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Trunk XBB.1.5, January 4, 2023, Suqian, Jiangsu, China.

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The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant currently dominating the US is the most contagious version of Covid-19 yet, but according to the World Health Organization it doesn’t appear to be making people sicker.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Covid-19, said global health officials are concerned about how quickly the subvariant is spreading in the US northeast. The number of people infected with XBB.1.5 in the US has been doubling about every two weeks – it is the most widespread variant in the country.

“It is the most transmissible subvariant discovered so far,” said Van Kerkhove during a press conference in Geneva on Wednesday. “The reason for this is the mutations in this subvariant of Omicron, which allow this virus to stick to the cell and replicate easily.”

It has been detected in 29 countries so far, but it could be more widespread, Van Kerkhove said. Tracking Covid variants has become difficult as genome sequencing declines around the world, she said.

The WHO doesn’t have data on the severity of XBB.1.5 yet, but there’s no evidence at the moment that it makes people sicker than previous versions of omicron, Van Kerkhove said. The WHO advisory group tracking Covid variants is conducting a risk assessment on XBB.1.5, which it will publish in the coming days, she said.

“The more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it will have to change,” said Van Kerkhove. “We expect further waves of infections around the world, but this need not lead to further waves of deaths because our countermeasures continue to work.”

Scientists say XBB.1.5 is about as good at dodging antibodies from vaccines and infections as its relatives XBB and XBB.1, which were two of the most immune-avoidable subvariants to date. But XBB.1.5 has a mutation that makes it bind more tightly to cells, giving it a growth advantage.

While XBB.1.5 is spreading rapidly in the US, China is grappling with a surge in cases and hospitalizations after abandoning its zero-Covid policy in response to social unrest late last year. US and global health officials said Beijing is not sharing enough data on the surge with the international community.

“We continue to ask China for faster, regular and reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive real-time virus sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.

More and more countries, including the US, are requiring passengers from China to test negative for Covid before boarding their flights. China’s Foreign Ministry said such measures lacked any scientific basis and governments have been accused of manipulating Covid for political ends. But the WHO director-general said the requirements are understandable given the limited data from China.

“Given the level of prevalence in China and the lack of comprehensive data, it is understandable that some countries are taking steps that they believe will protect their own citizens,” Tedros said on Wednesday.

The Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday shared data with the WHO showing that the BA.5 sublineages, BA.5.2 and BF.7, account for about 98% of all infections in the country. However, Van Kerkhove said China is not sharing enough sequencing data from across the vast country.

“It’s not just about knowing which variants are in circulation,” said Van Kerkhove. “We need the global community to evaluate these, to study mutation by mutation to determine if any of these new variants are new variants that are circulating in China but also around the world.”

A Supreme Court decision will keep a controversial Trump-era rule allowing the US to deport migrants at the Mexico border as a public health measure in response to the pandemic.

The court voted 5-4 on Tuesday to grant an emergency request by 19 Republican attorneys general who were trying to intervene in defense of the policy. It also agreed to hear oral arguments in February and decide whether states can intervene, with a decision by the end of June. The Directive will remain in effect at least until such judgment is rendered.

“Title 42 is a public health measure, not an immigration enforcement measure, and it should not be extended indefinitely,” the White House said in a statement. “To truly fix our broken immigration system, Congress must pass sweeping immigration policy reform measures, as proposed by President Biden on his first day in office.”

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, along with the three Liberals in court, voted against the stay motion. The brief court order said that while the administration cannot vacate the Title 42 policy, the decision “does not prevent the federal government from taking any action with respect to this policy.”

Since 2020, more than 2 million people have been deported at the southern border as part of the policy.

In November, a federal district court in Washington, DC, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to end the policy on December 21, criticizing the deportations as arbitrary. But Republican-led states intervened in the case, successfully petitioning the Supreme Court to block that lower court ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily prevented the Biden administration from exiting the controversial policy earlier this month.

The deportation policy has its origins in the Trump administration. In March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention applied a provision of the Public Health Services Act, or Title 42, to ban migrants from entering the United States from Mexico or Canada due to the risk of spreading Covid-19. The deportation policy is often referred to simply as Title 42.

But human rights groups and dozens of health experts have slammed the policy as a way for the federal government to carry out mass arbitrary deportations at the southern border under the guise of public health.

The White House continued the policy until April 2022, when the CDC said it needed longer to prevent the spread of Covid. The CDC and DHS had planned for the policy to end in May, but Republican states sued, leading a federal court in Louisiana to block the Biden administration from ending the deportations at that time as well.

