Hottest temperature in Australia since 1960 recorded in WA’s north as mercury soars to 50.7 degrees


By Holly Thompson
January 13, 2022 — 

A small town in Western Australia’s Pilbara endured the hottest temperature recorded in Australia in 62 years on Thursday, with the mercury soaring towards 50 degrees across most of the region.

In Onslow it hit 50.7 degrees at 2.26pm, the hottest day in Australian history since 1960, when temperatures in Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia also hit 50.7.

The Bureau of Meteorology MetEye map shows the extent of the area that will 

experience temperatures over 45 degrees.

CREDIT:BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY

In Roebourne and Mardie, temperatures hit 50.5 degrees about midday, both tied with the hottest day recorded in the state’s history and the second-hottest day in Australian records.

The maximum temperature ever recorded in WA before was 50.5 degrees in Mardie in 1998.



Bureau of Meteorology meteorologist Luke Huntington said the heatwave meant a high chance of multiple towns hitting 50 degrees in the worst-affected areas across the next few days.

“The Pilbara region has had persistent hot temperatures over the last few months and there has been no rainfall to really take away the hot air that has built up,” he said.

“Over the next few months there is a high chance that temperatures on a day-to-day basis will be above average, at least until the wet season rains hit properly.”

A map from the Bureau of Meteorology showing the average rainfall from November 1 to December 31, 2020 (left) compared to the same period in 2021 (right). Orange areas show lower rainfall in the state’s north in 2021, compared to heavy rain indicated by green and blue regions in 2020. CREDIT:BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY

This year’s rainfall has been well under average, between 0-50 millimetres across November and December, compared to 2-300 millimetres in 2020.

Onslow’s average temperature at this time of year is usually 36.5 degrees, and so the 49-degree temperatures will be more than 10 degrees hotter than usual.

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“I am sure most people living up there are used to the heat, but with these extremes people should take extra care to stay indoors with air conditioning or, if they have to be outdoors, to stay in the shade and keep up with fluids,” Mr Huntington said.

By 2030, the annual average temperature in the Pilbara is projected to increase by 0.6 to 1.5 degrees.

Although the next few days are predicted to be cooler across Perth, the state capital did experience a heatwave at the end of 2021, with Christmas temperatures reaching well over 40 degrees across most of WA.

It was the hottest Christmas period since records began more than 100 years ago.

Bureau of Meteorology WA state manager James Ashley said the heatwave had been “unusual” and meant even minimum temperatures had remained relatively high.

Work longer, die younger: report shines light on life in the UK's 'left behind communities'

The North East has the highest concentration of left behind areas, where people were 46% more likely to die from Covid

By Graeme Whitfield

Business and Agenda Editor
13 JAN 2022

Fifth Street in Horden, County Durham (Image: Newcastle Chronicle)

People in “left behind” communities in regions like the North East work longer hours and live shorter lives, with more years suffering poor health, a new report has found.

The report - drawn up partly by academics at Newcastle University - found that people living in those areas were 46% more likely to die from Covid-19 than people living in other parts of the country, with ill health costing the country nearly £30bn a year in lost productivity.

The findings have been revealed in a joint report released by the All-Parliamentary Party Group for left behind neighbourhoods and Northern Health Science Alliance, which looks at the 225 areas of England which are ranked in the most deprived areas of the country and the areas with the worst public services.

It finds that in those areas - which are mostly found in the North and the Midlands - life expectancy for men was 3.7 years lower than average and three years lower for women. People in those neighbourhoods can also expect 7.5 fewer years in good health than their counterparts in the rest of England.

All but two of those areas have higher levels of bad or very bad health than the national average, while there is a higher prevalance of high blood pressure, obesity and chronic lung conditions. People living in left behind communities claim almost double the amount of incapacity benefits due to mental health related conditions as in England as a whole.

All-Party group co-chair Paul Howell, Tory MP for Sedgefield, said: “Health is at the forefront of all our minds right now.

