With BA.4, BA.5 Threat Rising, White House Says Keep Calm

Politico: Bidenworld Projects Calm About Covid But Bite Their Nails In Private 
The White House is publicly arguing that the country has finally arrived at a promising new stage in the pandemic fight — one that a recent spike in Covid cases won’t spoil. Infections may be rising across the Northeast, but top Biden officials note that vaccines and tests are widely available and new therapeutics are capable of staving off severe illness. After a year consumed by the public health crisis, the administration says this time it actually is okay to stay calm and carry on. (Cancryn, 4/14)

Axios: Stuck In The Great COVID In-Between
Life in a COVID world is getting awkward again as Americans rush headlong back to their old ways of life even as case counts rise and new variants threaten to dash their hopes. We can't say we're in a post-pandemic period yet. But large segments of the public are embracing pre-COVID norms, a fact that's maddening for those who are — or must — continue taking precautions. "It's definitely weird," said Bob Wachter, chairman of the University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine. (Reed, 4/15)

Politico: White House On The Lookout For BA.4 And BA.5
The Biden administration, along with other nations and health organizations, is monitoring two emerging Omicron subvariants: BA.4 and BA.5. The two newest subvariants worry some scientists because of a single mutation that could make vaccines less effective against infection. The WHO said it hasn’t seen epidemiological changes in the little data available. (Payne and Banco, 4/14)

KHN: How The Test-To-Treat Pillar Of The US Covid Strategy Is Failing Patients
The federal “test-to-treat” program, announced in March, is meant to reduce covid hospitalizations and deaths by quickly getting antiviral pills to people who test positive. But even as cases rise again, many Americans don’t have access to the program. Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s Lagevrio are both designed to be started within five days of someone’s first symptoms. They’re for people who are at high risk of developing severe illness but are not currently hospitalized because of covid-19. Millions of chronically ill, disabled, and older Americans are eligible for the treatments, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said April 11 that more people may qualify soon. (Recht, 4/15)

And more on the spread of covid —

The New York Times: Are There Better Ways To Track Covid Cases? 
When the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus arrived in the United States last fall, it pushed new case numbers to previously unseen peaks. Even then, the record wave of recorded infections was a significant undercount of reality. In New York City, for example, officials logged more than 538,000 new cases between January and mid-March, representing roughly 6 percent of the city’s population. But a recent survey of New York adults suggests that there could have been more than 1.3 million additional cases that were either never detected or never reported — and that 27 percent of the city’s adults may have been infected during those months. (Anthes, 4/14)

The Washington Post: To Find Out Where The Covid Pandemic Is Headed, Look Here: The Sewer 
The first clues appear in sewer water. And those clues are piling up. As the United States enters year three of the coronavirus pandemic, disease trackers are trying to stay one step ahead of the constantly evolving virus — by hunting for it in feces. In Maine, hospitals are on alert for a potential surge of patients, tipped off by consistently rising levels of the coronavirus in wastewater. In Ohio, which has used sewage surveillance to identify new variants, authorities are tracking substantial increases at a dozen of the state’s 71 monitoring sites, including south of Columbus. In Houston, steady increases have not been accompanied by a rise in hospitalizations, the first time in almost two years, suggesting that vaccinations and previous infection may be keeping people out of hospitals. (Sun and Keating, 4/14)

Salt Lake Tribune: Utah COVID-19 Case Counts Remain Low As Sewage Shows One Site Of ‘Potential Concern’
Utah reported 740 new coronavirus cases in the past seven days and six more deaths, the Department of Health reported Thursday. The number of new cases increased by 40, compared to the weekly total released last Thursday. The state reported a 9% increase in the seven-day average of new cases, moving from 100 to 109. The weekly rate of positive tests rose slightly as well, to 3.16%. However, state officials are focusing less on new cases to track COVID-19 spread, since fewer people are being tested. The seven-day average for the number of tests has fallen from 3,492 as of April 7, to 2,288 on Wednesday. (Harkins and Pierce, 4/14)

Tribune Content Agency: COVID-19 Cases Jump 52 Percent In Massachusetts
State health officials on Wednesday reported nearly 2,000 new coronavirus cases, yet another increase from last week as COVID-19 hospitalizations ticked up across the region. The state Department of Public Health’s report of 1,969 cases was a 52 percent jump from last Wednesday’s total of 1,296 infections. The omicron BA.2 “stealth” variant is now the dominant strain in the U.S., according to the CDC. The subvariant has sparked a rise in virus cases, as more people gather indoors without masks. The Boston-area COVID wastewater data are going up. (4/14)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Georgia Scales Back On Reporting Of COVID-19 Data
Georgia is joining a growing number of states scaling back on the daily public reports of COVID-19 cases. The move comes just as widely used home test kits have made it harder to follow rising cases and questions have been raised about the best way to track the spread of new variants. Some public health officials say moving away from the regular reporting of new cases could leave Georgia in the dark about emerging outbreaks. A new subvariant of omicron, BA.2, is picking up steam in many states. (Oliviero, 4/15)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Health Department Updates COVID Charts To Align With CDC
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services made several changes to its public COVID-19 data pages Thursday, most notably by adopting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's system for indicating risk and community-level spread of the virus. The CDC breaks down COVID-19 levels into high, medium and low tiers, taking into account both local disease spread and hospital capacity. The new levels replace the states COVID-19 activity levels that the state used to feature on its site by region and county. (Shastri, 4/14)

Also —

WUSF 89.7: A Report Shows That The COVID Pandemic Is Having Lasting Effects On Florida Families 
A recent report found that Florida families continue to struggle with many hardships caused by the COVID pandemic, such as unstable housing, food insecurity, loss of health care coverage and mental health issues. The report is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey which was conducted between January and February of this year and focused on employment, housing, health, food and education. These issues are surfacing as the government aid provided during the pandemic begins to expire. The report shows that the pandemic is having lasting effects on people’s budgets, education and mental health. (Bruner, 4/14)

CIDRAP: Patients At Risk For Cardiovascular Disease Suffer More Severe COVID-19
New research to be presented at the end of the month at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) meeting suggests that people with elevated risk of developing a stroke or heart attack over the next 10 years are nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized and require intensive care unit (ICU) treatment, and six times as likely to die from COVID-19 compared with those at low cardiovascular risk. (4/14)