US Student borrowers in shock over 'zero balance' as federal program fulfills elusive promise


Erik Ortiz
Thu, January 27, 2022, 9:00 PM·6 min read

The notice from the federal government took Lee Dossett, a doctor in Lexington, Kentucky, by surprise. "Congratulations!" it began.

After a couple of years of denials for a student loan forgiveness program designed for public servants, Dossett, who has worked in the nonprofit sector for 10 years, was told last week that not only was his application re-evaluated, but that the Department of Education had determined he should have his outstanding medical school loans erased altogether — about $75,000 worth.

"I was completely shocked because I had honestly given up on getting it," Dossett said.

Image: Lee Dossett. (Courtesy of Lee Dossett)

But a record number of student borrowers are reaping the same benefit after the Biden administration in October began relaxing stringent rules around Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which launched in 2007 to help teachers, health care workers, military members and other public servants earn debt relief on their federal loans. As of last week, more than 70,000 borrowers qualified for debt forgiveness, amounting to about $5 billion in relief, the Department of Education said.

Before the overhaul, just 16,000 borrowers of about 1.3 million enrolled applicants had their loans' remaining balances expunged through the program, according to federal data.

Cody Hounanian, the executive director of the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for student borrowers, said the sudden notices of discharged debts are a blessing for many applicants who dutifully made the required 120 monthly payments or were on course to and yet were denied because they were inadvertently enrolled in the wrong payment plan or had the wrong type of loan or due to another technicality.

"It's very emotional," Hounanian said of the wave of financial assistance. "It's changing their lives for the better."

Student borrowers who have benefited in recent days are sharing their shock on social media.

But the latest reversal is also a "double-edged sword" for many borrowers, Hounanian said.

Those hoping to qualify will have until Oct. 31 to submit an application form under a limited-time waiver. Potentially 550,000 borrowers stand to benefit, the federal government said. In addition, student borrowers who may previously have been disqualified because they had a loan through Federal Family Education Loans, a program that ended in 2010, are now eligible. The catch is they will have to make sure such loans are consolidated into a new, federal direct loan.

Complicating the process as well is that last year, two major student loan companies — Navient and the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, often referred to as FedLoan — announced they were ending their contracts to service loans with the federal government. Some 16 million student borrowers were being transferred to new servicers, a monumental undertaking that student advocates worry could present a raft of bureaucratic problems — and only make applying for the already-troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness that much more arduous.

"Unfortunately, there are some folks who with this news that debt relief is attainable may find the process confusing," Hounanian said.

But the federal government said it is trying to simplify the steps, with about 22,000 borrowers initially having their debts automatically canceled.

In December, President Joe Biden also announced the federal government would extend its moratorium on all federal student loan payments through May amid the pandemic and rising consumer costs.

The White House still faces pressure to cancel student debt and help a broader swath of borrowers — more than 44 million Americans who owe about $1.7 trillion in student loans. A town hall was scheduled Thursday among advocacy groups like the Student Debt Crisis Center and Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, to call for the elimination of student debt.

At the very least, those advocates say, the loosening of rules around a program like Public Service Loan Forgiveness should be permanent. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that the Education Department under the previous secretary, Betsy DeVos, had rejected a staggering 99 percent of applications as part of a temporary expansion of the program in 2018.

Jane Saunders, who received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and taught English for a decade, didn't know about federal student loan forgiveness until a friend recommended she consolidate her loans in 2011.

But a few years passed before she realized her mistake: Her loans were being handled by a servicer that didn't qualify her for the program. She then switched servicers, but at one point, after years of making payments, she was told some of them didn't count, and the ever-tightening rules of the program were frustrating.

"It seemed like they were building the plane while we were on it," Saunders said.

But her fortunes reversed in December, she said, after she reapplied for relief after the Biden administration altered some of the program's requirements. She learned her outstanding debt — $106,000 — was wiped clear, and she also received credit for a few months in which she paid more than she needed to.

"I couldn't breathe when I saw the zero balance," Saunders said. "You know how your life is supposed to flash by you as you're dying? It was kind of like that only now I could see a potentially different life in front of me. One where I could buy a car or maybe take a summer off for once."

The stress of her student loan obligation while working as a teacher, getting her doctoral degree and also making house payments and meeting other financial burdens felt crushing as she tried to sock away for retirement. She said she remains cautious.

"Even trying to put more in now that the loans are gone is going to mean I work until 70 likely," said Saunders, 56. "And it's not gonna be a luxurious retirement even at that age."

But despite all of the agitation, Saunders said she doesn’t regret getting her degree. Neither does Dossett, who after seeing his medical school loans forgiven, shared his amazement in a tweet that went viral.

During the pandemic, Dossett has been helping to care for Covid-infected hospitalized patients, and the burnout coupled with anxieties over his student debt have been taxing.

But now, he said, he sees a way forward for not only himself but others who may want to pursue medicine, particularly people who are uncertain about medical school because of the initial debt they can incur.

"With forgiveness in sight, doctors would be more willing to go into lower-paying specialties, such as primary care and pediatrics," he said. "The more of these doctors there are, the better for society and the health of the nation."

INDIA FEMICIDE IS CASTE VIOLENCE

Woman gang raped, tortured and paraded through streets


Workers of Mahila Congress (Women's wing of the Indian National Congress) light candles during a protest after the rape and murder of a 21-year-old woman in New Delhi, India, in a September 6, 2021 file photo. / Credit: Pankaj Nangia/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Arshad R. Zargar

Fri, January 28, 2022

New Delhi — Police in the Indian capital have arrested 11 people, including nine women, after the alleged brutal gang rape and torture of a young woman that included her being paraded through the streets and humiliated. The incident took place on Wednesday in East Delhi's Kasturba Nagar area as the nation celebrated Republic Day — marked by a grand military parade through Central Delhi.

The woman, 20, was allegedly abducted and raped by a group of men in a revenge attack. The victim's head was shaved, face blackened, and a garland of shoes put around her neck as she was hit and paraded through the streets in East Delhi. Video of that part of the abuse went viral, causing widespread outrage.

It shows a group of women forcing the victim to walk and hitting her while onlookers cheer. The victim's family has said her attackers are connected to a family in which a teenage boy died by suicide last November. They say the boy was stalking and pursuing the victim for a long time but when his advances were rejected, he took his life.

