Tag Archives: Omicron

First known U.S. Omicron case found in fully vaccinated overseas traveler

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States on Wednesday identified its first known case of Omicron, discovered in a fully vaccinated patient who traveled to South Africa, as scientists continue to study the risks the new COVID variant could pose.

Public health officials said the infected person, who had mild symptoms, returned to the United States from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive seven days later.

That patient was fully vaccinated but did not have a booster shot, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official, who briefed reporters at the White House.

The person is in self-quarantine and all of the patient’s close contacts have tested negative so far, he said.

Key questions remain about the new variant, which has rattled markets amid signs it may spread quickly and evade some of the defenses provided by vaccines. It has been found in two dozen countries, including Spain, Canada, Britain, Austria and Portugal.

Fauci said it could take two weeks or more to gain insight into how easily the variant spreads from person to person, how severe is the disease it causes and whether it can bypass the protections provided by vaccines currently available.

“We don’t have enough information right now,” said Fauci, who serves as an adviser to President Joe Biden, adding that the variant’s molecular profile “suggests that it might be more transmissible, and that it might elude some of the protection of vaccines, but we don’t know that now… We have to be prepared that there’s going to be a diminution in protection.”

For days, U.S. health officials have said the new variant -first detected in southern Africa and announced on Nov. 25 – was likely already in the United States as dozens of other countries also detected its presence.

“This new variant is a cause for concern but not a cause for panic,” Biden said on Wednesday before the Omicron case was announced. A spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said he the president had been briefed by his team on the first known case.

The United States has barred nearly all foreigners who have been in one of eight southern African countries. On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) directed airlines to disclose names and other information of passengers who have been to those countries.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Ahmed Aboulenein and Nandita Bose in Washington, and Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva and Lisa Shumaker)

Inflation worries, pandemic curb U.S. consumer confidence; house prices cooling

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. consumer confidence dropped to a nine-month low in November amid worries about the rising cost of living and pandemic fatigue, but that probably does not change expectations for stronger economic growth this quarter.

The survey from the Conference Board on Tuesday showed consumers less enthusiastic about buying a home and big-ticket items such as motor vehicles and major household appliances over the next six months. But consumers held strong views of the labor market, with the gap between those saying jobs are plentiful versus hard to get widening to a record high.

“This isn’t a cause for concern as the relationship between spending and sentiment is loose, particularly in the short-run,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “The good news is that consumers’ assessment of the labor market improved in November, pointing toward further acceleration in job growth.”

The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index fell to a reading of 109.5 this month, the lowest reading since February, from 111.6 in October. The survey was conducted before the discovery of Omicron, a new COVID-19 variant, that was announced last week by South African scientists.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index falling to 111.0. The measure, which places more emphasis on the labor market, has dropped from a peak of 128.9 in June. The fall was less than that of the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment, which dropped to a decade low this month.

Data this month have suggested that the economy was accelerating in the fourth quarter, with consumer spending surging in October. But the outlook for next year has been clouded by the Omicron variant, which has since been detected in several countries outside the southern African region.

Not much is known about how contagious or vaccine resistant the Omicron variant is. The Conference Board’s so-called labor market differential, derived from data on respondents’ views on whether jobs are plentiful or hard to get, jumped to a reading of 46.9 this month, the highest on record, from 43.8 in October.

This measure closely correlates to the unemployment rate in the Labor Department’s closely watched employment report.

Combined with declining new claims for unemployment benefits, it raises hopes that job growth accelerated further this month, though a shortage of workers remains a challenge. There were 10.4 million job openings at the end of September.

INFLATION FEARS MOUNT

Consumers’ inflation expectations over the next 12 months surged to 7.6% in November from 7.1% last month. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Tuesday that the higher prices were generally related to the pandemic, and warned that the risk of higher inflation had increased.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower on Powell’s inflation comments. The dollar rose against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices were mixed.

Rising inflation is starting to influence consumers’ spending decisions, the Conference Board survey suggested.

Buying intentions for motor vehicles fell as did plans to purchase household appliances, television sets and refrigerators over the next six months. But intentions to buy washing machines and clothes dryers rose.

The survey also showed consumers less inclined to buy a house over the next six months. Slowing demand could help to further cool house price inflation.

A second report on Tuesday showed the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller’s 20 metropolitan area home price index rose 19.1% on a year-on-year basis in September after advancing 19.6 %in August.

Signs that house price growth was moderating were evident in a third report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that showed house prices rose 17.7% in the 12 months through September after powering ahead 18.5% in August.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)

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)