Short Wave - Omicron Around The World: From "Zero COVID" To Rising Cases

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

The Omicron surge may have peaked in the U.S., but parts of the world are seeing crippling levels of cases. Jason Beaubien, NPR global health and development correspondent, joins the show to talk about where the virus is spreading, different countries' strategies for controlling the pandemic and what vaccinations look like globally.You can email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. This is Lauren Summer here, climate correspondent, and I'm hosting a few episodes for Shortwave in the coming weeks. And let me be the first to say, hello, Lauren. Hey, and hey to you, Jason Bobian, Global Health and Development Correspondents. Today, we wanted to take a look at COVID outside the U.S. Because as we've seen over and over, the pandemic means we're all connected. Yeah. During the pandemic, I've been reporting on the World Health Organization.

I've been watching this pandemic's trajectory all around the world. In fact, in the very early part of the pandemic, I was in Hong Kong. Last summer, I did a stint in West Africa. I recently returned from Peru. And next month, I'm heading to the Middle East. Okay, wow. And it's an intense time to travel. Absolutely.

And it's also interesting because there's a huge range of strategies out there as different governments are dealing with the pandemic in different ways. You know, some countries are still trying to keep COVID out completely. Others are starting to look ahead to when the virus might become endemic. So today on the show, we'll talk to Jason about where the disease is spreading, what vaccination rates look like globally and two years into the pandemic, what the WHO says is necessary to control its spread. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. So, Jason, first of all, the U.S. may be seeing Omicron begin this downward trajectory. But what about elsewhere? You know, are some countries down and others

on the upswing? Because in the early days of Omicron, it seemed like the U.S. tended to be a few weeks behind, you know, Southern Africa and Europe. Yeah, well, cases are definitely dropping in the U.S. And it looks like things have peaked here. You've still got more than half the countries in the world where cases look like they're increasing. Eastern Europe, in particular cases are up sharply. they doubled in both Russia and Ukraine last week. Also, the Middle East is getting pounded right now. Infections in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, they're all up more than 100% when you look at them on a week-on-week basis. Same thing in Brazil.

Japan cases are up 150%. So from a global perspective, there isn't a sense at all that this Omicron wave is in the rearview mirror. It's very much the opposite. And then there's China. The Olympics are about to start their next week. Tell me about their COVID-Polns. policies because they've gone a very different route than the U.S. has. Yeah, it's a completely different route. China has this policy called zero COVID, and it is what it

sounds like. But also right now, it's quite different from not just what the U.S. is doing, but from what most other countries are doing in the world. The goal is no cases. So if someone at an apartment complex tests positive, the entire building gets locked down. Or if there's a cluster of cases, you could have millions of people in a particular city. get ordered to stay in their apartment blocks for days on end. This is incredibly strict. It's also been quite effective at keeping case numbers down. China last week reported roughly 500 cases total in the entire country,

while the U.S. reported nearly 5 million cases over that same time period. Oh, wow. Hong Kong is also doing this. The island nation of Tonga had managed to stay COVID-free by keeping just about everybody out. And then earlier this month, they got struck by that massive underwater volcanic eruption. And now their zero COVID policy or zero COVID attempts might be in jeopardy as humanitarian relief workers arrive. Right. Yeah. So is China going to stick with that zero COVID policy with the upcoming Olympics? I mean, because by definition, athletes are coming in from all over the world. So they are establishing what they're calling a closed loop system for the Olympics in which,

there's going to be dedicated buses and hotels and meal halls just for the athletes and Olympic officials. And the idea is that they will have no interaction with the Chinese public. It's very similar to what Hong Kong has done with cargo flights in and out of the city. They had, by our standards, some minor outbreaks of COVID in Hong Kong related to flight crews. So Hong Kong set up, in essence, a closed loop system in which crews from FedEx and other international shipping companies, they had to have all of their staff remain in the bubble. They can come in and out of the airport to deliver goods, but they can't leave their hotels or go out on the streets.

The Olympics in China are supposedly going to function the same way. And we're just going to have to see how that goes. Yeah, wow. Okay. And there's also vaccination. Do the athletes going to the Olympics have to be vaccinated? Officially they don't. However, if they show up unvaccinated, unless they manage to get an exemption,

from the International Olympic Committee, they'll have to do 21 days in quarantine at a government-run hotel. And these quarantines are incredibly strict. People often aren't even allowed to leave their rooms. And of course, because snowboarders are kind of wild people, there's at least one Swiss snowboarder who's supposedly doing the quarantine

in working out to prepare for the Olympics from her hotel room. So vaccination is voluntary, but there's a big incentive to do it if you want to stay in shape. Yeah, that's right. And have any other countries made this zero COVID strategy work at all? You know, so in the early days of the pandemic, a bunch of countries were attempting to do this,

including Australia and New Zealand. At times, Australia wasn't even allowing Australian citizens to fly back home. But now, with Omicron being so highly contagious, it's made it really difficult to carry out a zero COVID policy. At this point, the only sort of highly populated places that are still attempting this zero-COVID idea are China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Now most countries are accepting that there's going to be some transmission. And, you know, the dominant policies are masks and vaccines. And we've definitely entered a period where governments are using vaccines as the primary way to try to deal with this health issue.