“The findings from this report are clear, people living in ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods are overall worse off when it comes to health and something needs to change.”

Co-author Professor Clare Bambra, a public health expert at Newcastle University, said: “Levelling up needs to urgently focus on health inequalities by addressing the unequal conditions in which we live, work and age.

“For too long, a lack of investment in key services has meant that more deprived, ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods – particularly in the North – have suffered disproportionately.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened these inequalities and it will cast a long shadow across our future heath and economic prosperity as a country unless we act now. That’s why levelling up health needs to be central to the Government’s overall approach to levelling up the country.”

County Durham has the highest number of ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods in England at 16, while nine of England’s 20 most vulnerable areas to the Covid pandemic are in the North East.

In the County Durham village of Horden, 29.9% of working age people live with a limiting long-term illness, more than twice the national average.

The report’s authors make a series of recommendations to level up the health inequalities in left behind neighbourhoods, including an increase in NHS funding in more deprived local areas.

Despite being England’s smallest region, the North East has the country’s most ‘left behind’ areas at 54, including Byker and Walker, in Newcastle, the Choppington and Kitty Brewster areas of Northumberland, and Hendon in Sunderland.

Bolsonaro “welcomes” Omicron – angers WHO

Thursday, January 13th 2022 -

WHO's Michael Ryan replied that “no virus that kills people is welcome.”

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Wednesday said the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 was “welcome” in Brazil, because it “may point to the end of the pandemic.”

“Some studious and serious people, who are not linked to pharmaceutical companies, say that Omicron is welcome and, in fact, may point to the end of the pandemic,” Bolsonaro said in an interview with the Gazeta Brasil website.

Bolsonaro added that the omicron variant, which is causing an increase in COVID-19 cases worldwide, could be dubbed a “vaccine product virus.”

The President has stood out worldwide for his defiant stance in the face of the pandemic, repeatedly calling it “a little flu” despite the more than 600,000 Brazilians who have died from the virus. He has also vowed not to let his 11-year-old daughter be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Omicron has led to a sharp increase in cases in the country, causing infections to exceed 70,000 per day. During most of December, daily cases rarely exceeded 10,000. But while hospitalizations went up, there has not been a similar increase in the need for Intensive Care Units (ICU) beds like in 2021, before vaccines were widely available.

Despite the seemingly milder effects of the variant, medical experts warn that it could still overwhelm hospitals and healthcare systems due to how quickly it spreads. Omicron has become the dominant variant in many places, including the UK, the US, and Brazil.

“Perhaps we have reached herd immunization and I did not get vaccinated,” said Bolsonaro. “There are people who die from other things and they say they died from Covid,” he added.

World Health Organization (WHO) CEO Michael Ryan replied that “No virus that kills people is welcome, especially if death and suffering are avoidable. It is not time to give up, to declare that this is a welcome virus,” said Ryan. “There are many people who are in intensive care rooms with respirators, needing oxygen, who would say that this is not a mild ailment,” he added.

Here’s how scientists pulled off the first pig-to-human heart transplant

The effort involved genetic engineering, an experimental drug, and cocaine

12 JAN 2022
BYKELLY SERVICK

Surgeons examine the genetically engineered pig heart transplanted into a person last week.

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND MEDICAL CENTER

Surgeons announced this week they had performed the first transplant of a pig heart to a human. The 7 January surgery was a milestone for research on transplants between species, known as xenotransplantation. It’s still unclear how well or how long the heart will function, but researchers hope the technique can someday make up for a shortage in human organs for ailing patients.

The procedure, done by a team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), was a major test for several experimental innovations designed to keep the pig heart functioning in a human chest, including 10 genetic changes in the pigs, a novel immunosuppressant given to the recipient, and a cocaine-laced solution used to incubate the heart. Here’s how science and ethical considerations informed the complex procedure.
Why did this patient get a pig heart?

