residents over the age of 60, officials said.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* The Philippines economy is likely to grow faster than previously thought this year, but downside risks caused by the pandemic persist, the World Bank said.

* A nascent recovery in Asia-Pacific international travel demand has been set back by the Omicron variant as governments tighten rules, but airline bosses say they hope any backward moves will be short-lived.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Up to one million COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have expired in Nigeria last month without being used, two sources told Reuters, one of the biggest single losses of doses that shows the difficulty African nations have getting shots in arms.

* The African Union on Tuesday called for an urgent end to travel restrictions imposed on some of its member states, saying the measures effectively penalize governments for timely data sharing in line with international health regulations.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* Preliminary evidence indicates that the Omicron variant likely has a higher degree of transmissibility but is less severe, top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said.

* The head of the European Medicines Agency said it could soon approve the vaccine developed by U.S. biotech company Novavax.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* New travel restrictions prompted by the Omicron variant have dealt a setback to the nascent recovery in international flights, creating delays and headaches in some regions, according to airline and airport officials.

(Compiled by Juliette Portala, Federico Maccioni and Shailesh Kuber; Editing by Robert Birsel, Mark Heinrich and Shounak Dasgupta)

 

Germany, U.S. take new COVID restrictions as Omicron spreads across globe

By Joseph Nasr and Jeff Mason

BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Germany decided on Thursday to bar the unvaccinated from all but the most essential business and the United States prepared further travel restrictions as the world scrambled to curb the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

With countries including the United States, India and France reporting their first Omicron cases, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she hoped the pandemic would not completely stifle economic activity.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, but it could cause significant problems. We’re still evaluating that,” she told the Reuters Next conference.

The new measures in Germany focus on the unvaccinated, who will only be allowed in essential businesses such as grocery stores and pharmacies, while legislation to make vaccination mandatory will be drafted for early next year.

“We have understood that the situation is very serious,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told a news conference.

A nationwide vaccination mandate could take effect from February 2022 after it is debated in the Bundestag and after guidance from Germany’s Ethics Council, she said.

Eager to avoid derailing a fragile recovery of Europe’s biggest economy, Germany kept businesses open to the almost 69% of the population that is fully vaccinated as well as those with proof of having recovered from the virus.

In the United States, the Biden administration was expected to announce steps included extending requirements for travelers to wear masks through mid-March.

By early next week the United States will require inbound international travelers to be tested for COVID-19 within a day of departure, regardless of vaccination status.

And private health insurance companies will be required to reimburse customers for at-home COVID-19 tests, as part of a winter strategy that Biden is due to announce at 1840 GMT.

“The president is going to unveil a very robust plan, pull out all the stops to prepare for the winter and to prepare for the new variant,” White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told broadcaster MSNBC.

UNKNOWN

Much remains unknown about Omicron, which was first detected in southern Africa last month and has been spotted in at least two dozen countries, just as parts of Europe were already grappling with a wave of infections of the Delta variant.

But the European Union’s public health agency said Omicron could be responsible for more than half of all COVID infections in Europe within a few months, lending weight to preliminary information about its high transmissibility.

“It’s going to take about two more weeks to have more definitive information about the Omicron variant,” U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine said in an interview for the Reuters Next conference, adding that travel restrictions could slow the spread and give authorities the time to assess what further steps could be needed.

South Africa said it was seeing an increase in COVID-19 reinfections in patients contracting Omicron – with people who have already had the illness getting infected again – in a way that it did not see with other variants.

The first known U.S. case, announced late on Wednesday, was a fully vaccinated person in California who had travelled to South Africa. Another case was reported in Minnesota on Thursday. The two French cases, in the greater Paris region and in eastern France, were passengers arriving respectively from Nigeria and South Africa.

Global shares fell on Thursday, reversing gains from the previous session as a lack of information about Omicron left markets volatile, while crude oil futures extended losses.

TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS

Russia has imposed a two-week quarantine for travelers from some African countries including South Africa, the Interfax news agency said, quoting a senior official. Hong Kong extended a travel ban to more countries and Norway, among others, re-introduced travel restrictions.

Amid all the new restrictions, Europe’s largest budget airline, Ryanair, said it expected a challenging time at Christmas, although it was still optimistic about summer demand.

In the Netherlands, health authorities called for pre-flight COVID-19 tests for all travel from outside the European Union, after it turned out that most of the passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa on Nov. 26 had been vaccinated.

