Has omicron peaked?, Maryland man lives with a pig heart: 5 Things podcast
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Has omicron peaked?
Even if so, hospitalizations and deaths from the recent wave will continue slamming hospitals for weeks, as health reporter Elizabeth Weise tells us. Plus, investigations continue into the deadly Bronx fire, a Maryland man lives with a pig heart, the second season of 'Cheer' tackles its former star's child porn charges and a new report casts another shadow on inflation.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson. And this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 12th of January, 2022. Today, has Omicron peaked? Plus, hope from a pig heart transplant, and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- Former Senate leader Harry Reid will lie in state today at the US Capitol. The longest serving senator in the history of Nevada died last month at the age of 82.
- A drone strike has killed 17 civilians in Ethiopia's Tigray region. The attack came on the same day President Joe Biden held a call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, where he expressed concern about such attacks in the war-torn country.
- And a new study found that adding olive oil to your diet could lower your risk of Alzheimer's, cancer and other illness.
COVID-19 infections from the omicron variant in the US may have peaked, but as Health Reporter Elizabeth Weise tells us, more hospitalizations and deaths are still to come.
Elizabeth Weise:
So the good news is, according to three different groups that are modeling omicron, the peak has already passed, or it's going to pass in the next two days. That's according to folks at the University of Washington and also the University of Texas at Austin. So, that's the peak number of infections. The bad news is that hospitalizations and deaths take another two to three weeks before they hit. And so we have not yet hit peak hospitalizations or peak deaths.
So for the variant, it will kind of drop like a stone. They're expecting that by February, we're going to be back to a much lower infection rate, maybe one like the rate that we saw in the summer. And that's mostly because so many people got omicron. I mean, getting omicron, if you had already had delta, you were not necessarily protected against omicron. So a lot of people got sick at Thanksgiving with delta, and then they got again at Christmas with omicron, which is annoying. If they were vaccinated, though, they generally did pretty well.
So we're going to see overall COVID cases drop like a rock in February, although we'll still have, as one of the researchers said, a lot of devastation left over because all these people will still be in the hospital. That said, when I asked them, "Well, what happens? Does that mean COVID's over? Does it mean we're out of the danger zone?" And they said, "Well, it could be that this is when it becomes endemic. And most people have had it, and so people aren't getting horribly sick, or we just don't know what the next variant is going to be." And so around the corner could be sunlight and getting to go hang out with your friends without masks, or it could be in another couple of months, another variant. And it's just too soon to say. We're only two years in. And they all said, "Yeah, you can't relax with this virus because we don't yet know enough to know what it's going to do."
So one thing the University of Washington group estimated was that by January 3rd, at least 57% of Americans have had COVID at least once, which is a lot. The other thing is when they use their model, they're presuming that for every reported case of COVID, there are five actual cases. And that's for two reasons. One because a lot of people are doing home tests right now and those don't get reported. And the other is there's so many asymptomatic cases. About 40% of cases for delta were asymptomatic. And we don't know how many are asymptomatic for omicron. It's probably even higher than that. But, yeah, you read about, "Oh, the case counts are so high." Well, multiply that by five.
Taylor Wilson:
Breakthrough infections, that is infections that affect people who are already vaccinated and, in some cases, even boosted, have been on the rise for months as omicron has taken hold. Data out of New York State shows that the daily rate of breakthrough infections grew more than sevenfold there last month, but new infections were still dominated by the unvaccinated. The number of new infections per 100,000 vaccinated residents rose from 29.8 in the first week of January to 222.3 in the most recent week. In the unvaccinated, that number grew from 239.6 to 1583.1 per 100,000.
And crucially, vaccine effectiveness against severe infection remains high. Unvaccinated New Yorkers are being hospitalized at a rate 13 times higher than the vaccinated. Nationwide, this continues to be, by far, the highest caseload the US has seen during the entire pandemic. As of January 10th, the month already has more cases than any other month since COVID took hold in March of 2020.