The transplant recipient, 57-year-old David Bennett, had advanced heart failure and a type of arrhythmia called ventricular fibrillation. Because he had not taken steps to control his high blood pressure and other health problems, physicians at the University of Maryland Medical Center and nearby institutions deemed him ineligible for a human heart transplant, says Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of the cardiac xenotransplantation program at UMSOM. “A human organ is considered a very precious thing,” he says. “The main concern was whether to give the heart to a person who may not be able to take care of it.”

Instead, with Bennett’s consent, the UMSOM team sought a “compassionate use” authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give him a heart from a genetically modified pig created by Revivicor, a biotech company. Mohiuddin and colleagues have worked with pig organs provided by Revivicor for years. In 2016, they reported that pig hearts could remain healthy for more than 2 years when transplanted into a baboon's abdomen, and have since done transplants into baboons’ chests, where the hearts sustain life. In recent experiments, baboons relying on Revivicor’s pig hearts survived up to 9 months, Mohiuddin says. (Those primates died with functioning hearts after contracting lung infections unrelated to the transplant, he says.)

What genes were changed in the donor pig, and why?

Xenotransplantation risks provoking rejection, an immune response in the recipient that can cause the organ from another species to fail. A key problem is that antibodies produced by people recognize certain sugars on the surface of pig cells as foreign. “You really need to get rid of as much antibody binding as you can upfront to get the graft to survive longer,” says Joseph Tector, a transplant surgeon at the University of Miami who was not involved with the new surgery.

So, in one of its lines of engineered pigs, Revivicor knocked out three genes for enzymes that enable pig cells to synthesize those sugars.

Six tweaks were additions of human genes: two anti-inflammatory genes, two genes that promote normal blood coagulation and prevent blood vessel damage, and two other regulatory proteins that help tamp down antibody response.

A final modification removed the gene for a growth hormone receptor to reduce the chance that a pig organ, roughly matched in size to the patient’s chest, will outgrow it once implanted. In September 2021, Mohiuddin and colleagues reported that this modification reduced the growth of pig hearts transplanted into baboons—a change they expect will help prevent heart failure in people.

Were all 10 genetic changes necessary?

That’s not clear, xenotransplantation researchers say. In collaboration with Revivicor, the UMSOM team has studied baboons with progressively more genetic modifications and seen increasing longevity in the hearts. But baboon experiments are costly, and limits on the number of animals in a study make it difficult to test the effects of each modification independently. “We don’t know how much each of those genes is helping,” Mohiuddin says.

That uncertainty is “one of my reservations about this,” says Megan Sykes, a transplant immunologist at Columbia University. “We really do need to do more science … to determine which [modifications] are important and useful.” Certain changes can prove helpful in some types of transplants and harmful in others: Inserting the human anti-inflammatory gene CD47 improved outcomes of bone marrow transplants from pigs to baboons, but pig kidneys with that modification in all of their cells seem prone to inflammation and swelling, she says.

As xenotransplantation scales up to treat more people, the need for consistency might also limit the number of added human genes, Tector notes. He founded the biotech company Makana Therapeutics, acquired by Recombinetics Inc., which is preparing to launch a clinical trial of genetically engineered pig-to-human kidney transplants this year. “The level of expression from animal to animal, even when they’re clones, can be quite different,” Tector says. “If you’re a regulator … you want to say, ‘OK, this kidney is the same as that kidney.’”
Is the patient’s immune system being suppressed?

Even with the modifications to the heart, to prevent rejection, the UMSOM team is giving Bennett a strong immunosuppressant: an experimental antibody drug called KPL-404, made by Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, Ltd.