In France, the country’s top scientific adviser, Jean-Francois Delfraissy, said the “true enemy” for now was still the more familiar Delta variant of the virus, spreading in a fifth wave.

Laboratory analysis of the antibody-based COVID-19 therapy GlaxoSmithKline is developing with U.S. partner Vir has indicated the drug is effective against Omicron, the British drugmaker said.

And Novavax Inc said it could begin commercial manufacturing of a COVID-19 vaccine tailored for the Omicron coronavirus variant in January next year, while it tests whether or not its current vaccine works against the variant.

(Reporting by Reuters bureau; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Nick Macfie and Frances Kerry)

 

The race is on to trace the new COVID-19 variant

By Alistair Smout, Francesco Guarascio and Chen Lin

LONDON/BRUSSELS/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Governments around the world are urgently scouring databases for recent cases of COVID-19 infections, screening travelers and decoding the viral genomes of the new variant as they try to measure how far it has spread.

The pace of the work highlights the pressure on governments and public health authorities to decide quickly whether they need to take unpopular, economically damaging steps to curb Omicron’s spread.

Data shows it was circulating before it was officially identified in southern Africa last week and it has since been detected in more than a dozen countries. Work to establish if it is more infectious, deadly or evades vaccines will take weeks.

Britain and other major economies banned flights to and from southern Africa just days after the variant was first detected, roiling global financial markets and stirring worries about the economic damage.

The speed of the action is in stark contrast to the emergence of other variants – when the first samples of the Alpha variant were documented in Britain in September 2020, the government spent months gathering data and assessing its potential danger before imposing a nationwide lockdown in December.

It took the World Health Organization (WHO) months to designate it a variant of concern – its highest level.

Soon after detecting its first Omicron case on Friday, Israel announced it would buy 10 million more PCR kits that can detect the variant in an effort to contain its spread. It shut its borders to foreigners from all countries on Saturday.

Scotland and Singapore are scrambling to check tens of thousands of recent positive cases for signs of the variant they may have missed and the United States is enhancing its COVID-19 surveillance to distinguish domestic cases of the Omicron variant from the still-dominant Delta.

The European Union’s health commissioner has urged member states to boost efforts to detect mutations, as some still lag behind almost two years into the pandemic.

The bloc has now confirmed 42 cases in 10 countries.

“Certain Member States lag behind considerably in terms of this crucial dimension,” Stella Kyriakides said in a letter seen by Reuters to health ministers of the 27 EU countries.

“Already faced with a challenging winter due to the high transmissibility of the Delta variant (…) we may now experience further or additional pressures because of the appearance of the Omicron variant,” she wrote.

ALL ABOUT THE S-GENE

Most PCR tests cannot distinguish Omicron from the Delta variant, the dominant and most infectious version of the virus so far.

To distinguish Omicron from Delta, the PCR test must be able to identify a mutation in Omicron known as the S-gene drop-out or S-gene target failure (SGTF).

It is not a fail-safe because the Alpha variant, first identified in Britain, also has that mutation.

Given that Alpha is no longer widely circulating, the presence of the S-gene dropout suggests the sample is positive for Omicron and alerts the lab to send the sample for genome sequencing for confirmation.

If local PCR tests cannot identify this mutation, then randomly selected PCR swab samples must undergo genome sequencing, which can take up to a week.

The WHO has said that widely available tests are able to detect individuals infected with any variant, including Omicron.

However, it has so far only recommended the TaqPath test produced by U.S. firm Thermo Fisher as a proxy.

It’s not clear if countries will buy kits due to the unique characteristic of the test. Singapore is considering buying more, although no decision has yet been made, Kenneth Mak, the health ministry’s director of medical services, told Reuters.

Thermo Fisher has said it is prepared to increase production to meet demand from countries in Africa and elsewhere as they work to track the spread of the new variant.

Within a day of the variant being identified, Israel started checking for the S-Gene in all positive tests taken from travelers arriving at the main Ben Gurion airport, Israel’s head of public health at the Health Ministry, Sharon Alroy-Preis, told Parliament on Sunday.

Now, its labs monitor for that mutation in all tests nationwide and when a positive PCR test indicates SGTF, the sample is taken for further sequencing, the health ministry said.

Most U.S. labs will be using the TaqPath test, Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), a network of state and municipal public health laboratories, told Reuters.