The woman is married and has a 3-year-old son.

"He fell in love with her… He used to keep calling and asking her to leave her husband and be with him. She would always refuse," the victim's sister told an Indian news outlet. After the boy's suicide, his family had reportedly threatened the woman several times, prompting her to move recently.

The Delhi police said they were investigating the case and more arrests were expected soon.

The victim's family has been given police protection.

Delhi's Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, called the attack "shameful" and urged strict action against the perpetrators.

The alleged attack in the Indian capital is the latest in a string of rapes, and part of wider plague of sexual violence against Indian women.

Last year, a 34-year-old woman in Mumbai died after being raped and brutally tortured — bringing back memories of the 2012 Delhi rape and murder of a young medical student, which sparked massive protests and made international headlines.

Despite recently tightened laws against rape, India has struggled to address its severe crisis of sexual violence against women.

More than 32,000 rapes were reported in 2019, the most recent year for which government data is available. That's nearly four rapes every hour over the course of the year, on average, and those numbers represent only the cases that are reported to authorities, and only rapes, not other sexual violence.

UK assisted dying bill hopes to end 'inhumane' suicides



Last September, the influential British Medical Association ended its opposition to "physician-assisted dying" (AFP/Tolga Akmen)


Charlotte DURAND
Sat, January 29, 2022, 12:05 AM·4 min read

Molly Meacher's voice quivers with emotion as she tells how her aunt took her own life after her liver cancer tumour grew to the size of a football.

"One night, she took a whole lot of pills and whisky, and her husband found her dead in the morning," said Meacher, a member of British parliament's upper House of Lords.

"It seemed to me terribly sad that somebody would end their life alone in the middle of the night without even their dear husband knowing that this was what they were doing," she told AFP.


Meacher, 81, has drafted a law to legalise assisted dying in England for the terminally ill with less than six months to live, an act currently punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

"It just was clear to me that this was just inhumane. You wouldn't treat a dog or a cat like that. But we treat our own people like that," said the former social worker.

The UK parliament examined the question of assisted dying in 2015 and decided against legalising it, but since then other countries have decided to approve what many see as an act of mercy.

"Things are moving in the right direction, there are a number of British Isles jurisdictions that are looking at changing the law," said Sarah Wootton, head of the Dignity in Dying campaign group.

- 'Discriminatory' -

Last September, the influential British Medical Association ended its opposition to "physician-assisted dying", taking the "historic step" of adopting a neutral position.

According to a poll by YouGov, 73 percent of Britons questioned in August said that doctors should be able to help terminally ill patients die.

By contrast, only 35 percent of MPs approved.

Campaigner Alex Pandolfo says the law "needs changing immediately (because) of the discriminatory practice that takes place in this country".

"It actually exists already for the privileged," says Pandolfo, in his 60s and terminally ill with Alzheimer's.

If you have £10,000 (about 12,000 euros, 13,500 dollars) for flights, hotels and food, you can go to a country such as Switzerland to die, he said.

Pandolfo has already booked his assisted death at a Swiss clinic and in recent years has accompanied around 100 Britons to die in Switzerland.

But he would rather die in England, to be near loved ones and allow them to have a more natural grieving process.

"I'm in no hurry," he jokes, saying he was given "a death sentence" in 2015.

"I am already dying of a condition that I've got no control over," he said.

"All I'm asking for is somebody to assist me with that death when it will be unbearable, to accelerate things. It's a rational act."

Sitting on his sofa in Lancaster, northwest England, the white-haired Pandolfo says his illness has already had a "massive impact" on his quality of life.

It affects his memory, movement, ability to speak and drive, and watch a football match.

As a result, he would never qualify for assisted dying under the terms of the draft law before parliament, which he says is "extremely restricted".

"By the time I've got six months to live, I won't have capacity to say that I want assisted dying," he said.

- 'Unacceptable pressure' -

Meacher said her bill's restrictions are "a political decision based on realities" in a "fairly conservative country", particularly where religious leaders and the faithful are involved.

"It's pretty hard to get a bill through parliament with these rather narrow limits," she said.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told parliament that euthanasia could expose the most vulnerable to unacceptable pressure to die from some "loved ones".

Welby, the most senior cleric in the worldwide Anglican communion, also told the BBC that "sadly people make mistakes in their diagnosis".

Meacher's bill "has done a great job at raising the issue," said Wootton.

While it will not necessarily become law a similar bill before the Scottish Parliament has much more chance of success "within a year-and-a-half", she said.

"It will be very difficult for medical regulators to have something lawful in one part of the country and not lawful in other parts of the country.

"I think that's an unsustainable situation in the long term."

Similar draft laws are being looked at in the self-governing Crown dependencies of Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Even strictly Roman Catholic neighbour Ireland is studying the possibility of euthanasia, giving people like Pandolfo a measure of hope.

Once he had his place booked in Switzerland, Pandolfo said: "I stopped worrying about dying and suffering and started focusing and concentrating on enjoying what life can."

cdu/cjo/phz/jm

Red-Hot Rally in Palm Oil Reveals Dirty Jobs That No One Wants

Anuradha Raghu
Wed, January 26, 2022, 




(Bloomberg) -- Oil palm planters in Malaysia are confronting a hard truth -- behind the red-hot rally in prices are thousands of jobs that nobody wants.

While high prices typically encourage planting and production of crops, output in No. 2 grower Malaysia slumped to a five-year low last year and planters say the main reason for that is the industry’s worst-ever shortage of workers.

The inability to increase supply in response to rising prices goes to the heart of what’s driving palm oil to record highs. Output growth in top producer Indonesia is slowing too. This is important for global food inflation because the two countries account for more than 80% of world supplies, and consumption of the edible oil in everything from food, to detergent and fuel is expanding.

“The volume of palm oil that will come onto the market is more or less fixed and not going to grow very much,” said Julian Conway McGill, Head of South East Asia at LMC International, a consulting firm. “But the world keeps needing more vegetable oil for food. We need to get those yields up.”

Shunned by locals for being dirty, dangerous, and even demeaning, harvesting jobs on Malaysian estates are mostly taken by foreign workers that make up around 85% of the labor force. Planters have grappled with a decreasing supply of workers for years as harvesters -- many of whom were Indonesians -- chose to return home for better wages, or preferred jobs in the city.

