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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will take steps to improve collection of international air passenger contact information to better monitor public health risks after a report found the current data system "needs substantial improvement." ... The report said the CDC's current data management system developed in the mid-2000s "was not designed for rapid assessment or aggregation of public health data" and the CDC "is unable to quickly and accurately identify the number of passengers exposed to a specific infected passenger on a flight." (Shepardson, 7/11)

The Department of Health and Human Services has repeatedly renewed the emergency since it was originally declared in January 2020, with the most recent extension set to expire July 15. The next extension is expected to take effect Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. (Griffin, 7/11)

Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. population is now living in a county with a high or medium community risk level for COVID-19, as defined by the CDC, federal data shows. About one-third of those people -- 31.9%-- are living in a high-risk community, while 41.6% are living in a medium-risk county. (Mitropoulos, 7/12)

If you’ve recently been infected with COVID-19 or know someone infected, and you probably do, you can probably blame BA.5, one of five subvariants of omicron and possibly the most transmissible yet. (Cohn, 7/11)

Well, here we go again. Once more, the ever-changing coronavirus behind COVID-19 is assaulting the United States in a new guise—BA.5, an offshoot of the Omicron variant that devastated the most recent winter. The new variant is spreading quickly, likely because it snakes past some of the immune defenses acquired by vaccinated people, or those infected by earlier variants. ... (Yong, 7/11)

Seven cases of the BA.2.75 subvariant of omicron were detected in the United States in June, according to data from GISAID, a global genomic sequencing database. COVID-19 cases tied to the subvariant have been identified in at least 12 countries, including India, where it is driving a new surge. Nationally, two cases were found in California and one each in Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. The California cases were picked up in Bay Area wastewater samples from mid-June. (Vaziri, 7/11)

The numbers are refusing to drop as experts worry that the arrival of new subvariants, particularly BA.5, could push up cases and, after that, hospitalizations and deaths. As of last week, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard estimated that 60 percent of Massachusetts COVID-19 cases were caused by BA.5 and 20 percent by another subvariant, BA.4, as they elbowed out previous subvariants. (Finucane and Huddle, 7/11)

As pharmaceutical companies struggle to keep up with the rapidly mutating coronavirus, a startup in Cambridge, Mass., says it can help them by using artificial intelligence to predict future variants. Apriori Bio models the ways a virus might change and predicts how it will behave. The company says it’s harnessing that information to design “variant-proof” vaccines and treatments that can fight current and future strains—and provide an early warning to governments, sort of like a hurricane alert, to guide the public-health response. (Griffin, 7/11)

Already, Covid-19’s impact on life, disability and other insurers has extended beyond deaths. That includes things such as workers’ compensation claims. In the past, getting sick with a contagious illness such as the flu you may have caught at work might have been unusual to claim. But 20 U.S. states adopted some form of so-called coverage presumption measures during the pandemic generally for people such as front-line workers and others who needed to work in-person, according to the National Council on Compensation Insurance. Brian Schneider, senior director for insurance at Fitch Ratings, estimates that in 2020 about 10% of all workers’ comp claims were related to Covid-19. (Demos, 7/11)