QUIRKS OF THE VARIANT

Out of the 150,000 positive tests going back a month assessed in Belgium, 47 had S-gene drop-out and a high viral load. Only one of them was Omicron, according to Marc Van Rast, one of the virologists who parsed the samples.

The Scottish authorities have gone through swabs back to Nov. 1 to help in discover nine cases of Omicron, all linked to the same event.

They have found that around Nov. 16, S-gene target failure had started appearing in the tests again, a week before South Africa and Botswana identified the new variant. That feature has helped to direct genomic sequencing, as it did when Alpha emerged.

“That is one of the quirks of this particular variant that we can use to our advantage,” Gregor Smith, Scotland’s chief medical officer, said on Monday.

It means the government can start estimating how prevalent the new variant may be, identify people who may need to get tested again and which samples need to be prioritized for further decoding in labs, Smith said.

“It’s the best method that we have to be able to identify cases at this point in time.”

(Reporting by Alistair Smout in London, Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, Chen Lin in Singapore, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Maayan Lubell and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem; Writing by Josephine Mason; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Germany’s Scholz supports mandatory vaccines by end Feb – sources

BERLIN (Reuters) – Olaf Scholz, who is set to take over as German chancellor next week, supports making vaccination against COVID-19 compulsory and backs barring the unvaccinated from non-essential stores, sources said on Tuesday.

Scholz and outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel were meeting regional leaders on Tuesday to discuss how to respond to soaring infections in a fourth wave of the pandemic.

According to sources with information about the discussion, Scholz told the meeting he was in favor of a cross-party initiative to make vaccines mandatory, with the hope that it could be put into practice by the end of February.

Neighboring Austria, which like Germany has a relatively low rate of vaccination compared with the rest of western Europe, earlier this month announced plans to make vaccines compulsory as of February.

Scholz is also in favor of making non-essential stores require customers to show proof of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19, the sources said.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases reported that 452.2 people per 100,000 were infected in the last week, down slightly from 452.4 on Monday. It was the first decline since early November.

Despite this, the number of new daily cases rose slightly on Tuesday compared to last week to 45,753, and another 388 deaths were recorded – the highest daily figure since early March. That bought the overall death toll to 101,344.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Miranda Murray and Alison Williams)

Judge blocks U.S. COVID-19 vaccine rule for health workers in 10 states

By Tom Hals

(Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked in 10 states a Biden administration vaccine requirement, finding the agency that issued the rule mandating healthcare workers get vaccinated against the coronavirus likely exceeded its authority.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp in St. Louis prevents the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from enforcing its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers until the court can hear legal challenges brought by the 10 states.

The ruling is the second legal setback for the Biden Administration’s requirements aimed at increasing the use of vaccines to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. A federal appeals court in New Orleans earlier this month blocked a sweeping workplace mandate that requires businesses with at least 100 employees to get their staff vaccinated or tested weekly.

Republican state attorneys general sued the administration in early November over the CMS rule, seeking to block the requirement because they alleged it would worsen healthcare staffing shortages.

Schelp said CMS had significantly understated the burden of its mandate on the ability of healthcare facilities to provide proper care.

Schelp’s ruling applied in the 10 states that brought the case: Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota and New Hampshire.

On Nov. 4, CMS issued the interim final rule it said covers over 10 million people and applies to around 76,000 healthcare providers including hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis centers.

Providers that fail to comply with the mandate could lose access to Medicare and Medicaid funds. Medicare serves people 65 and older and the disabled. Medicaid serves the poor.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

COVID-19 reinfection less likely to be severe; cardiac stress test useful for unexplained lingering breathlessness

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be certified by peer review.

Coronavirus reinfections rarely severe

Reinfections with the virus that causes COVID-19 are rarely severe, new findings suggest. Researchers in Qatar compared 1,304 individuals with a second SARS-CoV-2 infection with 6,520 people infected with the virus for the first time. The odds of developing severe disease were 88% lower for people with second infections, the researchers reported online on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Re-infected patients were 90% less likely to be hospitalized compared to patients infected for the first time, and no one in the study with a second infection required intensive care or died from COVID-19, said Dr. Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar in Doha. “Nearly all reinfections were mild, perhaps because of immune memory that prevented deterioration of the infection to more severe outcomes,” he said. The risk for severe illness in people who had been infected before was only about 1% of the risk associated with initial COVID-19 infections, the researchers estimated. For half of those with a second infection, the first infection had occurred more than nine months earlier. It is not clear how long immune protection against severe reinfection would last, the researchers noted. If it does last for a long time, they speculate, it might mean that as the coronavirus becomes endemic, infections could become “more benign.”