“In Malaysia, there’s an image problem when it comes to manual labor and plantation work,” McGill said by phone. “The locals don’t want to do it because they consider it demeaning and unfashionable.”

The labor shortage worsened when the pandemic shut borders and the government extended a freeze on migrant hiring, cutting off access to new foreign workers. Fresh-fruit bunch yields slumped to the lowest in three decades last year, pushing palm oil production to the smallest since 2016.

“The pandemic was an eye-opener to us,” said Nageeb Wahab, chief executive at the Malaysian Palm Oil Association, a group representing 40% of plantations by area. “In the last two years we had zero workers coming in,” he said from Kuala Lumpur. “We managed to survive only because prices were very good.”

Without enough workers on the ground, planters were forced to reduce harvesting rounds and leave ripened fruits rotting on trees. While the production shortfall pushed palm to the forefront of a global rally in edible oils, plantation companies lost a large chunk of potential revenue. The Malaysian Plantation Industries and Commodities Ministry in December estimated losses last year at about $3.4 billion, and said the shortage of harvesters and fruit pickers had reached more than 25,000 as of August.

Plantations desperate for workers tried to ease the crunch by attracting locals with higher wages and hiring prisoners. But the attrition rate for locals was high, with nearly half the workers hired in 2020 leaving their jobs, while taking on parolees triggered concerns from non-governmental groups, Nageeb said.

One company appealing to locals is Sime Darby Plantation Bhd., the world’s biggest planter by area. But despite offering stable incomes and benefits such as free housing, subsidized utilities and day-care, the response has been lukewarm. “Work in the estates has historically been regarded as dangerous, difficult and dirty,” said Group Managing Director Mohamad Helmy Othman Basha. “This has become a stigma which the industry needs to overcome.”

Companies are looking for ways to re-brand and revamp field work to make it more attractive to locals and cut reliance on foreign labor. That includes automation and mechanization in harvesting, as well as drone technology, artificial intelligence and robotics along the supply chain. “Work on the estates has been done almost the same way for the last 100 years,” Helmy said.

Nageeb, from the plantation association, is heading a government-funded group to boost technology on the estates. For him, the focus over the next three years is to halve the requirement of foreign workers by improving harvesting with mechanized and intelligent cutters. The consortium, which has been allocated an initial fund of 60 million ringgit ($14.3 million), is “casting the net out to the world,” including the U.S. and China, to develop technology that will be commercially viable in plantations in the next five years.

Without an increase in production, it’s hard to see a way of slowing down the rise in prices, unless the rally rations demand, or countries ease up on their biofuel programs. Prices for the most active contract on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives jumped to a fresh intraday record of 5,442 ringgit ($1,295) a ton Thursday, almost three times higher than their early pandemic low in 2020.

(Updates to add price move in final graph, and Sime Darby group MD in 11th and 12th graphs)

Amazon, Whole Foods can be sued by murderer EX CON rejected for delivery job

Thu, January 27, 2022, 8:50 AM

By Jonathan Stempel 

  NEW YORK, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A federal judge said Amazon.com Inc and its Whole Foods unit can be sued over the refusal to hire a convicted murderer who claimed to be rehabilitated after nearly 23 years in prison. 

  In a Wednesday night decision, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said Henry Franklin could pursue a proposed class action after being turned down for a grocery delivery job at Cornucopia Logistics, which serves Amazon and Whole Foods. 

  Amazon determined after a background check that Franklin had lied on his April 2019 job application by answering "no" when asked if he had a criminal record. 

  New York law bars employers from rejecting job applicants based on their criminal histories unless the crimes relate directly to the jobs sought, or hirings would pose an unreasonable risk to the public. 

  Without ruling on the merits, Caproni said the defendants failed to show that either exception applied, adding that Franklin "has adequately alleged that he is rehabilitated and no longer poses a threat to the public." 

  She also said she was "sympathetic to defendants' likely position that they do not want a convicted murderer delivering groceries to their customers' homes." 

  The defendants and their lawyers did not immediately respond on Thursday to requests for comment. Franklin's lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests. 

  Amazon and Whole Foods had argued that Franklin's lie was reason enough turn him down, and he lacked standing to sue them because neither was his "prospective" employer. 

  Caproni called Franklin's pleading on the latter issue "barely" sufficient. 

  According to court papers, Franklin was convicted of second-degree murder in June 1995 and paroled in June 2018. 

  The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Amazon and Whole Foods job applicants in New York state and New York City with criminal records. 

  The case is Franklin v Whole Foods Market Group Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 20-04935. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Bill Berkrot) 

Ocugen signs letter of intent to buy Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturing plant


Ocugen Chairman and CEO Shankar Musunuri

By John George – Senior Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal

A Chester County company working to bring the Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to the United States has entered into a deal to buy a dormant manufacturing plant in Canada.

Ocugen Inc. (NASDAQ: OCGN) of Malvern said Thursday it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with Liminal BioSciences Inc. to acquire its manufacturing site in Belleville, Ontario, for an undisclosed amount.

This site, Ocugen said, would enable it to expand manufacturing and research and development activities to support its pipeline — which includes making Covaxin, as well as gene therapy candidates targeting retinal diseases.

Covaxin was developed by Bharat Biotech of India and is already approved for use overseas. Ocugen and Bharat entered into a partnership last year to bring the vaccine to North America and share revenues. Ocugen, through its Canadian affiliate Vaccigen Ltd., has submitted an application for Covaxin with Health Canada for regulatory review.

Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration advised Ocugen it would need to pursue a biologics license application to obtain full approval for Covaxin in the United States. In November, Ocugen filed an application with the FDA for emergency use authorization of Covaxin in children.

More than 200 million doses of Covaxin have been administered to adults and children outside the United States. The vaccine is authorized for emergency use in more than 20 countries; emergency use authorization applications are under review in more than 60 other countries.

“We believe establishing a manufacturing and R&D hub for our biotechnology platform is the right investment and next evolution of our business," said Dr. Shankar Musunuri, CEO and co-founder of Ocugen. "This site, after transformation into a state-of-the-art hub, with the support of the regional talent pool can help bring our products – from vaccines to our modifier gene therapy assets – to the patients we will serve globally.”