A vigil was held last night for the 17 people who were killed in a devastating New York City apartment fire over the weekend.
Woman at vigil
... reminds us every day during the greatest time of challenge, God will show his true colors.
Taylor Wilson:
The blaze happened in the Bronx, and local residents like Vanessa Riddick say it's been a devastating blow for the community.
Vanessa Riddick:
My children know people from this building in particular. I've been in this community for 21 years. And I see these people every day, whether I know them by name or not. They're family. We're family. And we know even more now when we see the support that the community has given to one another.
Taylor Wilson:
Fire officials have said the fire began from a malfunctioning space heater, but authorities continue to investigate how the fire and smoke spread through the building so quickly. In one new development, New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said that two self-closing doors did not close properly and then allowed smoke to spread. All 17 people died from smoke inhalation. And eight children, some as young as four, were among the dead. The death toll could also continue to rise with more than a dozen people in the hospital in critical condition as of Monday. The fire that broke out on Sunday is the worst in New York City since 1990. It followed another fire in Philadelphia that killed 12 people the week before. Officials said the cause of that blaze was a Christmas tree.
A man in Maryland has lived for three days now with a pig heart beating inside his chest. His transplant surgery is giving scientists hope for the future when it comes to similar transplants, as patient safety reporter Karen Weintraub tells us.
Karen Weintraub:
So this was the first ever person to have a transplant of a gene edited pig organ, but the hope is that he's the first of many. There are still a lot of hurdles that they have to jump over in order to make this routine. It'll probably take a number of years still, but the fact that they've kept one person alive for at least three days now is certainly a good sign.
So there are about 100-110,000 people on the wait list at the moment in the US, and about 6,000 die waiting. Most, in both cases, are waiting for kidneys, which is the other area that this field of so-called xenotransplantation is looking at. Can we use gene edited pig kidneys to help humans?
The other thing is that if these organs do become widely available, it's likely that many more people will be eligible or will be interested in getting an organ than would make it on the list. So for instance, the guy who volunteered for this experiment last week would not have qualified for a heart, for the heart wait list, because he had been non-compliant with medical directions in the past. He hadn't shown up to appointments, hadn't filled his prescriptions, that sort of thing. So he wouldn't even have qualified for the wait list. So it's possible that it could be, as one person told me, orders of magnitude larger.
A number of people raise ethical questions about this, and I think it is worth thinking about it, or it is interesting, I guess, at some level to think about whether we want to do this kind of procedure now that we can. Clearly, we eat hundreds of millions of pigs a year. So ethicists have said that they don't have any ethical problem with using pig organs for humans, but some people might have an issue with that. And just how long can we keep people alive? "How much should we do to keep people alive?" is a question that I think is easy to ask when it's not your family member or yourself lying in that hospital bed. But it is an ethical issue that comes up when talking about this topic.
Taylor Wilson:
Check out Karen's full story in today's episode description.
The second season of Cheer is here.
[Cheer trailer]
Taylor Wilson:
The show follows a dominant competitive cheer team, but at times this season things will take a different turn. Authorities in 2020 charged one of the first season's cheerleaders, Jeremy Harris, with producing child pornography. And the show will get into the scandal after at least two accusers initially said he persuaded them to send underage nude pictures. In a separate case, a grand jury last year declined to indict another cast member, Mitchell Ryan, of sexual assault of a child after an accuser said he forcibly assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 23.
The government is expected to report today that consumer prices jumped 7.1% over the past 12 months. That would be the steepest increase of its kind in decades. Inflation is surging, unemployment is falling, and wages are rising. And some economists warn that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to reverse its ultra low rate policies. Last Friday's jobs report for December also raised alarms. It showed another sharp drop in the unemployment rate, slightly higher wages and labor shortages. Those things can be good news for workers but can also fuel rising prices.
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us wherever you like to find your pods, including Apple Podcasts, where we ask for a five star rating and review if you have a chance. Thanks to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show. And I'm back tomorrow with more 5 Things from Paste BN.