• During an interview, Dr Rochelle Walensky, head of the US CDC, announced that most of the 40 people in the US with confirmed cases of Omicron have mild illness; one has been hospitalized. She reinforced the CDC’s recommendation for boosters for all adults, saying “What we generally know is the more mutations a variant has, the higher level you need your immunity to be. …We want to make sure we bolster everybody’s immunity. And that’s really what motivated the decision to expand our guidance.” Source
• China’s regulatory agency, the National Medical Products Administration (has given emergency approval to two monoclonal antibodies, BRII-196 and BRII-198, used to treat mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and adolescents ages 12 and above, who are at risk for progression to severe disease. Tsinghua University, the Third People’s Hospital of Shenzhen and Brii Biosciences jointly developed BRII-196 and BRII-198. Source
• Omicron cases in the UK have been doubling every three days, prompting a warning from the government’s Health Security Agency that “…we expect to see at least 50 percent of Covid-19 cases to be caused by the Omicron variant in the next two to four weeks.” Source