Alek Krstajic, Liminal BioSciences' board chairman, said his company was introduced to Ocugen by Innovation Science Economic Development Canada, a government agency.

“We are excited to see Ocugen’s plans to repurpose our dormant vaccine manufacturing facility and create vaccine manufacturing capacity in Canada," Krstajic said in a statement.

The completion of the deal is subject to the finalization of due diligence investigations by both companies, the negotiation and execution of definitive transaction agreements, and other customary closing conditions including certain undisclosed funding requirements.

Covaxin will be the first product manufactured in the new upgraded facility if the deal closes and the vaccine receives regulatory approval in Canada.

Ocugen's stock was trading down 3% at $3.05 per share in early afternoon trading on Thursday.

Why even progressive companies like REI are wary of unions

REUTERS/DAVID MCNEW

By Sarah Todd
Senior reporter, Quartz and Quartz at Work
Published January 28, 2022

REI prides itself on its progressive politics.

The outdoor apparel and gear retailer operates as a consumer cooperative, a structure which, according to its website, allows it to “put purpose before profits.” The Seattle-based company touts the flexible schedules and healthcare benefits available to its hourly retail employees, and every year it shutters its roughly 170 US retail stores on Black Friday to give employees a paid day off.

But when employees at one of REI’s Manhattan stores filed for a union election late last week, the company was quick to make its anti-union stance known.

“We respect the rights of our employees to speak and act for what they believe — and that includes the rights of employees to choose or refuse union representation,” REI said in a statement. “However, we do not believe placing a union between the co-op and its employees is needed or beneficial.”

REI isn’t the only outwardly progressive employer to come out against unions in recent years. Starbucks, known for offering comparatively generous benefits and perks to retail workers, not only discouraged store employees in Buffalo, New York, from voting for a union late last year but mounted what some workers and organizers described as an “imposing” counteroffensive. The crowdfunding site Kickstarter, a certified B corps, opposed the union effort among its employees and eventually settled a complaint alleging that it had retaliated against a worker involved in its organizing efforts.

There seems to be a disconnect between companies’ commitment to do right by their employees and their disapproval when employees decide that unions are what’s right for them. But why?

Employers don’t want to give up control

One explanation could be that many employers—no matter how progressive they are or claim to be—simply don’t want to relinquish control.

“It’s about power,” Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, told Quartz last year. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We want to do the right thing for our employees… [But] who has the power to determine pay and working conditions? If the employer unilaterally decides to be ‘generous,’ that’s one thing; if they’re sort of forced into it by union negotiations, that’s another.”

Another explanation could be that companies are simply not as invested in employees’ wellbeing as they claim to be. In such cases, the disconnect lies in their declaring themselves to be progressive in the first place, rather than in the gap between their actual workplace practices and their attitudes toward unions.
Is the relationship between companies and unions always adversarial?

Some companies may also believe that the relationship between unions and management is inherently adversarial, prompting them to try and avoid unions at all costs.

But many employees opt to unionize in order to preserve the things that make their company a good place to work – not just to advocate for better working conditions. As long as an employer treats workers well, unionizing is “not something you should be afraid of,” as Beneficial State Bank CEO Randell Leach told Quartz last year. About 100 workers at Beneficial chose to unionize in 2020, and ratified their contract with management last year. ​

“Enlightened corporations that focus not just on profit maximization but doing the right thing… if you’re doing all that, then the union proposition is a different one,” Leach said. “It isn’t Hey, we’re getting in fights and arbitrating. It’s, okay, make sure there’s a structure for employees to have a voice and make sure we’ve got a process to go through.”

If companies can shift their perspective on unions and learn to see collective bargaining as a structured way to have a dialogue with employees about what they want, Leach says, that’s one way to ensure that the process doesn’t get hostile.

Ultimately, a company that engages with an employee union will likely have to give up some power and control. But at a time when employees increasingly expect to have a say in everything from remote-work policies to their company’s ethical practices, trying to resist employee activism in any form is a losing proposition. Far better to embrace it.

THIRD WORLD USA
'You're old. Go in a corner and die': Seniors left homeless with few shelter options

Jessica Boehm,

AZCentral | The Arizona Republic
Fri, January 28, 2022

Kasey Dungan, on Jan. 20, 2022, in Phoenix, Ariz., talks about how she and her dog Sandy ended up homeless on the street for the first time in their lives.

Corrections & Clarifications: ​​A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the amount of flexible funding over three years in Maricopa County's deal with the Human Services Campus. In the deal, the county would provide $3 million.

Kasey Dungan sat in her wheelchair on the corner of 12th Avenue and Madison Street, in the middle of the state's largest homeless encampment, her 10-year-old dachshund Sandy cowering underneath her.

Last Wednesday was the 73-year-old's second night homeless. She spent her first night at HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Sunnyslope with a kidney infection.


The hospital discharged her Wednesday morning, and a social worker offered to call her a ride to Central Arizona Shelter Services, the 500-bed homeless shelter near downtown Phoenix.

"She said that if I didn't go to CASS and stayed on the street that I would be beat up and that those people were terrible and they would steal everything," Dungan said.

Still, she refused. She'd been to the Human Services Campus, where CASS is located, once before to have a procedure at the low-cost dental provider on the campus.

She remembered the lines of tents outside the campus where hundreds of people sleep every night. The thought of staying there terrified her, she said.

She searched through Sunnyslope to see if there was anywhere else for her and Sandy to stay. But she quickly realized CASS was her only emergency option.

Dungan and Sandy took a bus to the Human Services Campus, just south of downtown Phoenix. But by the time they made it to the campus welcome center at 6:30 p.m., all of the women's beds were full.

The sun had set, and her only option was the street.

"I felt like there was nothing there for me. They just want to say, 'Well you're old. Go in a corner and die,'" Dungan said through tears.
Elderly, sick and homeless

Dungan's situation isn't unique.

Human Services Campus Executive Director Amy Schwabenlender said people arrive at the campus from hospitals at least once per day, if not more often.

"My thing would be, why do we let hospitals discharge people into homelessness?" Schwabenlender said.

The simple answer is, hospitals are full and they're not required to keep people if they don't have an emergency medical situation.

A spokesperson from HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center said the hospital works with its partners to provide care navigation for people who are homeless. The navigation team talks to the patient and arranges transportation to "respite care, shelter services or other types of lodging."

