Raphael Stevens

Hospitalizations among children under 5 with Covid are rising as omicron sweeps the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kids in that age group are not currently eligible for vaccination, though the Food and Drug Administration could authorize Pfizer’s shots for them in the next month.
In the meantime, doctors say the best way to protect young kids is by making sure everyone else is vaccinated and boosted and practicing the well-known mitigation measures.

Students in the 5 day pre-K class at Immanuel Unite Church of Christ line up to go outside after helping to sort donated food items.
Ben Hasty | MediaNews Group | Getty Images

Covid hospitalizations are rising among children, and one age group is particularly vulnerable at the moment: kids under 5.
Infants to 4-year-olds are the only age group in the U.S. that isn’t eligible for vaccination, as the highly contagious omicron variant sweeps through communities.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said earlier this month there’s no indication omicron makes children sicker compared with past variants. The unprecedented levels of transmission across the nation, she said, is likely behind the increase in hospitalizations.
About 7 out of every 100,000 children under 5 were hospitalized with Covid as of Jan. 8, more than double the rate in December, according to CDC data from 250 hospitals across 14 states.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that children are much less likely to develop severe disease from Covid compared with adults but that the risk is not zero.
“We have plenty of children, when you look at children’s hospitals throughout the country, who are severely ill with Covid-19 requiring hospitalization, some even dying,” Fauci said.
Dr. Roberta DeBiasi said most of the children admitted to Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., with Covid during the omicron wave have been under 5 years old.

“It is overwhelmingly the group that has not been vaccinated, which is the under 5 years of age,” said DeBiasi, who runs the infectious disease division at the hospital.

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Dr. Andi Shane, infectious disease division chief at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, said many parents understandably feel a loss of control as the pandemic drags on with repeated waves of infection.
However, Shane said, parents should know that they are not powerless in the face of the virus and there are practical steps they can take to protect their kids. Though children under 5 can’t get the vaccines, parents can protect them by making sure every other eligible person in the family is fully vaccinated and gets a booster shot, according to doctors who spoke with CNBC. Everyone 12 and older is currently eligible for Pfizer and BioNTech’s booster shot at least five months after their second dose.
People who are vaccinated and boosted have up to 75% protection against symptomatic infection from omicron, according to a real-world study from the U.K. Health Security Agency.
Guarding infants and toddlers from Covid is particularly challenging because so few tools are available to protect them, said Dr. Allison Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist at Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago. They are not eligible for the vaccine, the CDC advises strongly against putting masks on children under 2 years old, and the FDA has not authorized over-the-counter Covid tests for them.
“They’ve got three strikes against them in terms of preventing infection,” Bartlett said. However, parents can protect them by using the full range of mitigation measures that reduce the risk of family members catching the virus and spreading it to the vulnerable, she said.
“It just is that much more imperative on everyone else in the household and in contact with the kids less than 5 to wear their own masks and socially distance and limit their activity outside the home and take every other risk-mitigation step to help cocoon and protect the child,” Bartlett said.
Shane said many parents are understandably tired of the pandemic and want their children and families to have normal social interactions again.
“It’s very challenging with these surges that we have every couple of months that we have to pull back and go into not doing things that we really want to do,” Shane said. “But we really do have to do that for short periods of time, at least until we get everybody vaccinated and boosted.”
Fauci said on Wednesday he hopes the FDA could approve the vaccine for kids under 5 in the next month, though he said there’s no guarantee that will happen. Younger children will likely need three doses, because two shots did not induce an adequate immune response in kids 2 to 4 years old in Pfizer’s clinical trials. Pfizer said it has not identified any safety concerns during its trials with the doses for young kids, which at 3 micrograms each are much smaller than those for adults.

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The International Monetary Fund’s managing director said Friday that China’s zero-Covid policy is increasingly looking like a “burden.”
Speaking to CNBC at The Davos Agenda, Kristalina Georgieva said the containment strategy, though initially successful, was now presenting more risks than benefits.
Georgieva noted that further measures could be expected as a “pandemic policy” remains a top economic policy for China and the rest of the world throughout 2022.

The International Monetary Fund’s managing director said Friday that China’s zero-Covid policy is increasingly looking like a “burden,” which is impinging economic recovery both domestically and for the world at large.
Speaking to CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore via videoconference at The Davos Agenda virtual event, Kristalina Georgieva said the containment strategy, though initially successful, was now presenting more risks than benefits.

Zero-Covid refers to attempts to completely eliminate the virus via public health measures such as lockdowns, mass testing, and border quarantine.
“The zero-Covid policy, for quite some time, did contain infections in China,” said Georgieva, adding that the new highly transmissible omicron variant meant that these containment measures cannot now be easily achieved.
“The restrictions that need to be imposed are more of a burden to the economy, put more at risk not [for] only China but also China as a supply source for the rest of the world,” she said.