Standard immunosuppressants used in human-to-human organ transplants aren’t effective if the immune system makes lots of antibodies against the organ, as surgeons feared would be the case with the pig heart. KPL-404 shuts down production of these antibodies by binding to a cellular receptor called CD40, suppressing the activity of antibody-producing B cells, and inhibiting their cross-talk with T cells that coordinate the immune system’s response to an invader. “The 10 [altered] genes help, but the anti-CD40 antibody, which had been my main focus throughout my career, I think is the game changer,” Mohiuddin says.

Kiniksa has been working on KPL-404 as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and announced positive results from a safety trial in healthy volunteers in May 2021.
How was the heart prepared for transplant?

Immune rejection aside, pig hearts transplanted into baboons seem to sputter out in a matter of days unless they’re perfused with a nutrient solution before the transplant, Mohiuddin says. The mechanisms behind the hearts’ failure are unclear, though he speculates that being deprived of blood flow and oxygen when removed from the pig chest somehow depletes the energy-producing mitochondria in the organ’s cells.

The UMSOM team relied on a method developed by Lund University surgeon Stig Steen and commercialized by the Swedish company XVIVO for storing and treating the donor heart after it’s harvested. The heart is bathed in a circulating broth that includes water, hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol—and dissolved cocaine.

How cocaine helps keep the bodiless heart healthy isn’t clear, Mohiuddin says, but its presence in the solution creates a headache when his team imports a new batch from Sweden; each shipment needs a permit from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Will more patients get pig hearts now?

The authorization UMSOM received from FDA only applies to one patient. “There’s a chance that if we get another patient like this, we will apply for [another],” Mohiuddin says. But his team’s main goal is to advance the approach into a multicenter clinical trial. The team will have to do more tests showing long-term survival in baboons to get FDA approval for the trial, he says.

“This is not a one-off,” says Revivicor CEO David Ayares of Bennett’s surgery. “We’re going to take this all the way through to human clinical trials, and hopefully have an unlimited supply of donor organs.” The company is constructing a new clinical-grade facility for raising its pigs to meet FDA standards for such a trial, which he expects to launch by the end of 2023.

doi: 10.1126/science.ada0089

The Milky Way's central black hole is a powerful, fickle enigma of a void

Sagittarius A is flashing the rest of the galaxy in a way that scientists have yet to fully understand.


Eric Mack
Jan. 12, 2022 

Sag A is at the center of this X-ray image of the Milky Way's galactic nucleus.

NASA/Swift/N. Degenaar

A mysterious monster lies at the center of our galaxy and after intensive study by researchers the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A (Sag A) appears just as unpredictable and chaotic.

An international team analyzed fifteen years worth of data and concluded that Sag A flares irregularly from day to day as well as over the longer term.
"How the flares occur exactly remains unclear," Jakob van den Eijnden, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. "It was previously thought that more flares follow after gaseous clouds or stars pass by the black hole, but there is no evidence for that yet. And we cannot yet confirm the hypothesis that the magnetic properties of the surrounding gas play a role either."

Jakob van den Eijnden is co-author of a paper soon to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For decades we've known that Sag A is an active, dark maw and a strong source of radio, X-ray and gamma ray emissions. As it roils and presumably consumes everything that comes near it lets off daily flashes of radiation that can be 10 to even 100 times brighter than normal background emissions coming from the black hole.

Supermassive black hole at Milky Way's core gives up a secret

 (images) See all photos

+7 More

The team used observations from NASA's Swift observatory in orbit and were unable to distinguish a pattern in Sag A's flaring activity from day-to-day or over the span of years. For example, the black hole was hyperactive from 2006 to 2008, then relatively quiet until 2012 before seeing an increase in activity again.

"The physical process producing the flares is not fully understood and it is unclear if the flaring rate varies, although some recent works suggest it has reached unprecedented variability in recent years," the paper reads.

Members of the research team say they will request more data and observing time on Swift to continue studying the little understood celestial object, which also happens to be the most powerful force within at least 100,000 light years. Seems worth taking a second look.