Dungan opted out of the hospital's offer to take her to CASS. If she hadn't, there may have been a bed available for her.

But by the time she arrived at the Human Services Campus at 6:30 p.m., after realizing there were no other shelter options, the shelter was full.

Every day, people are turned away from CASS and other shelters across metro Phoenix because there are no more beds.

Metro Phoenix has fewer than 2,000 emergency shelter beds and more than 7,400 people experiencing homelessness, according to the last point-in-time count in 2020.

Experts predict the true number of people experiencing homelessness is much higher now. Maricopa Association of Governments held its annual point-in-time count Tuesday and will release the updated numbers in February.

'We're not lazy': What people experiencing homelessness are saying in annual count

Increasingly, people arriving at CASS look like Dungan. They are older, experiencing homelessness for the first time and have medical conditions.

About a third of people who stayed at CASS in December were 55 or older, CASS CEO Lisa Glow said.

A recent CASS survey of clients 55 and older found that 86% of them have a medical condition and 63% have a mobility impairment.

During the first two years of the pandemic, Phoenix provided CASS with CARES Act funding to rent 65 rooms in a north Phoenix hotel, where it placed the most vulnerable older adults in private rooms with their own bathrooms. The organization later expanded the program with 20 additional rooms.

The temporary project ran out of funding late last year, but Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Housing provided funds for CASS to purchase and rehabilitate a hotel in northwest Phoenix for a permanent shelter for older adults.

The new shelter, dubbed "Project Haven" won't be open until the end of this year at the earliest.

"We are so eager to get the Project Haven hotel open. People are already asking to go there ... but we've got to figure out some interim solutions," Glow said.

She said she was disappointed to hear that Dungan was turned away from shelter last week and called on the homelessness service system as a whole to get more creative and find ways to not turn people out to the streets when shelters fill up.

"The safety net has to get stronger for people like this woman who is elderly and just released from the hospital," Glow said.

Kasey Dungan, on Jan. 20, 2022, in Phoenix, Ariz., cries as she talks about how she and her dog ended up homeless for the first time in their lives.
A lucky break

Dungan didn't end up staying on the street last week.

Community advocate Stacey Champion, who was visiting the encampment around the Human Services Campus to drop off supplies, saw Dungan crying in her wheelchair.

Champion, who frequently spends time in the encampment, said she didn't believe Dungan and Sandy were safe staying there. After unsuccessfully trying to get Dungan into the shelter, she paid for her to stay in a hotel in midtown Phoenix.

Champion started a crowdfunding link through her Twitter account and has been able to keep Dungan in the hotel while she tries to find her long-term housing.

"She is an angel from heaven. She told me, 'I'm not going to leave you here.' She just instantly made me feel like somebody cared about me," Dungan said.

Dungan became homeless last year after a falling out with her daughter. She stayed with a friend for a few months before ending up in a budget hotel in northwest Phoenix.

Last week, she ran out of money. A family member is rehabbing a trailer for her in Ashfork, but it's not finished, she said. Dungan was hoping to find a safe place where she could stay for a few weeks until she can move.

"There's need to be more help out there. There needs to be somebody who cares about us," she said.

Money galore, solutions sparse

Champion said she was relieved she found Dungan and could find a safe place for her to stay.

But sheltering homeless seniors shouldn't come down to chance meetings, she said.

She's pushing the city, county and homeless providers to offer hotel vouchers or other emergency overflow shelter for seniors and other vulnerable people who would not be safe sleeping on the street.

Jessica Spencer, who goes by Lefty, also does direct outreach to the homeless population. She said she's helped many people get into hotels for a few nights when they needed a safe place to stay. She also uses crowdfunding because the alternative — helping people go through the formal shelter assistance process — can take weeks.

More and more often, it's older adults that she finds needing assistance.

"Our disabled elders are just begin left out to dry," Spencer said. "I understand we can't house people forever, but we don't even have a temporary solution for people who are newly houseless."

Despite relying on crowdfunding, there's actually more money available to help people experiencing homelessness than ever because of federal COVID-19 stimulus packages.

Cumulatively, the city, county and state have allocated almost $100 million of federal relief funds to build new shelters. But those could take a year or more to get up and running.

Phoenix provided funds to purchase a sprung structure on the Human Services Campus that will add 100 beds to the campus. The heavy-duty tent-like building, which will have central air conditioning and heating, should be open this spring.

Maricopa County is currently inking a deal with the Human Services Campus to provide $3 million of flexible funding over three years that could be used to fund emergency hotel nights, Schwabenlender said.

It will also be used to fund other emergencies that can stand in the way of someone getting into shelter or long-term housing. For example, helping someone pay for car insurance so they can maintain a job and qualify for an apartment.

"We want to reduce barriers to housing," Schwabenlender said.

Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.

Reach the reporter at jessica.boehm@gannett.com 

Follow her on Twitter @jboehm_NEWS.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix homelessness: Sick, elderly people have few shelter options

Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Alice Park

TIME
Wed, January 26, 2022

Sequencing laboratory for corona variants

Different variants and mutations of the corona virus are graphically displayed on a computer monitor in the sequencing laboratory for corona variants (CoMV gene) at Greifswald University Medical Center. Corona viruses are constantly changing and need to be monitored by elaborate genetic analyses. In Greifswald, researchers are working at full capacity and have sequenced more than 1,500 samples in recent weeks. Credit - Jens B'ttner–Picture Alliance/DPA/AP

When Jeremy Luban first looked over the genetic sequence of the Omicron variant on his phone one day last November, it was five o’clock in the morning. But even at that hour, the University of Massachusetts virus expert knew right away Omicron was a problem.

First, there was the sheer number of new mutations—by some counts, as many as 50, with 30 of them in the critical places that vaccines and drug treatments target. Second, this new version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to appear out of nowhere, unpredictably and with no immediately obvious connection to previous variants.


“It’s like when you look at the first page of a comic book and all of the Marvel villains have gotten together,” he says. “That was literally what it was like when I saw the sequence. How are we going to survive this? We can deal with one [mutation], but 10 or more of them all at once?”

Other public health officials shared Luban’s alarm, but, it turns out, Omicron, like all villains, has an Achilles’ heel. For people who are vaccinated or who have been exposed to its predecessors, this variant does not seem to cause severe disease. While it can still be dangerous for people who are unvaccinated, or who have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19’s effects, for the vaccinated, there was a glimmer of hope.