People wear masks while standing near to lanterns in the market on January 19, 2022 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.
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Two years into the pandemic and with the emergence of the omicron variant, Georgieva noted that it is now important for all countries to reassess the best way to deal with the pandemic. In China’s case, it may soon be untenable to contain the latest wave without severe economic implications, she said.
“What omicron is teaching all of us is that a highly transmissible variant of Covid may be much more difficult to contain without a dramatic impact on the economy,” said Georgieva.

Already, China has been moving to boost its economy amid slowing growth. On Wednesday, the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, cut its benchmark lending rates, lowering corporate and household loans.
Georgieva noted that further measures could be expected as a “pandemic policy” remains a top economic policy for China and the rest of the world throughout 2022.
“Unless we build protections around the globe, we are going to continue to see disruptions and the future would not be as bright as we want it to be,” Georgieva said.
On Thursday, China’s mainland health commission reported a total of 73 new confirmed cases. It has a seven-day average of 129 cases. More

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MidAmerican Energy says it’s also proposing “feasibility studies” centered around technologies such as energy storage, small modular nuclear reactors and carbon capture.
According to the American Clean Power Association, wind was Iowa’s “largest source of electricity generation” in 2020.

This image from 2016 shows a wind turbine on property used by MidAmerican Energy’s Eclipse Wind Farm in Adair, Iowa.
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A subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy has released details of plans to develop a $3.9 billion project in Iowa that would incorporate both wind and solar power.
In a statement Wednesday, MidAmerican Energy, citing a filing to the Iowa Utilities Board, said the Wind PRIME development “would add 2,042 megawatts of wind generation and 50 megawatts of solar generation.”

In addition, MidAmerican said it was proposing what it described as “feasibility studies” centered around technologies such as energy storage, small modular nuclear reactors and carbon capture.
If Wind PRIME was granted approval, MidAmerican — which has its headquarters in Des Moines – said it planned to wrap up construction “in late 2024.”

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According to the American Clean Power Association, wind was Iowa’s “largest source of electricity generation” in 2020.
The United States is home to a well-developed onshore wind sector. According to the ACP a total of 16,836 MW of utility-scale, land-based wind was installed there in 2020. “The amount of new wind capacity in 2020 is more than three times the amount installed in 2010,” the ACP says.
Offshore wind is a different story. America’s first offshore wind facility, the 30 megawatt Block Island Wind Farm in waters off Rhode Island, only started commercial operations in late 2016.

Change looks to be coming on that front, however. Last March, the Departments of Energy, Interior and Commerce said they wanted to roll out 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by the year 2030.
In Nov. 2021, ground was broken on a project dubbed the United States’ “first commercial scale offshore wind farm.” More

The number of children hospitalized with Covid hit a pandemic high during the omicron variant’s surge.
The CDC has said there’s no indication that omicron causes more severe illness in children.
Pediatric infectious disease specialists are concerned about the long-term consequences of Covid in children.

A respiratory therapist checks on Adrian James, 2, who tested positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and is on a ventilator, at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 5, 2021.
Callaghan O’Hare | Reuters

Trisha DeGroot’s 10-year-old daughter, Rainey, returned to her Houston home after a church choir practice in September looking unwell.
Rainey was running a fever, so DeGroot had her tested for Covid-19 as a precaution. When the results came back positive, DeGroot assumed Rainey would recover quickly, like her 13-year-old son, Sam, who had caught Covid in February.

Rainey experienced abdominal pain, a bad headache, nausea and vomiting. But after about 10 days, her personality came back and she seemed to be turning the corner, DeGroot said.
Then Rainey’s condition took a turn for the worse. She had trouble eating. The abdominal pain and headaches got worse. But the family doctor couldn’t identify why Rainey was sick. A gastroenterologist told DeGroot that some children’s bodies overreact to Covid. He prescribed a medication called cyproheptadine to ease the stomach pain and help her start eating again. It didn’t work, DeGroot said.
DeGroot, who studies nursing, took her daughter to a clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston that specializes in post-Covid symptoms. Rainey was diagnosed with long Covid and dysautonomia, a failure of the autonomic nervous system, which controls the body’s basic functions, such as digestion.

Rainey’s fight

In December, Rainey became nauseated by the smell of food and said everything tasted like it was rotting, DeGroot said. She took Rainey back to Texas Children’s Hospital, where she was admitted and treated for two weeks.
Rainey was placed on a feeding tube, which is still the only way she can eat. She is now home-schooled, but she has difficulty reading and it’s hard for her to keep up, DeGroot said.

