How Spotify is responding to Joe Rogan podcast, COVID misinformation
As musicians leave Spotify, the streaming service plans to add content advisories before podcasts discuss COVID-19.
Just the FAQs, USA TODAY
The director of the World Health Organization’s Europe office said Thursday that coronavirus deaths are starting to plateau and the continent faces a “plausible endgame” to the pandemic.
Dr. Hans Kluge said there is a “singular opportunity” for countries across Europe to take control of COVID-19 transmission as a result of three factors: high levels of immunization because of vaccination and natural infection, the virus’s tendency to spread less in warmer weather and the lower severity of the omicron variant. Data in the U.S. is similar to the data from Europe, providing similar hope.
“This period of higher protection should be seen as a cease-fire that could bring us enduring peace,” Kluge said.
At WHO’s Geneva headquarters, director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the world as a whole is far from exiting the pandemic.
“We are concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines, and because of omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity, preventing transmission is no longer possible and no longer necessary,” Tedros said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Also in the news:
►Four senior aides to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — including chief of staff Dan Rosenfield and principal private secretary Martin Reynolds — have resigned in the wake of a scandal over parties held by Johnson and his staff while the country was under lockdown.
►The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is launching a campaign to enlist young people to encourage vaccinations. Less than 12% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people are vaccinated.
►The North Carolina Commission for Public Health rejected a petition from four University of North Carolina system professors to add the coronavirus vaccine to state immunization requirements for 17-year-olds and those entering 12th grade as of July 1.
►A Rhode Island man has pleaded guilty to fraudulently filing applications in five states for COVID-19-related unemployment benefits. Prosecutors say Keishon Brown, 33, collected tens of thousands of dollars he was not eligible for.
📈 Today’s numbers: The U.S. has recorded more than 75 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 896,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Global totals: More than 386.8 million cases and over 5.7 million deaths. More than 212 million Americans – 63.9% – are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
📘 What we’re reading: Testing, robots, Closed Loop: This is how China plans to keep these Olympics safe in the COVID era.
Keep refreshing this page for the latest news. Want more? Sign up for USA TODAY’s free Coronavirus Watch newsletter to receive updates directly to your inbox and join our Facebook group.
People on Medicare will get up to eight free COVID-19 home tests each month, the Biden administration announced. The administration said it will be the first time Medicare covers a free, over-the-counter test for enrollees. Medicare will pay pharmacies and other entities directly to allow enrollees to pick up the free tests. The administration said earlier that the home tests would not be covered by Medicare. But on Thursday, the administration cited the “importance of expanding access to testing.”
People will be able to pick up the tests from pharmacies and other vendors in early spring. Until then, Medicare recipients can order tests through the new government-run website, CovidTests.gov, which allows Americans to order four free kits per address delivered by the Postal Service.
– Ken Alltucker
The subvariant of omicron known as “stealth omicron’’ – technically BA.2 – has been gaining attention as it spreads to about 50 countries, including the U.S.
The notion that it might be more contagious than the original omicron variant – BA.1 – is enough to raise concerns, considering how much disruption the first version has caused in taking over delta as the dominant strain of the coronavirus.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledged in a press briefing the slightly superior infectiousness of BA.2 but said it’s linked to only 1.5% of the country’s cases.
“What we know about BA.2 so far is that it does have a modest transmission advantage over BA.1. However, it’s not nearly the transmission advantage that we’ve seen between omicron and delta,’’ Walensky said. “We have not seen any studies that suggest it’s more severe, nor have we seen studies that suggest that it will evade our vaccines any more so than omicron has already, and in fact that our vaccines would work just like they have with omicron.’’
Public health experts have said the stealth omicron may slow down the current drop in infections across the nation, but likely won’t stop it. That’s typically what has happened in other countries, with some exceptions like Denmark, where BA.2 has become dominant.
Walensky said that has coincided with the relaxation of mitigation measures, adding, “Which is why we’re currently keeping those in place, among the reasons.’’
In between qualifying for the 2022 Beijing Games and competing in their events, several athletes have been engaging in a challenging activity unknown to previous winter Olympians: COVID avoidance.
Beijing Olympic organizers have adopted a “zero COVID” policy and require everyone coming in for the Games, which begin Friday, to test negative at least twice beforehand and then again on arrival. A positive test could jeopardize a dream the athletes have been working years for, as has already happened to some Danish men’s hockey players, the Swiss women’s hockey team and the Norwegian cross-country skiers.
Some participants have taken drastic measures to keep the coronavirus at bay, virtually retreating from society to prevent exposure. American moguls skier Hannah Soar, for one, felt the need to avoid any indoor contact and to treat everyone she encountered as if they had COVID-19.
“It definitely is a huge mental toll. It’s really anxiety-inducing,” she said. “You kind of have to juggle your sanity and being able to perform at the Olympics, and not lose your mind beforehand.”
A week before his 27th birthday, a Texan named Fabian Granado said he felt “human again” as he left a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, this week following a 164-day stay with COVID-19.
Granado, who wasn’t vaccinated, said he contracted the coronavirus while in Jacksonville training at a commercial diving school to become an underwater welder. He landed in the hospital Aug. 21 and got so sick he spent two months in a coma.
“I came to Florida from Texas thinking I was coming to bury my son,” said his father, Rene Granado, who had encouraged Fabian to get vaccinated, to no avail.
Fabian now says his ordeal would not have been as difficult if he had gotten the COVID shots, and he urges others to get inoculated.
“I thought I was invincible,” he said. “I didn’t think it would happen to me, and of course it did happen and I was wrong.”
– Teresa Stepzinski, Florida Times-Union
Travel industry trade groups are pushing federal officials to drop the pre-departure coronavirus testing requirement for vaccinated travelers flying into the United States.
Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said the organization is “very much in favor” of shaking up the entry requirements to make travel to the U.S. more seamless.
“Our expectation is that taking that away will definitely increase travel,” Dow told reporters Wednesday, adding the expectation was an “intuitive guess” rather than one backed by data. “Travel is like water. You put a barrier in place, it will impede it.”
Other destinations, including the United Kingdom and Puerto Rico, have dropped testing requirements for fully vaccinated travelers in recent weeks. Dozens of trade associations hope the U.S. will follow suit.
A Wednesday letter to White House COVID-19 response team coordinator Jeffrey Zients signed by trade groups in a number of travel sectors “urgently” requests the Biden administration to remove the pre-departure testing requirement for vaccinated flyers.
– Bailey Schulz, USA TODAY
More nursing homes are waiting longer for COVID-19 test results for residents and staffers, according to federal data, making the fight against record numbers of omicron cases even harder.
The double whammy of slower turnaround times for lab-based PCR tests and a shortage of rapid antigen tests has strained facilities where quickly identifying infections is crucial for keeping a highly vulnerable population safe.
A Kaiser Health News analysis of data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finds that 25% of nursing homes that sent tests to a lab waited an average of three or more days for results as of Jan. 16. In early December, that number was 12%.
At Lutheran Life Villages in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the long wait for results renders PCR tests “useless,” President Alex Kiefer said. “If we send somebody off to get a PCR test, sometimes it takes two days for them to get an appointment. And then it takes two, three, four days to get a read.”
– Rachana Pradhan, Kaiser Health News
Contributing: The Associated Press
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