Whether justified or not, that glimmer has been flamed into a blazing beacon by some people, who interpret Omicron’s relatively mild effect on health if you’re vaccinated—a sore throat, some flu- or cold-like symptoms, or no noticeable symptoms at all—as a sign that SARS-CoV-2 may be reaching the end of its onslaught. If Omicron isn’t as virulent, then SARS-CoV-2 must be weakening, the thinking goes.

Even leading scientists have been tempted by the idea, admitting that of all the versions of SARS-CoV-2 that have hit humanity over the past two years, Omicron might be the preferable one to get infected with, since it doesn’t make the immunized that sick. And if more vaccinated people are infected with Omicron and develop immunity, that protection, combined with the protection that some people might have from being infected with previous variants, could reach the magical herd immunity threshold—which experts say could be anywhere between 70%-90% of people recovered from or vaccinated against COVID-19—that would finally make SARS-CoV-2 throw up its spike proteins in defeat.

Read more: No, You Should Not Try to Get Omicron

According to some models, by the time Omicron works its way through the population, up to half of people around the globe will have been infected, and presumably immune to the variant. With fewer unprotected hosts to infect, viruses generally begin to peter out—epidemic influenza viruses are a good example—and optimistic models show that after a peak of cases by the end of January and beginning of February, SARS-CoV-2 may follow that path. Under that assumption, COVID-19 would begin its shift from being a pandemic disease to an endemic one, confined to pockets of outbreaks that erupt among immunocompromised populations or the unvaccinated, such as the youngest kids—but are manageable and containable because most people would be protected from the worst effects of the virus.

But there’s also the possibility of a darker timeline, in which the unpredictable nature of SARS-CoV-2 to date drives the next year and beyond. If that occurs, it could mean the sobering possibility that Omicron is not the beginning of the end, but just the beginning of a more transmissible, more virulent virus that could do even more harm than it has already.
Scenario #1: The COVID-19 virus has achieved equilibrium with humans

Let’s start with the more sanguine prediction of what 2022 might hold for SARS-CoV-2.

There are several lines of scientific evidence that support this perspective, including some long-held truisms about how viruses behave as they find more hosts to infect.

Viruses mutate every time they make copies of themselves, becoming more or less infectious, or more or less harmful to their hosts. For a changing virus, it’s all about balance; finding the right mutations that allow it to become more efficient at spreading from one host to another in order to infect cells, while not causing so much disease that the host dies. A dying or dead host won’t help it to keep replicating.

Textbooks teach that viruses, being the relatively simple entities that they are, have limited resources to devote to their one goal: survival. A virus can’t even reproduce on its own, and needs to borrow the reproductive machinery of cells from those that it infects. So, when a genetic mutation makes a virus more adept at spreading from one host to another, with each new host a brand new virus-making factory, it’s a huge advantage. It also suggests that the virus is opting for transmissibility over virulence; it’s in its best interest to spread more quickly and replicate than in causing its host to die.

A resident registers their details at a vaccination point at Cape Flats Development Association (CAFDA) in the Egoli township of Cape Town, South Africa, on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021. South African scientists were last week the first to identify the new variant now known as omicron, and while symptoms have been described as mild, the exact risk from the new strain is still uncertain.

Dwayne Senior—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMore

Omicron appears to be the perfect example of that strategy. What Luban saw in the virus’s genetic sequence last November was a series of changes that made the variant at least several-fold more transmissible than the previous one, Delta, which was already twice as transmissible as the original version of SARS-CoV-2. Such high transmissibility led to Omicron’s quick dominance across the globe—replacing the previous variant, Delta, in a mere two months. “The speed with which Omicron took over was really amazing,” says Shangxin Yang, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of California Los Angeles. “It’s almost magical. In two weeks, it went from accounting for 1% of COVID-19 cases around the world to 50% of cases, and in one month, to almost 100% of cases. That’s amazing speed; we could never have imagined any virus could do that.”

Yang points to other lines of evidence that suggests Omicron’s high transmissibility may herald SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah. Whereas all previous variants of the virus preferentially infected cells deep in the human respiratory tract, nestling all the way into the lungs, Omicron tends to infect the cells in the upper respiratory tract. That makes it more like the common cold, and could explain why, at least among the immunized, Omicron tends to cause milder disease than previous variants.

Read more: What Actually Worries U.S. Doctors About Omicron

Those early versions of SARS-CoV-2 also tended to cause a phenomenon called cell fusion, in which a virus infects one cell, then co-opts other viruses that have infected other cells to fuse into a large viral mass to make a larger virus-making machine. That’s good for the virus, but bad for the patient, as it can trigger inflammation, which can in turn destroy cells and tissues; such inflammation is the hallmark of late-stage, severe COVID-19 disease. Omicron doesn’t lead to such cell fusion and therefore tends to cause less cell damage, which could in part explain, at least in immunized people, why those infected with Omicron tend not to get as sick. Recent data from the U.K. shows that vaccinated people infected with Omicron are two-thirds less likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people infected with Delta.

“All of this comes together to make the perfect scenario to end the pandemic,” says Yang. “This is exactly how most other pandemics with respiratory pathogens had ended. They spread like fire and then eventually most people either became vaccinated or infected and when the population reached herd immunity, the pandemic ended.”

That doesn’t mean it’s the end of SARS-CoV-2, but it could signal the end of its pandemic phase. From there, COVID-19 should shift into being endemic, in which we learn to live with a virus that has already learned to live with us.

Read more: We Need to Start Thinking Differently About Breakthrough Infections

At this stage, says Yang, “the virus has already accomplished its goal of establishing a balance with its host—humans. It can spread easily among hosts, but not kill them, so it lives among its hosts. The virus has mutated to the point where it just chooses to live among us without causing too much trouble. And in return, we have to learn to live with the virus as if it is just another common cold.”

That’s not just wishful thinking, he says—there’s historical precedent. Already, there are four coronaviruses that have been circulating among us for decades causing mild symptoms similar to the common cold. At some point in history, these coronaviruses could, hypothetically, have burned through the world’s population like SARS-CoV-2 is currently, and then, as more people became infected and therefore protected, these viruses could have become endemic and happy to cause infection where it could, among vulnerable people with weakened immune systems.