Republicans and some Democrats argue that ending the policy will result in a sharp increase in migration at the southern border, which communities there cannot cope with. El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency Saturday in response to the recent spike in migrants crossing the border.

The US recorded more than 100 million officially diagnosed and reported Covid-19 cases this week, but the number of Americans who have actually had the virus since the pandemic began is likely to have more than doubled.

Covid-19 has easily infected more than 200 million people in the US alone since the pandemic began – some people more than once. The virus continues to evolve into more transmissible variants that elude immunity from vaccination and previous infections, making controlling transmission incredibly difficult in the fourth year of the pandemic.

The United States officially recorded more than 100 million cases as of Tuesday, almost a third of the total population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data isn’t perfect and likely vastly undercounts the true number of infections, scientists say. While it counts people who have tested positive more than once or been infected multiple times with Covid, it does not count the number of Covid patients who were asymptomatic and never tested or tested at home and did not report it.

dr Tom Frieden, former CDC director under the Obama administration, estimates that the reported data represents less than half the actual total.

“There have been at least 200 million infections in the US, so this is a small fraction of that,” Frieden said. “The question really is whether we are better prepared for Covid and other health threats in the future and the jury is out on that,” he said.

The CDC estimated last spring that nearly 187 million people in the United States had contracted Covid at least once as of February 2022, more than double the officially reported cases at the time. The estimate was based on a survey of commercial lab data that found about 58% of Americans had antibodies as a result of Covid infection. The survey did not take into account reinfections or antibodies from vaccinations.

The CDC subsequently registered more than 21 million confirmed cases from March to December 21 this year, although that’s an underestimate because people who use rapid tests at home aren’t included in the data.

The more than 21 million additional confirmed cases, on top of the CDC’s February estimate of about 187 million total infections, gives a lower estimate of more than 208 million infections since the pandemic began.

“It’s really hard to stop this virus, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve shifted the focus to hospitalizations and deaths rather than just counting cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

The US has made significant strides since the darkest days of the pandemic. Deaths have fallen by about 90% since the pandemic peaked in January 2021, when more than 3,000 people succumbed to the virus every day before widespread vaccination. Daily hospitalizations are down 77% from a peak of more than 21,000 in January 2022 during the massive Omicron surge.

Despite these advances, deaths and hospitalizations remain stubbornly high given the widespread availability of vaccines and treatments. Around 400 people still die from the virus every day and around 5,000 are hospitalized every day. The virus is still circulating at levels that would have been considered high earlier in the pandemic, with an average of nearly 70,000 confirmed cases per day, a clear undernumber due to at-home testing.

More than a million people have died from Covid in the US since the pandemic began, more than in any other country in the world.

“I think people have gotten used to it,” Frieden said of Covid’s toll. “Covid is a new bad thing around us and it’s likely to be here for the long term. We don’t know how this will develop, whether it will become less virulent, more virulent – we have years that get better and worse. “

White House Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is stepping down this month, said the US could consider the pandemic over if Covid hospitalizations and deaths return to levels similar to the flu burden.

For one thing, the two viruses circulate at high levels at the same time. From October to the first week of December, the flu killed 12,000 people, while Covid killed more than 27,000 during that period.

“We’re still in the middle of it — it’s not over yet,” Fauci told the Conversations on Health Care radio show in November. “400 deaths a day is not an acceptable level. We want to get it much lower.”

Frieden said 95% of people who die from Covid are not up to date on their vaccinations and 75% of people who would benefit from the antiviral Paxlovid are not getting it.

“We should celebrate these great tools that we have, but we’re not doing a good job of getting them into people and that would not only save lives but also reduce the impact of Covid,” he said.

dr Ashish Jha, the coordinator of the White House Covid task force, said people who are up to date with their vaccines and are treated if they have a breakthrough infection are at almost no risk at this point in the pandemic dying covid. Jha has particularly urged older Americans, who are more susceptible to serious illness, to get empowered so they have more protection during the holidays.

“There are still too many older Americans who haven’t updated their immunity and haven’t protected themselves,” Jha told reporters at the White House last week.

Michael Osterholm, a leading epidemiologist, said new Covid variants would pose the greatest threat to US progress in 2023.

In response to widespread social unrest in the fall, China eased its strict zero-Covid policy, which has been used to try to quell outbreaks of the virus. Infections in the country are now rising sharply, raising concerns that Covid now has even more room for mutation.

The virus has continued to mutate into increasingly transmissible versions of Omicron over the past year, while immunity from vaccination or previous infections has waned.

“We want to believe that after three years of activity, all the immunity we should have acquired either through vaccination or previous infection should protect us,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But with the immunity going down and the variants – we can’t say that.”