America Goes Viral, Con't

 Republicans in Congress (and more than a few Democrats) have decided that COVID-19 is over despite dire White House warnings.

The White House is preparing to "stop critical COVID response efforts" as additional funding for COVID-19 relief sits stalled in Congress, a person familiar with the plan told ABC News.

Biden and his administration have warned for weeks that there was not enough money left to support critical COVID-19 response efforts, including testing at the current pace, purchasing more COVID-19 treatments and acquiring more booster shots.

But pleas for Congress to allot billions more in its latest funding bill fell short last week, leaving government relief efforts in a "dire" place, the White House said.

While it’s not yet clear which response efforts will get cut back, the White House is expected to lay that out in a letter to congressional leadership later Tuesday, according to the person familiar with the White House’s plans.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki previewed the cuts on Monday, warning reporters that "some programs, if we don't get funding, could abruptly end or need to be pared back."

She also stressed that the U.S. needs to be ready to respond to a potential increase in cases like the upticks currently happening in the U.K. and China due to the BA.2 variant, which is a more transmissible strain of omicron, and said that any reduction in the United States' COVID-19 response could hamper the country's ability to fight back to this variant or future ones.

 

Nobody cares. War! Inflation! March Madness is here!

 

Ahh, but we've now reached the fourth time in two years that we've beaten COVID down, then let it come back again because "COVID is now over!"

A wastewater network that monitors for Covid-19 trends is warning that cases are once again rising in many parts of the U.S., according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by Bloomberg.

More than a third of the CDC’s wastewater sample sites across the U.S. showed rising Covid-19 trends in the period ending March 1 to March 10, though reported cases have stayed near a recent low. The number of sites with rising signals of Covid-19 cases is nearly twice what it was during the Feb. 1 to Feb. 10 period, when the wave of omicron-variant cases was fading rapidly.

It’s not clear how many new infections the signs in the sewage represent and if they will turn into a new wave, or will be just a brief bump on the way down from the last one. In many parts of the country, people are returning back to offices and mask rules have been loosened — factors that can raise transmission. At the same time, warmer weather is allowing people to spend more time outside, and many people have recently been infected, which may offer at least temporary protection against getting sick again – factors which would keep cases down.

“While wastewater levels are generally very low across the board, we are seeing an uptick of sites reporting an increase,” Amy Kirby, the head of the CDC’s wastewater monitoring program, said in an email to Bloomberg. “These bumps may simply reflect minor increases from very low levels to still low levels. Some communities though may be starting to see an increase in Covid-19 infections, as prevention strategies in many states have changed in recent weeks.”

Bloomberg reviewed data for more than 530 sewage monitoring sites, looking at the most recent data reported during the 10-day window from March 1 to March 10. Out of those sites, 59% showed falling Covid-19 trends, 5% were roughly stable, and 36% were increasing. Rises or declines are measured over a 15-day period.

 

In fact the Omicron BA.2 variant is now very much in play in Europe and spreading globally.

Covid cases are rising in Europe, with an increasing number being attributed to the prevalence of a "stealth" subvariant of the omicron strain.

Covid cases have increased dramatically in the U.K. in recent weeks, while Germany continues to mark record high daily infections with more than 250,000 new cases a day. Elsewhere, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands are also seeing Covid infections start to rise again, aided and abetted by the relaxation of coronavirus measures and the spread of a new subvariant of omicron, known as BA.2.

Public health officials and scientists are closely monitoring BA.2, which has been described as a "stealth" variant because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the delta variant using PCR tests, compared with the original omicron variant, BA.1.

The new subvariant would be the latest in a long line to emerge since the pandemic began in China in late 2019. The omicron variant — the most transmissible strain so far — overtook the delta variant, which itself supplanted the alpha variant — and even this was not the original strain of the virus.

Now, Danish scientists believe that the BA.2 subvariant is 1½ times more transmissible than the original omicron strain, and is already overtaking it. The BA.2 variant is now responsible for over half of the new cases in Germany and makes up around 11% of cases in the U.S.  

That number is expected to rise further, as it has in Europe.

 

Going to be a bad spring again. We still have 1,500 or so people dying from COVID a day. We're coming up on one million US COVID deaths.  That's only going to get worse, and possibly much worse as even basic prevention is now history. Omicron BA.2 is most likely going to be another wildfire in the weeks and months ahead.

So of course Republicans are going to block COVID funding and watch America get sick again so they can blame Biden.

You were warned.  We all were.