Variant spreads further around globe

Nations rush to tighten rules, close borders as Omicron extends its reach.

Facing a global spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant, U.S. health officials said it will probably take two weeks to fully determine the level of threat but pushed booster shots as a key first stage in the battle.

President Biden met with top health advisors Sunday to map out a strategy as new cases were confirmed in more countries, including Germany, Italy, Belgium, Israel and Hong Kong.

In Amsterdam, 13 people on flights from South Africa, the region where Omicron is believed to have originated, tested positive.

In England, officials imposed stricter mask rules in response to the discovery of two cases.

The Biden administration on Sunday stressed the need for vigilant adherence to existing COVID-19 safety practices — notably, vaccinations and booster shots.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-diseases expert, said a winter COVID-19 surge is possible, and vaccinations are the best way to combat it.

“If we have a combination of getting as many people as we can get vaccinated as possible who have not yet gotten vaccinated, add on to it the children who are now eligible, the 5 to 11, there’s 28 million of those ... if we do that successfully, in a very intensive way, we can mitigate any increase,” Fauci told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reiterated that strategy.

“From today, we’re going to boost the booster campaign,” he said.

Interest in booster shots has been more sluggish than officials had expected. Fauci said that must change.

“We feel, even with variants like Omicron, that if you get boosted, you’re going to get a level of antibody that’s high enough that it is likely you’ll be able to get at least some degree and maybe even a lot of protection against this,” he said.

The variant, first identified in southern Africa amid a spike in infections there, has more mutations than scientists have seen before, including some that may make the coronavirus more resistant to immunity generated from previous infections or vaccines.

Many questions remain unanswered about the variant, including how rapidly it spreads and how well vaccines can protect against it.

Fauci said there is concern about the speed at which Omicron has swept across South Africa.

“It just kind of exploded in the sense that when you look at South Africa, you were having a low level of infection, and then all of a sudden there was this big spike,” he said.

“The profile of the mutations strongly suggests that it’s going to have an advantage in transmissibility and that it might evade immune protection,” he said. “The critical questions now are, do the antibodies block this well, and what is the seriousness of the disease?”

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Sunday that the Omicron variant “has a lot of mutations.”

“It does make you worry, therefore, that it’s a sufficiently different virus — that it may not respond as well to protection from the vaccines. But we don’t know that,” Collins said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We can certainly see that in South Africa and a few neighboring countries in the south part of Africa, this does seem to be spreading quite rapidly,” he said. “So the inference would be there that it’s particularly contagious. We don’t know about its severity. [We’re] trying to collect that data as quickly as possible.”

Collins stressed that there are no data yet to suggest that Omicron causes more serious illness than other coronavirus variants, such as Delta.

“I do think it’s more contagious when you look at how rapidly it spread through multiple districts in South Africa. It has the earmarks, therefore, of being particularly likely to spread from one person to another. What we don’t know is whether it can compete with Delta,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

There has been some initial suggestion that the new variant causes mild illness, based on many of the cases followed in South Africa. But scientists have cautioned that this idea could stem from the fact that the early reports were of cases among young, generally healthy people, and that it is too soon to know if Omicron causes more or less severe illness than earlier coronavirus variants.

The U.S. plans to ban travel from South Africa and seven other southern African countries beginning Monday.

Many other governments rushed to close their borders, fearful of any new development in a pandemic that has killed 5 million worldwide.

Israel announced the strictest measures, closing its borders for two weeks and red-lining travel to 50 African countries. Morocco barred all incoming flights for two weeks.

As airports were snarled and travelers faced canceled flights, the World Health Organization condemned travel bans that would “place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods” while doing little to stop the variant’s spread. Similar bans did little to slow the spread of the Delta variant from England a year ago.

Throughout 2021, the WHO pleaded with richer countries to not hoard COVID-19 vaccines and starve poor countries of protection. With much of the world still unvaccinated, the risk of new variants developing is high.

South Africa’s government responded angrily to the travel bans, saying they are “akin to punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and the ability to detect new variants quicker.”

In the United States, where 62 million eligible Americans have chosen not to get available vaccines, and others who have not had booster shots may have waning immunity, there was worry over a possible surge.

Officials in California joined the Biden administration in pushing vaccinations.

Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health, said Omicron has not been found in the state. He said California has formed a public-private partnership for genomic sequencing in an effort to detect the variant early.

Travelers arriving in California who have been in South Africa, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia or Zimbabwe within the last 14 days must follow recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get tested three to five days after arrival, quarantine for seven days even if testing negative and isolate for 10 days if COVID-19 symptoms develop.

“We are doubling down on our vaccination and booster efforts to ensure that all Californians have access to safe, effective and free vaccines that can prevent serious illness and death,” Aragón said in the statement.

In Los Angeles County, health officials are urging residents to be vaccinated and to wear masks in indoor public settings and at outdoor “mega events.”

Those on the ground know how hard it will be to get people to take cover from a possible surge.

“We all knew something like this was coming,” said Dr. Rene Ramirez, a UC San Francisco emergency department physician on the Fresno campus, which has been repeatedly overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Ramirez also serves as public health officer for Calaveras County, where the vaccination rate is barely 50%, compared with a statewide rate of 62%.

“To me, the biggest question is, why is not everyone getting vaccinated in order to protect others? As long as there is a high transmission rate, the virus will continue to mutate,” he said. “We have to find a way to flip the conversation from me, me, me to protecting others by wearing masks and getting vaccinated.”

He conceded that even he, a doctor, had failed to convince a friend he has known since kindergarten to get vaccinated, even as the person’s relative lay intubated with COVID-19. He also has faced threats from people angry over mask mandates.

The events related to the presence of Black people in our country are truths integral to U.S. history. The fact that many of these events reflect badly on white citizens is a truth that has been avoided, sidestepped and denied.

History books used in all U.S. schools need to be revised to reflect the truths about the horrible treatment of Black people from the very beginning up to the present, as many Black citizens continue to fear for their lives and well-being.

The guilty verdicts in the Ahmaud Arbery case are a step in the right direction — a step in a long and complex journey to racial justice. Betsy Gallery

Santa Barbara

I received my graduate degree from Howard University

in 1966. In 1985, I obtained a paralegal certificate from UCLA.

In 1970, I was hired as a social worker. In 1989, I applied for a job at a law firm as a paralegal but was not given an interview for the position. What’s the connection?

At some point after being hired as a social worker, my supervisor told me one of the reasons I had gotten an interview was because a

Black employee had left and they wanted to hire someone Black, if possible. Years later, when I talked to a woman who worked at the firm I applied to, she admitted I hadn’t been granted an interview because one of the attorneys noted my degree from Howard University — a historically Black university — and made a comment about not wanting to hire “one of those.”

Critical race theory is often described as the study of systemic racism in the legal system. By way of background, I’m of mixed western European heritage, white with auburn hair and hazel eyes.

John Snyder Newbury Park