The West Los Angeles VA Medical Center in Los Angeles was the site of a press conference on Wednesday, November 10, 2021.
The person in California who tested positive for the omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 has mild symptoms and is improving, officials said Wednesday.
After returning to the San Francisco Bay Area from South Africa, the patient developed symptoms and tested positive for Covid.
The sample was received by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. The lab director said that it took about five hours to complete the project.
The patient was not given a booster shot because they were not six months out from their original vaccine course.
The individual has not been hospitalized. The individuals that this individual has come into contact with have not tested positive yet, and we are hopeful of full recovery and expect nothing less based on what we have learned.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all adults get a booster six months after their original Pfizer or Moderna two-dose course and two months after their single J&J shot.
The secretary of California's Health and Human Services said that the patient is improving and underscores the importance of vaccinations.
The fact that vaccinations do one really, really important thing is something that we have been talking about for months. The evidence that an individual with omicron has mild symptoms is improving, I think is a testimony to the importance of the vaccinations.
There is still a lot to learn about the variant, but Ghaly encourages Californians to get a booster shot if they are eligible.
The profile of the omicron variant suggests that it could affect the effectiveness of the vaccines currently on the market, but more data is needed, according to the White House chief medical advisor.
Fauci said that the kind of mutations seen in omicron might be more transmissible and that it might be less effective at protecting against vaccines. We don't know that now.
The CEOs of Moderna and Pfizer said it will take about two weeks to determine the impact omicron has on the effectiveness of the current vaccines.
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, told CNBC on Monday that he doesn't think the vaccines won't protect. I think the result could be that the vaccines protect less.
Pfizer can develop a vaccine in 100 days. The company was able to quickly create vaccines for the Covid variant but they didn't use them because the original vaccine was still effective against the mutations.
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, said that the vaccine maker can roll out a higher-dosage booster shot quickly but that it could take until early in the future to develop and ship a vaccine that specifically targets omicron.
The higher dose could be done right away but it will be months before the variant is ready to ship in large quantities, according to Bancel.
According to reports from South Africa, some patients with omicron show mild symptoms, but in other cases the disease has become more severe. Van Kerkhove said that studies are looking at those hospitalized to see if they have the omicron variant.
It is possible that the virus may still have a fitness advantage, meaning that it can become more transmissible than Delta. She said that they would have to see. We don't know the severity yet.
