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What has the Omicron variant changed?

What has the Omicron variant changed?

Dhruv Khullar writes: The Covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage it inflicts and the social, economic, and political choices we make. A disease persists as a pandemic as long as these forces remain in flux; it becomes endemic when the balance is, more or less, set. The morning after Thanksgiving, Americans awoke to an unsettling…

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Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Bloomberg reports: A two-shot course of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, but can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa. Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban issued additional data on a small study released earlier this week. The research considered blood plasma samples from 12 participants. Scientists found omicron resulted in about a 41-fold reduction in levels of neutralizing antibodies produced by people who had…

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The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

Rachel Gutman writes: Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant…

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The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The New York Times reports: From the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus seemed to target people carrying extra pounds. Patients who were overweight or obese were more likely to develop severe Covid-19 and more likely to die. Though these patients often have health conditions like diabetes that compound their risk, scientists have become increasingly convinced that their vulnerability has something to do with obesity itself. Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune…

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What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

Nature reports: As the world sped towards a pandemic in early 2020, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom gazed into the future of SARS-CoV-2. Like many virus specialists at the time, he predicted that the new pathogen would not be eradicated. Rather, it would become endemic — the fifth coronavirus to permanently establish itself in humans, alongside four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that cause relatively mild colds and have been circulating in humans for decades or more. Bloom, who is based at the Fred…

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Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Science reports: Since South African scientists announced last week they had identified an unsettling new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the world has anxiously awaited clues about how it might change the trajectory of the pandemic. But as big a mystery—if less urgent—is where and how Omicron evolved, and what lessons its emergence holds for avoiding future dangerous variants. Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to…

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Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

A virus’s genes hold a record of where it’s traveled, and when. imaginima/E+ via Getty Images By Claire Guinat, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Etthel Windels, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Sarah Nadeau, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich More than 250 million people worldwide have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, usually after a diagnostic nose swab. Those swabs aren’t trash once they’ve delivered their positive result, though. For scientists like us they carry additional valuable information about…

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Omicron risks infecting vaccinated people but may not cause them severe illness

Omicron risks infecting vaccinated people but may not cause them severe illness

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus could lead to more infections among vaccinated people, according to several scientists, but some said there were reasons to believe the shots would protect against severe disease. While the new variant might evade the antibodies generated in reaction to the vaccines, the virus will likely remain vulnerable to immune cells that destroy it once it enters the body, said Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech SE, which sells a…

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It looks like Omicron causes milder illness – is this how COVID becomes endemic?

It looks like Omicron causes milder illness – is this how COVID becomes endemic?

AP Photo/Denis Farrell By Hamish McCallum, Griffith University These are very early days in terms of our understanding the Omicron variant. What is known is that it has a large number of mutations, particularly in the spike protein and it appears to be rapidly spreading in specific parts of the world. Very early indications from Africa suggest it does not cause particularly severe disease (though the World Health Organization has urged caution given the limited data available). At this point,…

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Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots

Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots

John Timmer writes: Scientists on Monday announced that they’d optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be mobile themselves. The researchers call this process “kinematic self-replication,” although that’s not entirely right—the copies need help from humans to start moving on their own, are smaller than the originals, and the copying process grinds to a halt after just a couple of cycles. So, of course, CNN…

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How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

The Wall Street Journal reports: Over coffee at his office on Tuesday, Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, let a colleague in on a secret. “There’s something going on,” he told Alex Sigal, a virologist growing coronaviruses at a South African laboratory. “They’ve found a variant they’ve never seen before.” For days, case numbers in the nation had been rising rapidly. Puzzled lab technicians had been getting back Covid-19 tests that were positive,…

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These ‘living robots’ self-replicate — and it’s not terrifying

These ‘living robots’ self-replicate — and it’s not terrifying

The Daily Beast reports: You might have missed the debut of the Xenobots last year when the world was falling apart, but they made quite a splash in the science and tech community. These Pac-Man-shaped synthetic organisms designed by supercomputers can organize into larger groups and be programmed to fulfill specific functions. They’re certainly not robots in the traditional sense, but they’re also too artificial to qualify as typical living organisms. They’re part cell, part machine, and completely one-of-a-kind. As…

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How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

Science reports: At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong. Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that…

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What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

Ashish Jha asks: How worrisome is Omicron? There are three key questions that help scientists understand how consequential any variant might be. The first question is whether the variant is more transmissible than the current, prevalent Delta strain? Second, does it cause more severe disease? And third, will it render our immune defenses — from vaccines and prior infections — less effective (a phenomenon known as immune escape)? On transmissibility, the data, while early, look worrisome. This new variant appears…

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What impossible meant to Richard Feynman

What impossible meant to Richard Feynman

Paul J. Steinhardt writes: Impossible! The word resonated throughout the large lecture hall. I had just finished describing a revolutionary concept for a new type of matter that my graduate student, Dov Levine, and I had invented. The Caltech lecture room was packed with scientists from every discipline across campus. The discussion had gone remarkably well. But just as the last of the crowd was filing out, there arose a familiar, booming voice and that word: “Impossible!” I could have…

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First known Covid case was vendor at Wuhan market, scientist claims

First known Covid case was vendor at Wuhan market, scientist claims

The New York Times reports: A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had most likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it. The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal…

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