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00:00Cape Town is seven thousand three hundred miles from Auckland New Zealand and everybody in your game is focused today on New Zealand where they actually announced a plan to quote unquote open up New Zealand. How far are we from other nations saying enough or done. We're going to open up. When does America when does the United Kingdom or France name the country. When do they do a New Zealand. Well I think in this region and as you said I'm here in South Africa. Today we lifted more restrictions in South Africa. We're seeing I think a number of countries Botswana Malawi Zimbabwe around South Africa. Also in this post Omicron post Delta position where so many people have had the virus vaccine coverage is low. But nevertheless we're really coming out on the other side. So I think in this region you're going to see more restrictions lifted. Remember too this is a really young part of the world. So Malawi for example the median age is 18. Wow. They should never close schools again. It's just you know that is not going to happen and it shouldn't happen. We're different in the US. You know we we knew that was gonna be a lag. We knew there were going to be this hospitalisation wave. We knew there was going to be this loss of life. And we had you know yesterday. Thirty six hundred. So we're not out of it yet. And we still don't have high enough immunisation rates and we still don't have high enough boosters particularly for people over age 65. Well that's a big part of the reason why we're not there yet. How do you respond to the regional nature of the recovery in the United States. How does a pro develop northeast Midwest South far west all the different regions you people are expert on. How do you adapt to that into March and July. Well I think you're going to see that the declines in the places that had Omicron first like the Northeast New York New Jersey Connecticut are going to continue to go down in terms of new cases. We're still in parts of the country where on the Quran continues to surge and the hospitalizations and the loss of life are going to follow that same lag fashion. I do think that we will as a country be in a very different position certainly by the end of February early March because if barring another variant with with even more transmissibility or immune escape then then omicron. We will be coming out on the other side of all of those regional spikes. And I think as we've seen before. And hopefully we'll see again the warm weather is going to change the dynamic as well. And of course we now have some other big changes Moderna got got full approval for them. Are their mRNA vaccine. NovaVax has applied for emergency use authorization for their protein subunit over 90 percent efficacy. And of course you know we now have applications to the FDA for the under fives. All of those are going to matter. Dr. Beyrer can you game out what's going to happen as we kick off the Olympics tomorrow in a nation that really doesn't have a collective immunity and that is trying to make inroads with respect to new vaccination cycles but has not really reached critical mass yet. Oh yeah. Well when you contrast for example what's happening in this region where there never was high enough vaccine coverage but where there was so much more transmission so many more people got infected and these are young populations. China looks terribly vulnerable because they went with the zero Covid approach and because their initial vaccines the sign of act and sign of farm turned out to be low efficacy against the new variants. Delta and omicron they're really not protected. And so despite their very strict approaches and control and intense surveillance what they have is an enormous number of people who are vulnerable to this virus. And that now looks like a vulnerability particularly as the Olympics get go.

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Why America Lags the World on Lifting Covid Restrictions

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Professor Chris Beyrer discusses countries lifting Covid restrictions, regional recovery from omicron in the U.S., and China’s vulnerability to Covid-19 as the Olympic games begin. The Bloomberg School of Public Health is supported by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. (Source: Bloomberg)

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