Cardiac stress test useful for lingering breathlessness

In COVID-19 survivors struggling with lingering shortness of breath for which doctors do not have an explanation, cardiac stress testing may help identify the cause of the problem, researchers say. “The current clinical guidelines do not recommend cardiopulmonary exercise testing out of concern that this test could worsen the patients’ symptoms. However, we found that cardiopulmonary exercise testing was able to identify reduced exercise capacity in about 45% of patients,” said Dr. Donna Mancini of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The 18 men and 23 women in the study all had persistent shortness of breath for more than three months after recovering from COVID-19, according to a report published on Monday in Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Heart Failure. They had normal-looking results on lung function tests, chest X-rays, chest CT scans and echocardiograms. The exercise tests revealed problems that would otherwise have been missed, Mancini said. “Low level functional testing recommended by the guidelines, such as a 6-minute walk test, would not be able to detect these abnormalities,” she said.

Experimental smartwatch COVID-19 detection improving

Smartwatch alerting systems for early detection of COVID-19 infection are coming closer to reality, researchers reported on Monday in Nature Medicine. They tested their new system, developed with open-source software, in 2,155 wearers of Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin watches or other devices. Ultimately, 84 of the volunteers were diagnosed with coronavirus infections – including 14 of 18 people without symptoms. Overall, the researchers’ algorithms generated alerts in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals, on average three days before symptoms began. “This is the first time, to our knowledge, that asymptomatic detection has been shown for COVID-19,” they said. Presently, the system mainly depends on measurements of wearers’ resting heart rate, said study leader Michael Snyder of Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Going forward, he said he hopes watch manufacturers will be able to provide other types of highly accurate physiologic data. “Many stressors can trigger the alerting,” Snyder said. “Most of these are easy to spot – travel, excessive alcohol, even work or other types of stress, so the user knows to ignore the alerts.” When watches can report other health data such as heart rate variability, respiration rate, skin temperature, and oxygen levels, it will become easier to distinguish the COVID-19 cases from other non-COVID-19 events, researchers said. “Right now we are running this as a research study,” Snyder said. “But soon we hope that FDA approved devices will dominate this area.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Additional reporting by Megan Brooks; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

WHO flags Omicron risk, countries tighten curbs, Biden urges vaccination

By Stephanie Nebehay, Alexander Winning and Wendell Roelf

GENEVA/JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday the Omicron coronavirus variant carried a very high risk of infection surges as more countries closed their borders, reviving fears over economic recovery from the two-year pandemic.

Airlines were scrambling to limit the impact of the variant on their networks, while delays in bookings threatened an already fragile recovery for global tourism.

But shares in airlines bounced back with the rest of the market on Monday after a sharp sell-off on Friday as hopes grew that the variant might prove to be milder than initially feared.

The WHO advised its 194 member nations that any surge in infections could have severe consequences, but said no deaths had yet been linked to the new variant.

“Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic,” the WHO said.

“The overall global risk related to the new variant of concern Omicron is assessed as very high.”

Further research was needed to understand Omicron’s potential to escape protection against immunity induced by vaccines and previous infections, it said, adding that more data was expected in coming weeks.

U.S. President Joe Biden said the new variant was a cause for concern but not panic and that it would sooner or later arrive in the United States, urging people to get vaccinated. He said it would be weeks before the world knew how effective current vaccines would be against it.

“Obviously, we’re on high alert,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official and Biden’s chief medical adviser, told ABC News. “It’s inevitable that, sooner or later, it’s going to spread widely.”

An infectious disease expert from South Africa, where scientists first identified Omicron, said it was too early to say whether symptoms were more severe than previous variants, but it did appear to be more transmissible.

Professor Salim Abdool Karim also said existing vaccines were probably effective at stopping Omicron from causing severe illness. Scientists have said it could take weeks to understand the severity of Omicron.

South African cases were likely to exceed 10,000 a day this week, rocketing up from barely 300 a day two weeks ago, Karim added.