At the time of Rainey’s infection, 10-year-old children weren’t eligible for vaccination. The Food and Drug Administration would authorize the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11 in October. DeGroot, her husband, David, and Sam were all vaccinated. Her 4-year-old daughter Helen isn’t eligible yet.

“It’s absolute misery. It takes its toll on everybody, especially your child. You do not want this.”

Trisha DeGroot

Rainey was infected during the surge caused by the delta variant. The highly contagious omicron variant is now driving the pandemic’s largest wave of infection across the world. As new infections soar, the number of children hospitalized in the U.S. with Covid recently hit a record high.
Infectious disease experts at children’s hospitals in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver and Washington, D.C., all told CNBC that they are seeing more children hospitalized with Covid than during previous waves — although the number represents a lower percentage of overall cases.

Hospitalizations rise

Pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Roberta DeBiasi said that at omicron’s peak 67 children were hospitalized with Covid at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. — a pandemic high and almost three times higher than the delta peak. About 45 children are currently hospitalized there, she said.
At the Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago, 15 children are hospitalized with Covid on any given day, said Dr. Allison Bartlett, a pediatric infectious disease specialist. That’s about twice the previous peak, which occurred in September.
“The good news is in terms of the number of children who are in our intensive care unit on ventilators, that number is about the same as it was at our last peak,” Bartlett said. “Proportionally we don’t have as many super-sick kids as we did before.”

Fewer in ICU

While more children are hospitalized with Covid, due to omicron’s high level of transmissibility, they don’t appear to be getting sicker than they did with previous strains, physicians say.
More than 80 children are currently hospitalized with Covid in the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta system, which has three hospitals, compared with 15 children on any given day during most of October and November, when delta was the dominant variant.
However, the percentage of children in the ICU — about 10% to 15% of those hospitalized — is probably slightly lower than what the hospital saw during the delta wave’s peak, said Dr. Andi Shane, head of the infectious disease division at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The FDA cleared Pfizer’s Covid shots for 12- to 15-year-olds on May 10 and 5- to 11-year-olds on Oct. 29, giving a large portion of those kids some protection against omicron. Roughly 55% of kids ages 12 to 17 and 19% of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated right now, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The biggest risk

Pediatric infectious disease specialists said most of the children hospitalized with Covid are unvaccinated. Shane said children with underlying conditions who are vaccinated but got breakthrough infections are having much less severe symptoms than those who are unvaccinated and they are not being hospitalized with Covid-related complications.
“The biggest risk factor at this point is being unvaccinated,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters earlier this month that unvaccinated 12- to 15-year-olds are 11 times more likely to end up in the hospital with Covid than vaccinated children in the same age group. However, kids under 5 are particularly vulnerable right now because they are not yet eligible for vaccination.
“Sadly, we are seeing the rates of hospitalizations increasing for children zero to 4, children who are not yet currently eligible for Covid-19 vaccination,” Walensky told reporters.

‘Such a contagious variant’

O’Leary, who is also vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases, said about a third of the children in his hospital with the virus were admitted for other things, but the other two-thirds of them need hospital care because of Covid.
“Yes, we’re going to see more kids hospitalized with other things that also have Covid, because this is such a contagious variant and infection is so common right now. But we are also very much seeing a lot of kids hospitalized with Covid,” O’Leary said.
An average of roughly 5,100 kids, from infants to 17-year-olds, were hospitalized with Covid as of Jan. 20, according to a seven-day average of data from the Department of Health and Human Services, up 26% over the past two weeks.

‘Absolute misery’

Though hospitalizations among children with Covid have steeply risen to pandemic highs this month, kids still have the lowest hospitalization rate of any group, according to the CDC.
“I get that the chances are low — but it’s not zero,” DeGroot said of the risk Covid poses to children. “It’s absolute misery. It takes its toll on everybody, especially your child. You do not want this.”
At least 1,000 children have died from Covid since the pandemic began, according to CDC data. The virus has infected more than million children, accounting for 17% of all cases in the U.S., according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
In all, hospitals have seen more than 94,000 admissions of children with Covid during the pandemic, according to the CDC. However, it’s likely an undercount because the data only goes back to August 2020.

Obesity and asthma

Bartlett said many of the children hospitalized with Covid at Comer in Chicago are also obese.
Dr. Camille Sabella, an infectious disease specialist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s, said severe asthma is another major risk factor. Sabella said the children’s hospital has between 15 and 20 pediatric patients infected with Covid on any given day, compared with less than five in September and October. He estimated that about 70% of them are hospitalized because of Covid.
The CDC found that two-thirds of children hospitalized with Covid had one or more underlying health issues, with obesity the most common condition, according to a study of pediatric patients at six hospitals during July and August when the delta variant was predominant.