Archaeology: More precise age for earliest known human fossils from Ethiopia estimated

Nature

January 13, 2022

The remains of the Kibish Omo I from Ethiopia — among the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa — could be at least 36,000 years older than previously thought, according to a paper published in Nature. The minimum age is estimated to be approximately 233,000 years old, a timescale that aligns more consistently with models of modern human evolution.

The Omo I has previously been predicted to be around 197,000 years old. However, this estimate, which was made by studying layers of ash corresponding to the timing of volcanic eruptions, has been challenged. Céline Vidal and colleagues re-examined the layer of volcanic ash that overlies the sediment containing Omo I, linking the volcanic deposits to a major explosive eruption of the Shala volcano in the Main Ethiopian Rift. These analyses allowed the authors to more precisely date the age of the Omo fossils below this layer, to approximately 233,000 (±22,000) years old. This new age corresponds with most models of modern human evolution, which predict that our species originated and diverged from our closest ancestors around 350,000 to 200,000 years ago.

The authors conclude that future research will be needed to obtain a robust maximum age for Omo I. Further analyses will also hopefully confirm the age of the Herto fossils — additional early H. sapiens fossils from Ethiopia, generally reported to be between 160,000 and 155,000 years old — as these are shown to lie underneath a different volcanic ash layer to that of the Omo fossils, contrary to previous understanding.

doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04275-8

Original article 

Could Indiana’s anti-CRT bill ban teachers from condemning racism?

By Aleksandra Appleton Jan 12, 2022

House Bill 1134 passed the Indiana House Education Committee on an 8-5 vote with all four Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Ed Clere of New Albany, opposed. It now heads to the full House.

Two Indiana lawmakers got into a tense exchange Wednesday over whether a controversial bill would prevent teachers from condemning racism.

The bill, authored by Rep. Tony Cook, R-Cicero, would ban teachers from promoting eight concepts, including teaching about race and racism in a way that makes students feel responsible for matters like slavery and discrimination.

In an education committee hearing, Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, asked Cook whether a “good citizenship” clause added to House Bill 1134 would allow teachers to say unequivocally that “racism is bad.”

In response, Cook said teachers could teach historical events, like the Tulsa race massacre, the Selma Civil Rights march, and the Japanese-American internment during World War II.

“(Those) examples would certainly talk about racism and how it was approached in a very bad way in our country at one time,” Cook said. “What this bill is meant to caution against is bringing in my own feelings and imposing or promoting those to students.”

Cook later clarified with Chalkbeat that the bill would allow teachers to condemn racism, through the new language encouraging teachers to promote the values of the U.S. Constitution over other political systems. Racism, he said, is contrary to constitutional ideals, citing amendments that abolished slavery, offered equal protection, and gave voting rights to Americans of color.

“I will say racism is bad. I would say that in a classroom under this bill,” said Cook, a former teacher.

Cook amended his bill after a national outcry over another Indiana lawmaker’s comments that teachers should be impartial when teaching Nazism.

Cook said he does not intend to ban teaching of specific historical events, and that he wouldn’t support lists of what would be allowed and what wouldn’t. Instead, he said the bill authors are seeking to ban the promotion of ideologies, and activities like role-playing that sort children into roles of the oppressor versus the oppressed.

Some of the ideas the bill would ban are that any student is superior or inferior to any other on the basis of their race, as well as the idea that they should feel guilt for the past actions of people who share their characteristics.

Smith said civil rights groups remain concerned that the bill would prevent teachers from taking a stand against racism. He called the answers he received from Cook “evasive.”

Smith said he believes Cook’s bill is intended to censor critical race theory, which states that racism is embedded in the policies of the U.S.

“Anyone with an open mind would know that,” Smith said.

He said that by trying to protect students from feeling uncomfortable, the bill would deny them a chance to learn higher-order thinking, or the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas.

Its proposal to allow parents to remove their children from lessons they object to would create “academic bedlam,” as teachers try to reconcile parents’ requests with academic standards.