But South African President Cyril Ramaphosa denounced “unjustified and unscientific” travel bans that damage tourism-reliant economies. His country has said it is being punished for its scientific ability to detect new variants.

After a virtual meeting on Monday, health ministers from the Group of Seven bloc of wealthy nations praised South Africa for its “exemplary work” in detecting the variant and alerting others.

JITTERY MARKETS

Fears the new variant might be resistant to vaccines helped wipe roughly $2 trillion off global stock markets on Friday but markets settled down again on Monday, even after Japan said it would close its borders.

Other countries also imposed travel and other restrictions, worried that Omicron could spread fast even among people with immunity.

Travelers stranded at Johannesburg international airport said they felt helpless as flights from South Africa were cancelled.

“We don’t know what to do, we are just waiting here,” said Ntabiseng Kabeli, a stranded passenger from Lesotho.

Portugal found 13 cases of the variant at a Lisbon football club. Spain, Sweden, Scotland and Austria also reported their first cases.

Japan described its ban on arrivals by foreigners as precautionary.

Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto said tests would determine if a traveler from Namibia was Japan’s first Omicron case.

In Israel, a ban on arrivals by foreigners took effect overnight.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern that restrictions would leave southern African countries isolated.

“The people of Africa cannot be blamed for the immorally low level of vaccinations available in Africa – and they should not be penalized for identifying and sharing crucial science and health information with the world,” he said.

Guterres has long warned about the dangers of vaccine inequality around the world and that low immunization rates are “a breeding ground for variants.”

More than 261 million people in over 210 countries have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019 and 5,456,515​ have died, according to a Reuters tally.

The new variant was discovered just as many parts of Europe were suffering a fourth wave of coronavirus infections as winter grips the continent in the runup to Christmas, with more people gathering indoors and increasing the risk of infection.

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde tried to reassure investors that the euro zone could cope with a resurgence of infections.

“We now know our enemy and what measures to take,” she told Italian broadcaster RAI late on Sunday. “We are all better equipped to respond to a risk of a fifth wave or the Omicron variant.”

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Himani Sarkar, Catherine Evans and Nick Macfie; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Peter Graff)

Slovakia follows Austria into lockdown amid record surge in COVID cases

By Robert Muller and Jason Hovet

PRAGUE (Reuters) – Slovakia’s government followed the example of neighboring Austria on Wednesday and ordered a two-week lockdown to quell the world’s fastest rise in COVID-19 cases as the number of people sick in hospital reached a critical level and vaccination levels remain low.

Restaurants and non-essential shops will close as part of the measures and movement will be limited to trips for essential shopping, work, school or medical visits, along with walks in nature, government officials said.

Slovakia on Tuesday registered more than 10,000 new daily infections for the first time since the pandemic started, while hospitalizations hit what the Health Ministry called a “critical point” that meant limiting other care and possibly asking for foreign assistance.

“The situation is serious,” Prime Minister Eduard Heger said. “We got here because the (existing) measures were not observed.”

Adjusted for population size, Slovakia is experiencing the world’s fastest rise in infections, according to Our World in Data, topping a list currently led by other European countries.

The neighboring Czech Republic and Hungary both registered a record daily rise in cases on Tuesday, while Austria also implemented a total lockdown this week, shutting non-essential shops, bars and cafes for at least 10 days.

Slovakia’s decision to return to a lockdown comes after the government already slapped new restrictions on unvaccinated people this week in a bid to push up inoculations. Before that, the country had been gradually tightening restrictions in regions hard-hit as cases have jumped over the past month.

Heger said measures would be assessed after 10 days and any loosening would only be for the vaccinated.

Less than 50% of people in the country of 5.5 million are fully vaccinated, the third-lowest rate in the European Union. The unvaccinated count for the majority of cases and hospitalizations.

President Zuzana Caputova made an emotional plea on Tuesday, saying the country was losing its fight with COVID-19 and needed a lockdown as healthcare staff became overworked.

The number of hospitalized patients has reached 3,200, approaching peaks of around 3,800 seen in the last wave of the pandemic.

Dagmar Sudekova, deputy director of the Zilina hospital in one of the harder hit regions, told the state broadcaster RTVS on Tuesday evening more than 80% of patients were unvaccinated and the hospital’s ventilation and high-flow oxygen beds were full.

“We just manage with the help of neighboring hospitals,” she said.

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jason Hovet; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Hugh Lawson)