“Everyone is at risk from Covid. You do not know what Covid will do to you in the window of infection or in the long term of having Covid — you just don’t know.”

Megean Naughton

O’Leary and DeBiasi said about a third of children hospitalized because of Covid ultimately need intensive care and oxygen support due to respiratory failure.

‘We haven’t even scratched the surface’

As the numbers of kids’ hospitalizations and infections rise, the long-term consequences for their health is unclear. Dr. Grace Lee, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University, said the pandemic has burdened an entire generation of children.
“I also truly believe we have not yet addressed the long-term impact of Covid infection in children,” Lee told the CDC’s independent committee of vaccines advisors, which she chairs, earlier this month just before the agency cleared Pfizer boosters for 12- to 15-year-old children.
“I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we’re going to see,” Lee said.
Some children who catch Covid aren’t hospitalized until months after their initial infection when they start developing serious complications.

104-degree fever

Janelle Bardon’s daughter, Taylor, was a healthy 17-year-old in Louisville, Kentucky, until she caught Covid in the summer of 2020. Taylor had no underlying health conditions and played field hockey. She lost her senses of taste and smell after infection but had no other symptoms and tested negative four weeks later, Bardon said.
When Taylor went back to field hockey, she felt short of breath and dizzy and struggled with endurance. Bardon, a registered nurse with 20 years of experience, took Taylor to a cardiologist, who found that she had second-degree heart block, or irregular heart rhythm.
Taylor’s condition deteriorated during a family trip to Disney World that fall. She developed a 104-degree fever, a sunburn-like rash and a terrible sore throat and could barely walk, Bardon said. Taylor had symptoms similar to hypovolemic shock, in which the heart rate is high, blood pressure is low and oxygen delivery to organs drops.

MISC-C and long Covid

Taylor was taken to the emergency room, where the family was told by the ER doctor that Taylor had multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C. She was transferred to the ICU, where she was given steroids and antibodies intravenously. Her condition improved enough that the family was able to fly back to Kentucky.
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 6,000 children have developed MIS-C, a rare but serious condition associated with Covid infection, according to the CDC. MIS-C is characterized by inflammation of multiple organ systems. At least 55 children have died from the condition, according to the CDC.
Taylor is 18 now and still has symptoms. The lymph nodes in her throat are swollen, she’s developed cysts on her wrists and has joint pain, Bardon said. Most children recover from MIS-C after treatment, with one study showing that inflammation had mostly resolved after six months. However, there are indications that MIS-C is similar to autoimmune diseases, suggesting symptoms could recur.

‘Lifelong illness’

“Now she’s stuck with a lifelong illness,” Bardon said. Taylor will have to take either colchicine, an anti-inflammatory pill normally used to treat gout, or anakinra injections, which are used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, Bardon said.
O’Leary, the pediatrician in Colorado, said MIS-C usually develops two to six weeks after infection, which would suggest a wave of cases in the coming weeks. However, O’Leary said it is too early to determine the omicron variant’s association with MIS-C.
The CDC, in a recent study, found that vaccination with two Pfizer doses was 91% effective at protecting adolescents 12 to 18 against MIS-C. Taylor was vaccinated last summer.
Megean Naughton’s family came down with Covid after her husband, Patrick, a firefighter, was infected in the summer of 2020. Her daughter Zoe, who is now 14, was sick in bed for four weeks. 
“She recovered, and she was well for about five months. And then one day she got sick and then she literally could not stand up,” said Naughton, a stay-at-home mom of five children. Zoe was a healthy child who played lacrosse before Covid, Naughton said.

‘Everyone is at risk’

Zoe was in bed for five months, and Naughton had to take her out of school on a medical withdrawal. Zoe was hospitalized for four days after experiencing dehydration and severe migraines, Naughton said.
Naughton scheduled a telehealth appointment with Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, which runs a specialized clinic for kids experiencing lingering Covid symptoms. That’s when Zoe was diagnosed with long Covid, Naughton said.
Zoe missed the entire second semester of eighth grade and is now in physical rehabilitation. She still experiences dizziness and severe headaches and is constantly in pain, Naughton said.
“Everyone is at risk from Covid,” Naughton said. “You do not know what Covid will do to you in the window of infection or in the long term of having Covid — you just don’t know.”
— CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed to this report

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During a recent panel discussion, industry figures with experience of both policy and the corporate world reflected on the outcome of COP26 and how things could progress moving forward.
The panelists also touched upon the subject of net-zero pledges from major businesses.
While net-zero commitments draw attention, actually achieving these goals is a huge task with significant financial and logistical hurdles.

