Time to mask up again?
Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,149th day of the pandemic and password day, a reminder to assess the strength and security of the passwords you use in order to secure your accounts from hackers.
A plurality of passwords continue to be password, password1, 12345789, 11111, dragon, football, Pokémon, superman, princess, baseball, and Password. If you’re using any of these or anything at all similar, stop reading today’s Morning News Brief and change your passwords to something more secure instead.
Diamonds are forever, the saying goes, but immunity to SARS-CoV-2 from inoculation is not.
A new study quantifies just how a dose of vaccine protects someone and shows how the protection drops over time.
This study demonstrates that protection received from vaccines is very high at the beginning, but it confirms not only that it wanes quickly but the extent to which protection falls over a period of time.
The study, “Evaluation of Waning of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine–Induced Immunity: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” was published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.
The meta study was led by a team of scientist from Italy. They analyzed 40 studies that documented people’s vaccination status and their subsequent infections with Covid-19, as confirmed by lab tests. The studies included data from both the delta and omicron surges.
Here’s what they found.
On average, one month after receiving two doses of either mRNA vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech, the vaccine from AstraZeneca, or the shot from Sinovac, the effectiveness had fallen to 53% in protecting against symptoms of SARS-CoV-2.
The 53% figure is, however, an average.
The primary series of Moderna’s vaccine had the highest effectiveness, 62%, while Sinovac came in at 32%.
Six months after the administration of the primary vaccine cycle, the average effectiveness of the vaccines had fallen to lower than 20%.
The waning was greater after the omicron wave than the delta wave, which suggests that the vaccine was more effective against the delta variant than the omicron variant.
This is where it gets interesting.
Getting a booster dose after the primary cycle restored protection levels back to where they had been just after the first set of doses, but this protection dropped on average from 60% at the one-month point to less than 30% at nine months.
In other news we cover today, cases are rising in Southeast Asia, mask mandates are returning in some countries, and Moderna posted a surprise profit for the first quarter.
UNITED STATES
Drugmaker Moderna announced, on Thursday, first-quarter sales of $1.9 billion, posting a surprise quarterly profit despite the fact that Q1 revenue was down $4.2 billion from the same period in 2022 as sales of the company’s coronavirus vaccine surged amidst a resurgence of cases of SARS-CoV-2 during the omicron surge.
Moderna reported net income of $79 million, compared with $3.66 billion in net income in Q1 2022.
GLOBAL
Governments need to learn to adjust to Covid’s ebb and flow if the world is to continue living with the virus.
In Malaysia, rising numbers of SARS-CoV-2 cases are threatening to overwhelm the country’s already crowded hospitals.
The rise in cases is being fueled by gatherings over the recent long Hari Raya Aidilfitri holiday. There have been 20 deaths due to Covid in the two weeks preceding April 29 , a figure that is 25% higher than the previous 14 days.
Health officials in the Philippines said the country had reopened its coronavirus treatment wards amid a surge of SARS-CoV-2 cases in Southeast Asia.
The test positivity rate there jumped from 7% at the start of April to 17% by the end of the month.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, cases are also rising. Health officials there have reimposed indoor mask mandates in the capital, Hanoi, and the country’s commercial hub, Ho Chi Minh City, has brought back its mask mandate for school campuses.
TODAY’S STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Thursday, May 4.
As of Thursday morning, the world has recorded 687.5 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.1 million from the previous day, and 6.87 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, just over 659.9 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of under 0.1 million from the previous day.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Thursday at press time is 20,671,640, an increase of 18,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,632,349, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 39,291, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past five months.
The United States reported 88,210 new cases in the period April 20 through April 26, a figure that is down 13% over the same period one week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll for the same period is 1,052, a figure that is down 20%. The average number of hospital admissions from Covid was 4,198 on May 2, a figure that is down 15% over the preceding 14 days. Finally, the test positivity rate is 5.1%, down 14% over the 14 days preceding April 28.
Starting on March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis.
In addition, since the start of the pandemic the United States has, as of Thursday, recorded 106.7 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.16 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, over 44.9 million, and a reported death toll of 531,606.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States. Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 701,833, has recorded just under 37.5 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with over 33.7 million cases, South Korea, with 31.2 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with just under 25.8 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with over 24.5 million, and Russia, with over 22.8 million.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of the past Thursday, just over 270 million people in the United States – or 81.3% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Of that population, 69.4%, or 230.5 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now 675.4 million. Breaking this down further, 92.2% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.1 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.3 million people – is fully vaccinated. In addition, 20.3% of the same population, or 52.3 million people, has already received an updated or bivalent booster dose of vaccine, while 23.3 million people over the age of 65, or 42.6% of that population have also received the bivalent booster.
Starting on June 13, 2022, the CDC began to update vaccine data on a weekly basis and publish the updated information on Thursdays by 8 p.m. EDT, a statement on the agency’s website said.
Some 70% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Thursday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.38 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 85,019 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 29.8% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the start of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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