Yeah, that just came up in Australia, right? I saw that officials in the end did not let tennis player Novak Djokovic come into the country. He was arriving for the Australian Open and he wasn't vaccinated. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, as I mentioned, Australia and New Zealand tried this zero COVID thing for a long time. And ordinary people had to put up with very lengthy lockdowns and returns to lockdowns whenever a new cluster of cases were turned up. It was arduous. And that's part of why the Novak Djokovic scandal was such a big deal.

A lot of Aussies had had to make sacrifices over the last two years. And here it looked like the world's number. one tennis player was getting special treatment, getting a special exemption to the vaccine mandate. And, you know, another place where there are a lot of differences, right, is vaccination efforts. How is vaccination going? Definitely, vaccine efforts are improving. They're getting better. But about three dozen countries still haven't gotten to 10 percent of their populations fully vaccinated.

These are some of the poorest countries in the world. many of them are in the central part of Africa. Then you've also got countries like Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan that are unstable or even in the midst of war. I was talking with Yasmin Levois with the Norwegian Refugee Council, and he's based in the northern Yemen city of Sanaa, where he says there simply aren't any vaccination campaigns at the moment. So I asked him, you know, what are the options? If that person wanted to be vaccinated, I assume that person would have. to go to the south. So drive around 15 to 20 hours crossing front lines in the mountain. You know, and even then, after this treacherous journey through a war zone, it's not clear

doses would even be available. Like many low-income countries, Yemen has struggled to get a hold of vaccine. Yeah, wow, that's tough. And we have heard a lot about vaccine inequity globally, this idea that rich countries are hoarding vaccines. Is that still going on? Is that why we see these huge differences? It is still part of the problem, but it is no longer as much of an issue as it was last year and earlier in the pandemic. Vaccine supplies are definitely increasing. They're more accessible, even than they were a few months ago. That said, places like Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, they're still under 1% vaccinated.

Yemen, which we were just talking about, it's 1.2%. LaVois with the NRC says that in, in... some of these places, you know, war zones, places with intense poverty, COVID vaccination simply isn't a high priority for people who are living there. When you're trying to find food, when you want to make sure that all your children are eating well, that you need a roost up, you need decent toilets, and then you have to move constantly because of the conflict. These are reasons why people are not getting vaccinated too.

Wow, geez. So then the big picture question, of course, given all these challenges, you know, what's the plan to get this pandemic under control? We keep asking this, right? Right, right. And that is the million dollar question. And from the beginning, the WHO has been trying to offer a plan for this. And, you know, there's still a lot of challenges, but the world is in a much better place than a year ago.

We have to remember that it was at the very end of 2020. So just over a year ago that the first COVID vaccines got regulatory approval and started to roll. out. You know, and a lot has happened in the last 12 months. The WHO's COVAX program has finally gotten a steady supply of vaccines to distribute. More doses are available to purchase. You know, there are other vaccines in the pipeline. There's almost 300 in development. And a few more of those candidates could get cleared by the WHO or some other regulatory body soon. Financing is now in place for some of the poorest countries if they want to try to get out and by vaccine, not even just vaccine, but also buy syringes and pay health care teams to do mass

immunization drives, you know, get upgraded freezers to do these kind of things. Yeah. So 70% of the world by June, you know, that obviously sounds like it would go a long way to reducing how sick people get in those countries that are behind at this point. How much does that number matter, though, to the rest of the world and how the pandemic plays out from here? because I think everyone's bracing for that next variant, right? Yeah.

And, you know, we still don't know if the WHO is going to hit that 70% goal by this summer. I have to say, frankly, I wouldn't bet on it. But even if they get close to that target, it will mean that the health care workers, the elderly folks, the most vulnerable in these countries are vaccinated. And this will make a big difference. You know, it'll mean that the virus. is much less of a threat. Hopefully it will reduce the potential for these other variants to emerge because you won't have places where huge amounts of transmission is going on. And hopefully more and more things can get back to some semblance of normal. Semlance of normal. We keep coming

back to that idea. Thank you, Jason, and travel safe in the coming weeks. Thanks, Lauren. This episode was edited by Giselle Grayson and produced by Chloe Weiner and Thomas Liu. Catherine Seifer, check the facts. The audio engineer was Quasi Lee. I'm Lauren Summer, and you've been listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.