House Bill 1134 passed the House Education Committee on an 8-5 vote with all four Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Ed Clere of New Albany, opposed. It now heads to the full House.

Similar legislation, Senate Bill 167, is awaiting a committee vote.

Other changes to the House bill approved Wednesday establish a 30-day limit for parents to file complaints about forbidden concepts in the classroom.

Educators could lose their licenses for violating the bill, but the amendment adds that those violations must be “willful” or “wanton,” to address concerns about frivolous complaints brought under the bill.

The bill also would not require teachers to submit lesson plans for a curriculum review committee to approve, after teachers testified in public comment that their plans were fluid and changed daily.

Lawmakers changed the makeup of those committees to specify that they must be composed of 60% parents, rather than 40%. However, no more than 50% of those parents could also be school district employees.

The committee also dropped the wording — the singular word “include” — that teachers feared could have prevented even neutral academic examination of controversial topics. But the bill still would ban teachers and schools from promoting eight banned concepts that it lists.

Groups sue Bureau of Land Management over grazing on Agua Fria

By Ron Dungan

Published: Wednesday, January 12, 2022 - 

The Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa Audubon Society have sued the Bureau of Land Management over grazing in Agua Fria National Monument.

The groups allege that the BLM has not done enough to prevent cattle from harming endangered species on the monument, located north of Phoenix.

The lawsuit cited damage to streams and habitat for a number of threatened and endangered species.

Agua Fria has been a popular area for outdoor recreation since it was created about 20 years ago, and its streams have been affected by climate change and wildfire in recent years.

THEN FARMER BROWN COMPLAINS, WITHOUT EVIDENCE, THAT A WOLF KILLED HIS CATTLE ILLEGALLY GRAZING ON PUBLIC LANDS, HAPPENS IN CANADA TOO.

Amid Labor Shortage, US Army Offers Largest Enlistment Bonus Ever

“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” a military official said

Tasos Katopodis | Getty Images News | 
Members of the U.S. National Guard arrive at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 12, 2021 in Washington, DC.

The U.S. Army is seeking to blunt the pandemic-fueled labor shortage rocking the country’s economy with its largest bonus ever — $50,000.

In a release Thursday, military recruiting officials said the incentive, for qualified recruits who sign up for certain career paths and agree to an active-duty six-year enlistment, is aimed at alluring the “same talent” that private companies are competing for.

“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” Brig. Gen. John Cushing said in a statement.

The announcement comes after millions of Americans — perhaps fearful of getting sick or unable to find child care — voluntarily quit their jobs last year. Many large and small companies responded with bonuses, raises and other enticements.

Here’s Why Omicron Is “Milder” But Still Wreaking Havoc On Healthcare

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” one doctor said.

Dan Vergano BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on January 12, 2022

Jeenah Moon / Reuters
A woman takes a COVID test in New York City, Dec. 27, 2021.

The paradox of Omicron, now responsible for an estimated 98.3% of all US coronavirus cases, is that while it seems more likely to result in significantly milder outcomes than Delta and previous variants, the health system is as stressed as it’s ever been.

Public health officials are warning that Omicron is threatening to overwhelm the medical infrastructure with sheer numbers, and hospitals are filled with seriously ill patients.

“It's going to get worse before it gets better,” said Dean Blumberg, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis.

Here’s what we know about why this is happening:
Omicron is more contagious

The variant appears to be roughly two to five times more transmissible than Delta, which previously dominated US cases.

“This is the second-most contagious disease in the world now, second to measles,” said Sara Murray, the director of the health informatics data science and innovation team and an associate professor of clinical and hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

“While we are seeing early evidence that Omicron is less severe than Delta and that those infected are less likely to require hospitalization, it's important to note that Omicron continues to be much more transmissible,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday.

This means that even though a smaller percentage of patients infected with Omicron require hospitalization, the total number of COVID cases is so high that hospitals are seeing more of those patients than at any point in the pandemic.