“One of these now-common cold coronaviruses may have been responsible for an epidemic in the late 1800s that back then did not cause such mild disease,” says Nadia Roan, an associate investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. “But eventually as community immunity started to build, it became more endemic. It makes sense that—hopefully, potentially—Omicron could become one of the common coronaviruses when we as a community build up enough immunity against it.”
Scenario #2: The virus could keep changing in unpredictable and possibly deadly ways

But a different, troubling scenario might also be possible. There is good evidence that suggests SARS-CoV-2 is an especially unpredictable virus—Omicron, after all, was an entirely new variant that shocked experts with its sudden and efficient ability to spread so quickly. In the fall of 2020, most virologists would have made an educated guess that if a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 were to emerge, it would be a souped up version of Delta—there was even talk of a Delta Plus. But Omicron surprised them all.

“This isn’t a Delta-plus variant,” says Jeremy Farrar, president of the global health research foundation Wellcome Trust. “It’s from left field, and came out of a virus from 2020, which tells us something. We haven’t seen one lineage of this virus evolving into another lineage. We’ve seen things coming from a much broader spectrum. What that means is that we can’t expect the daughter or son of Omicron to then become the next thing we deal with. It could be something that comes from a different part of the virus’s evolutionary path.”

What that suggests is that if we want to be prepared for future, potentially dangerous variants, we need to more closely monitor the virus around the world so we can identify any possibly highly transmissible variants earlier, and hopefully control them better.

Read more: What We Learned About Genetic Sequencing During COVID-19 Could Revolutionize Public Health

And as surprising as it was, Omicron probably didn’t appear overnight. SARS-CoV-2 likely evolved in stages, and the increasing transmissibility of what would become the Omicron variant went largely unnoticed. For example, about a year ago, researchers reported what should have been alarming changes to SARS-CoV-2 in three air passengers flying from Tanzania who tested positive for the virus when they landed in Angola. Those changes helped the virus evade the immune system better, and transmit more efficiently. Looking back, while their viral sequences did not quite match that of the variant we now know as Omicron, they showed enough worrying signs of adaptation to human immune defenses that we should have taken stronger action to contain those cases.

Security stand in front of people as they line up for nucleic acid tests to detect COVID-19 at a mass testing site on January 24, 2022 in Beijing, China. While China has mostly contained the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, and even though cases remain relatively low, recent outbreaks of the virus including the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant have prompted the government to lockdown people in various major cities and to reinforce stricter health measures. Mask mandates, mass testing, immunization boosters, quarantines, some travel restrictions and bans and lockdowns have become the norm as China continues to maintain its zero-COVID policy.

Kevin Frayer—Getty ImagesMore

“There is no reason to think that Omicron is the result of the virus mutating any faster,” says Luban. “It’s just that we never saw this version as it was developing, wherever that was.” That may have been in someone with a weakened immune system, who was only able to mount a partial defense against the virus, which was just enough selective pressure to push the virus to mutate, and continue mutating, until it hit upon the changes that helped it to become the efficiently spreading virus we now know as Omicron. Since the pandemic began, scientists have reported on cases of immunocompromised patients who have been able to harbor potentially mutating viruses for months or even a year.

In other words, the next Omicron could already be out there, and we wouldn’t know it.

Unless, that is, we dramatically improve our global surveillance efforts, and increase the amount of genetic sequencing of the virus that is done around the world. Laying bare the virus’s genome can provide the earliest hints of any changes, and clues as to which of these aberrations could be dangerous for human health.

If we’d been able to identify the genetic changes that led to the Delta variant early on, for example, we could have prioritized locking down the parts of the world where those mutations were common, says Pardis Sabeti, professor at the center for systems biology at Harvard and member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. “That’s what genomic sequencing can do—stay ahead of diagnoses [of new cases] so we can try to develop countermeasures against something, including developing new therapies. It’s about ‘know thy enemy.’ If your enemy moves, you have to move.” With real-time genetic information, we could better know how to prioritize vaccine and treatment efforts. “The more information you have, the more thoughtful we can be in expending what are necessarily finite resources,” says Sabeti.

Read more: Let’s Not Be Fatalistic About Omicron. We Know How to Fight It

The problem, as Sabeti and Luban note, is that we don’t have such genomic eyes on the virus throughout the globe. Even in the U.S., where sequencing is becoming a priority, the Centers for Disease Control’s National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance program is sequencing only a small percentage of positive cases—in the single digits—each week. Only about five countries have sequenced double digit percentages of their positive cases so far.

Experts’ best guesses at what comes next

How likely is it that Omicron is indeed SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah? Farrar puts the odds at 40% to 50%.

One major reason the odds aren’t higher is that Omicron’s genetic changes make it more capable of evading capture by the antibodies the immune system makes, both after natural infection and vaccination. That helps the virus to spread more quickly—up to the tipping point at which if the virus is too good at spreading and causing disease, then it becomes self-defeating.

“The virus doesn’t want to kill its host,” says Dr. Warner Greene, former director of and current senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology. “That’s counterproductive.” That could explain why Omicron is so impressively transmissible, but, for those with some protection, especially from vaccines, not particularly dangerous—making it possible that this particular version of the virus is the one that will persist in the human population for years and years to come.

That’s the path public health experts hope SARS-CoV-2 will take, following the example of the other common coronaviruses. “The best scenario is for the virus to become so weakened it just becomes a vaccine itself,” says Greene. “It would spread but it wouldn’t cause severe disease. In that kind of setting, the virus would start to lose its foothold and become endemic in very small areas, replicating only when it finds people who are not previously infected or vaccinated.”

That’s assuming, of course, that most of the world’s population is vaccinated, or recovered from being naturally infected with Omicron. The fewer opportunities SARS-CoV-2 has to replicate and produce more copies of itself, the fewer people will become infected, and the fewer people will get sick. Every variant in the virus’s short two-year history is the direct result of unchecked viral replication, so the surest way to turn COVID-19 from a pandemic into an endemic disease is to shut down as many of those opportunities as possible. “If we have learned anything from the past year, it is that variants will continue to emerge,” says Ho. “What will be helpful is to establish growing immunity, either from vaccines or infections. That will help protect the population from the next one.”

