Health News at Your Fingertips

In the US, National Basketball Association (NBA) players who test positive for Covid now have a quicker path to return to play, AP reports, after the league cut isolation times from ten to six days for vaccinated asymptomatic players.

The NBA has seen coronavirus numbers soar in recent days, even with 97% of players vaccinated and at least 65% of eligible players boosted against the virus.

It follows a move from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cut the isolation period for people testing Covid-positive from ten to five days. Officials said that data shows people are most infectious in the two days before, and three days after, symptoms appear.

Read the full NBA story here.

Health authorities in Denmark are concerned over low vaccination rates for children ahead of the 5 January return to schools.

Currently, 38% of children aged 5-11 have had at least one dose, the Copenhagen Post reports, leading ministers to urge parents to get their kids vaccinated as soon as possible to prevent a new term surge.

“We can see that it had a beneficial effect on infection among the younger age groups when the schools were shut down before Christmas,” health minister Magnus Heunicke said. “But we still need to vaccinate more of the youngest school kids so the infection doesn’t skyrocket in the schools when they open in January.”

Omicron has seen new cases climb in Denmark. The country reported 16,164 new Covid cases on Monday, the Post reports, more than doubling the 7,799 new infections on Monday two weeks ago.

Denmark currently has one of the highest per capita covid rates in the world, local media TV 2 reports, with 1,612 cases of infection per 100,000 people last week.

Omicron accounts for 58.6% of all Covid cases in the US, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.

Delta accounts for 41.1% of Covid cases for the week ending 25 December. (The remaining 0.3% is made up of other variants.)

The drastic rise of the highly mutated strain comes after the US reported its first Omicron case on 1 December. Omicron has pushed cases up to record levels in some states and sparked a rush for the delivery of booster jabs in efforts to beat back the variant.

The new data comes after Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser, said the US should consider making vaccination mandatory for domestic air travel, to push up the vaccination compliance rate.

Ukraine detected 2,248 new positive Covid tests in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said, a 71% decrease from the 7,716 new cases on Tuesday two weeks ago.

Ukraine saw spiking cases in late October and early November, sometimes above 20,000 or 25,000 a day, but cases have receded in recent weeks. (Some countries are reporting lower numbers over the holiday period.)

A further 134 Covid-related deaths were recorded, a 68% decrease on two weeks ago, and 944 hospitalisations were reported. Ukraine’s death toll is now 95,105, the world’s 15th highest.

Bangladesh began its booster vaccination drive today in a bid to ward off the highly mutated Omicron variant.

Health officials said frontline workers and the over-60s will be first in line to get the booster jab, with the campaign starting in the capital, Dhaka.

About 27% of Bangladesh’s population is double vaccinated, Reuters reports.

Two Omicron cases have been detected so far – in two travellers returning from Zimbabwe – but community transmission is yet to be confirmed.

Really interesting opinion article on burnout for The Guardian here: I thought I could plough through the pandemic without burning out. I was wrong.

The rapid spread of the Omicron variant brings home the difficult truth: the moment isn’t going to come “when all this is over”. The pandemic isn’t like a war, to be survived until the day when peace is made, and we can all exhale and begin picking up the pieces. It’s a new reality that will, at best, gradually fade into the background as the threat recedes and our coping strategies improve.

The problem is that our bodies aren’t designed to cope with this. As Emily and Amelia Nagoski point out in their book Burnout, our stress response is designed to help us run away from lions. It is something we are supposed to move through: it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Writer Christine Berry goes on to discuss her own experience with burnout.

I learned this the hard way when I burned out at the end of July. Like many people, I thought I could just plough on through the pandemic and still meet my own wildly unrealistic expectations of myself.

In my case, this meant juggling parenthood with writing my first solo book and taking on a new senior leadership role. As it turned out, I was spectacularly wrong. After several months wrestling with anxiety, depression and fatigue, I finally faced up to reality and decided to step away from the new job. It was wrenching, but I just couldn’t ignore the message my body was giving me: I had to slow down.

Read the full story here, including how it is important to “find ways to deal with our stress, calm our nervous systems and make our bodies feel safer.”

The multibillion-pound world’s fair in Dubai has warned that some venues on site may shut down as Covid cases rapidly rise in the United Arab Emirates, AP reports.

Dubai’s Expo 2020 said that virus outbreaks among staff may force some parts of the fair to “close temporarily for deep cleaning and sanitisation,” without elaborating on the scope or the location of the infections.

The UAE’s daily virus caseload has skyrocketed by a multiple of 37 in just the last three weeks after the arrival of the Omicron variant.

The vague statement from Dubai’s government-run media office on Monday underscores the daunting challenges of hosting among the world’s first major in-person events amid a still-raging pandemic. The fair opened in October after a year’s delay as the UAE bet that its rapid vaccine rollout would allow its economy to avoid the closures that have paralysed much of the west.

With Dubai’s peak winter tourism season in full swing, the world’s fair has vaulted into the spotlight. Millions of tourists from around the world are flocking to the sprawling site packed with scores of national pavilions, restaurants, shops and performance stages.

The government of Delhi, India on Tuesday announced more restrictions amid rising Omicron cases, the Times of India reports.

The city of about 19 million people will enter lockdown-like restrictions after it reported a further 63 Omicron cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 142. (The number is likely to be much higher.)

“As the Covid-19 positivity rate has been above 0.5% for the past few days, we are enforcing Level-I (yellow alert) of the Graded Response Action Plan,” Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said.

The new restrictions include, the Times of India reports, among other things:

• Schools, colleges and other educational institutions closed
• Sports complexes, cinemas, conference halls, stadiums and swimming pools closed
• Offices at 50% maximum capacity
• Restaurants and bars at 50% maximum capaicty with a 10pm curfew
• Delhi Metro at 50% seating capacity and no standing

It comes after India reports 671 total Omicron cases sequenced so far.

Despite the severity of India’s Delta wave providing some barrier of protection from antibodies, there are fears Omicron could re-infect people – and that the high use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which studies have showed to be less effective against Omicron, could provoke a new wave.

Japanese officials have detected a five-person cluster of Omicron cases in the city of Osaka, local media agency Kyodo reports.

It follows days of anxiety over Omicron community transmission in Japan, which has imposed strict border restrictions in attempts to shut out the variant.

The cluster relates to five people in a nursing home. Omicron has been detected beforehand but this is the first suspected cluster, Kyodo reports.

Prime minister Fumio Kishida said on Thursday Japan is prepared for a domestic outbreak. “Using the time we bought through strengthened border controls, we have accelerated efforts to enhance the process of prevention, testing and early treatment,” he said.

Japan detected 214 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, the Japan Times reports, a 67% increase on the 128 on Tuesday two weeks ago. No Covid deaths were recorded in the past 24 hours.

Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the UK government’s life sciences adviser, said that although hospitalisations had increased in recent weeks as Omicron spreads through the population, the disease “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”. Fewer patients were needing high-flow oxygen and the average length of stay was down to three days, he said.

“The horrific scenes that we saw a year ago of intensive care units being full, lots of people dying prematurely, that is now history, in my view, and I think we should be reassured that that’s likely to continue,” Bell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

For the full story, read my colleague’s report here.