COVID-19 cases have reached record levels in the US, averaging around 1.4 million new reported cases a day, itself an undercount. Daily, an average of 19,800 people nationwide are now admitted to hospitals with COVID, according to the CDC, a 33% increase over the past week. Almost a third of intensive care unit beds nationwide are now filled with COVID patients, meaning roughly 1 out of every 2.5 people in an ICU ward in the country has the virus


Peter Aldhous/BuzzFeed News / Via Department of Health and Human Services
The number of patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US.

More patients are being admitted “with” COVID

COVID is so widespread right now that a significant percentage of hospitalized patients are admitted for something else but then test positive upon screening at admittance.

“We test a lot of asymptomatic patients in preparation for procedures or surgeries, planned hospitalizations — and even in those folks who are totally asymptomatic, we're seeing a case positivity right now of about 12%,” Murray said.

“It’s a very different landscape that we're seeing with overcrowding in the hospital than we've seen with the prior waves of COVID,” said Richelle Charles, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Almost half of these cases are in the hospital for non-COVID-related illnesses.”

At UCSF, Murray said overall about two-thirds of their COVID patients were hospitalized for the disease, while one-third were hospitalized with it. In pediatric COVID patients, about half of them were admitted for something other than the disease.

Yet even if these patients' COVID symptoms are mild or nonexistent, their positive status places an extra burden on the hospital because they require isolation and extra safety protocols for hospital staff.

Staffing shortages from exposure and burnout

Hidden in the increasing case numbers are doctors, nurses, and other healthcare personnel infected by the more contagious variant, which causes more breakthrough infections among the vaccinated than past ones, said Akin Demehin, the policy director at the American Hospital Association. Even with mild infections, those healthcare workers are still out of action for a week after their tests turn negative, per CDC policy, just as the surge fills up hospitals and drives up demand for staff.

The Omicron surge will only put more stress on doctors and nurses, who still have to care for all those extra patients. One survey last August reported that nearly 60% of doctors feel burned out, Demehin said, and that was two surges ago. “We hear this from hospital leaders all the time — their number one, two, and three priority right now is workforce,” he said. “They know just how much has been asked of healthcare providers over the past almost two years.”

More young children

“This time around, we're seeing more children less than 5 years of age,” Blumberg said.

He has observed that many of them have milder cases of bronchitis or croup, whereas the teens with COVID seen in earlier surges had more severe pneumonia. Most of these young children recover well, but he cautioned that with any infection and any hospital admission, “some children aren't going to do well.”

Hospitalizations among young children are currently higher than they’ve ever been during the pandemic, according to the CDC.

Vaccines still work, but boosters are important

One thing the Omicron surge hasn’t altered is the well-established reality that vaccines significantly improve people's odds of not dying from COVID-19. Deaths are still on the increase, averaging 1,600 a day in the US, an increase of 40% from the past week, according to the CDC. (Walensky said at the White House briefing that she thinks most of those are Delta variant cases.)

With Omicron rampant, “virtually everybody is going to wind up getting exposed and likely get infected,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday. “But if you're vaccinated, and if you're boosted, the chances of you getting sick are very, very low.”

“At my hospital, we have a graphic that's sent out every day that has little people icons, those in the ICU, those on a ventilator, and those admitted for COVID. And the vast majority, overwhelmingly, are unvaccinated people in all three categories,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, who spoke Tuesday at an Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing on Omicron for reporters.

“What we've learned with Omicron is that the booster really makes a big difference in terms of reducing your risk,” Murray said. Her hospital is seeing both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients hospitalized for COVID. But even patients who only had an initial series of vaccines — no booster — appear to be protected from the most severe outcomes.

“What we aren't seeing is patients ending up on ventilators if they're fully vaccinated,” she said. “I don't have a single fully vaccinated patient in the hospital on a ventilator right now.”