Is the omicron variant Mother Nature’s way of vaccinating the masses and curbing the pandemic?

Prakash Nagarkatti, Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, University of South Carolina

Mitzi Nagarkatti, Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, University of South Carolina
Thu, January 27, 2022, 

Preliminary research suggests that the omicron variant may

 potentially induce a robust immune response.

Olga Siletskaya/Moment via Getty Images

In the short time since the omicron variant was identified in South Africa in November 2021, researchers have quickly learned that it has three unique characteristics: It spreads efficiently and quickly, it generally causes milder disease than previous variants and it may confer strong protection against other variants such as delta.

This has many people wondering whether omicron could act as a vaccine of sorts, inoculating enough people to effectively bring about herd immunity – the threshold at which enough of the population is immune to the virus to stop its spread – and end the COVID-19 pandemic.

As immunology researchers at the University of South Carolina who are working on inflammatory and infectious diseases, including COVID-19, we find the characteristics of omicron in the pandemic setting particularly intriguing. And it is these characteristics that can help answer that question.

Some 4.73 billion people across the globe – about 61.6% of the world’s population – have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In the United States, 63.4% of the population is fully vaccinated with two doses as of late January 2022, while only 39.9% of Americans have received the booster dose. Such low levels of vaccination resulting from vaccine hesitancy and the complexities of the global vaccine supply chain cast doubt on reaching herd immunity through vaccination anytime soon.
How does omicron mimic a vaccine?

All vaccines work on the principle of training the immune system to fight against an infectious agent. Each vaccine, regardless of how it is made, exposes the human or animal host to the critical molecules used by the infectious agent – in this case, the SARS-CoV-2 virus – to gain entry into the host’s cells.

Some vaccines expose the host only to select portions of the virus. For example, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to encode and produce a fragment of the “spike protein” – the knobby protrusion that is expressed on the outside of SARS-CoV-2 viruses – inside a person’s body. These spike proteins are the key way that the coronavirus invades cells, so the mRNA vaccines are designed to mimic that protein and trigger an immune response against it.

In contrast, some vaccines against other infections, such as chickenpox and measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), expose the host to a “live attenuated” form of the virus. These vaccines use small amounts of a weakened form of the live virus. They mimic a natural infection, trigger a strong immune response and afford lasting resistance to infection.

In some respects, omicron mimics these live attenuated vaccines because it causes milder infection and trains the body to trigger a strong immune response against the delta variant, as shown in a recent study that is not yet peer-reviewed from South Africa.

Deliberate infection with omicron is not the answer

While omicron may share certain characteristics with a vaccine, it should not be considered a viable alternative to the existing vaccines. For one, COVID-19 infection can result in severe illness, hospitalization or death, especially in vulnerable individuals with underlying conditions. It can also cause long-term health effects in some people, called long COVID. In contrast, vaccines currently available against COVID-19 have been tested for safety and efficacy.

The high transmission of omicron combined with ongoing vaccination efforts could help attain herd immunity soon and end the most acute phase of the pandemic. However, there is little chance of it eradicating COVID-19, since all signs point to the likelihood that the virus will become endemic – meaning SARS-CoV-2 will be in circulation but will likely not be as disruptive to society.

Thus far, smallpox is the only infectious disease that has been eradicated globally, which shows how difficult it is to fully eliminate a disease. However, it is easier to control an infection effectively. One example is polio, which has been reduced or eliminated in most countries through vaccination.
What happens when the body meets a virus or vaccine

Both viral infections or the mimicking of a virus through vaccination activate a critical component of the immune system, called B cells, in the body. These cells produce antibodies that bind to the virus, preventing it from infecting cells. These antibodies act much like anti-ballistic missiles that shoot down an incoming virus missile. However, once a virus manages to get inside the body’s cells, antibodies are less effective.

A 3-D illustration of antibody proteins attacking a coronavirus pathogen cell.

That’s where another key player in the immune system, called killer T cells, come in. These cells can recognize and destroy a cell as soon as it is infected, thereby preventing the virus from multiplying and spreading further. Think of this as an anti-ballistic missile that detects and destroys the factory where missiles are manufactured.

Immunologists believe that antibodies against COVID-19 prevent an individual from catching the infection, while the killer T cells are crucial in preventing severe disease. Despite its numerous mutations, omicron can trigger a strong killer T cell response. This may explain why the COVID-19 vaccines – by triggering the T cells – have provided strong enough immunity against omicron to, in most cases, prevent hospitalization and death.

But, critically, the first wave of antibodies and killer T cells produced during infection or vaccination last for only a few months. This is why recurrent infections of COVID-19 have occurred even in the vaccinated population, and it’s also why booster shots are needed. In contrast, some vaccines – like the one against smallpox – have been shown to trigger immunity that lasts for several years.
Memory immune response

So what exactly triggers strong and lasting immunity? The lifelong immunity seen in certain infections such as smallpox can be explained by a phenomenon called “immunological memory.”

After the B cells and killer T cells first encounter the virus, some of them get converted into what are called memory cells, which are known to live for several decades. As their name suggests, when memory cells “see” a virus again after initial exposure, they recognize it, divide rapidly and mount a robust antibody and killer T cell response, thereby preventing reinfection.

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For this reason, memory cells are critical for establishing strong, long-lasting immunity. This is evidenced from studies with smallpox in which people that were infected or vaccinated were found to have the antibody response even after 88 years! Why some infections or vaccines trigger long-lasting memory and others do not is under active investigation. Because COVID-19 is only two years old, we researchers don’t know yet how long the memory B and T cells last. Based on recurrent infections, it looks like longer-term immunity does not last very long, but that could also in part be due to the evolution of new variants.

All of these considerations leave room for hope that when new variants of SARS-CoV-2 inevitably arise, omicron will have left the population better equipped to fight them. So the COVID-19 vaccines combined with the omicron variant could feasibly move the world to a new stage in the pandemic – one where the virus doesn’t dominate our lives and where hospitalization and death are far less common.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Prakash Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina and Mitzi Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina.

Read more:

Alpha then delta and now omicron – 6 questions answered as COVID-19 cases once again surge across the globe

What is herd immunity? A public health expert and a medical laboratory scientist explain

Prakash Nagarkatti receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Mitzi Nagarkatti receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.