As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle, CDC scraps COVID reporting for hospitals.
As of May 1, hospitals in the United States are no longer required to report on hospitalizations from COVID-19 or influenza within their facilities to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An act that amounts to a final step in the dismantling of all tracking of the COVID pandemic.
The complete scrapping of all mitigation measures has allowed SARS-CoV-2 to continue evolving unimpeded. Although sequencing data remains limited, the KP.2 (JN.1.11.1.2) lineage of Omicron (24.9 percent of sequences) has now outpaced JN.1 (22 percent) as the dominant variant in the US.
Dr. Sato and colleagues noted in their preprint study, “KP.2 shows the most significant resistance to the sera of monovalent XBB.1.5 vaccine without infections (3.1-fold) as well as those with infection (1.8-fold). Altogether, these results suggest that the increased immune resistance ability of KP.2 partially contributes to the higher reproductive number more than previous variants including JN.1.”