The COP26 climate summit, held in the Scottish city of Glasgow last year, made headlines around the world.
After days of painstaking and at times fraught negotiations, countries agreed upon a deal which sought to build on 2015′s Paris Agreement and curb the worst effects of climate change.

Things weren’t all plain sailing, however. The Glasgow Climate Pact, as it’s known, faced stumbling blocks related to the phasing out of coal, fossil fuel subsidies and financial support to low-income countries.
India and China, both among the world’s biggest burners of coal, insisted on a last-minute change of fossil fuel language in the pact — from a “phase out” of coal to a “phase down.” After initial objections, opposing countries ultimately conceded.
During a recent panel discussion chaired by CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick, industry figures with experience of both policy and the corporate world reflected on the summit’s outcome and how things could progress moving forward.
“A lot more was expected, but what was delivered was really spectacular,” Jos Delbeke, who is the former director-general for climate action at the European Commission, said.
Delbeke, who also holds the position of European Investment Bank climate chair at the European University Institute, went on to say that major oil and gas producers were now “on board” alongside corporations, cities and regional authorities.

“We have seen lots of commitments, so that’s basically the good news,” he said.
“It is not yet the one and a half degrees Celsius, as scientists are telling us we should get … but it is a major change,” he said. 
The 1.5 degrees that Delbeke references relates to the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming “to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.”
Hitting that target will be no mean feat. On Monday, the U.N. secretary general struck a sobering tone in a speech to the World Economic Forum. “Emissions must fall, but they continue to rise,” António Guterres said. “Coal-fired power generation is surging towards a new all-time record.”
“And even if all developed countries kept their promise, very important promise, to drastically reduce emissions by 2030,” he continued, “the problem is that with all developing countries achieving their present Nationally Determined Contribution, especially emerging economies, global emissions would still be too high to keep [the] 1.5 degrees goal within reach.”
In simple terms, NDCs refer to individual countries’ targets for cutting emissions and adapting to the effects of climate change. According to the United Nations, the Glasgow Climate Pact “calls on all countries to present stronger national action plans next year [2022], instead of in 2025, which was the original timeline.”

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While the outcome of negotiations at COP26 left many frustrated, a number of high-profile pledges and announcements were made during the summit.
A joint declaration between the United States and China, for example, in which the two superpowers said they would work together on a number of climate-related actions, took many by surprise.
Elsewhere, signatories to another declaration at the summit said they would “work towards all sales of new cars and vans being zero emission globally by 2040, and by no later than 2035 in leading markets.”  
And on Nov. 3, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero said more than $130 trillion of private capital had been “committed to transforming the economy for net zero.”

Also speaking on CNBC’s panel last week was Judy Kuszewski, chief executive of Sancroft International, a sustainability consultancy.
“We very rarely ask the business community or individual businesses to make promises towards a goal where the path to get there may not be entirely clear,” she said. 
“This is actually a very rare exception and the fact that there have been quite a few early adopters of net-zero pledges and targets towards meeting those net-zero pledges — they’ve been especially bold to take that kind of slight leap into the unknown.”
Over the past few years, a wide range of high-profile businesses — including major oil and gas firms — have made net-zero pledges.
Initiatives such as Amazon’s Climate Pledge also exist. Its signatories — who include Microsoft, Uber and Unilever — have committed to what the Pledge calls “net zero carbon” by the year 2040.
According to the Climate Pledge website, firms that have signed up to it have agreed to, among other things, regular reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon elimination and “credible offsets.”

No simple solution

While net-zero commitments draw attention, actually achieving them is a huge task with significant financial and logistical hurdles. The devil is in the detail and ambitions and goals can often be light on the latter.
Referencing the Glasgow climate summit, Sancroft International’s Kuszewski said it was clear that the business community had been “visible and active in a way that it had not previously been in earlier COPs.”  
“We see a lot of action from business in calling for a level playing field, for bold commitments and for a framework that they know they can operate within.”
“So I think it’s a mixed bag, but there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful about the progress,” she said.
For his part, Daniel Schmid, chief sustainability officer at German software firm SAP, emphasized the importance of companies having what he called a “maturity in attitude and understanding the holistic view on sustainability … with the environmental, the economic and the social dimension and how these are linked to each other.”
Sustainability and commerce were intertwined, he argued on the same panel. “There’s either no business, or sustainable business: That is my true belief for the future to come.”
—CNBC’s Matt Clinch contributed to this report More

Singapore is extending its Covid booster program to teens aged between 12 and 17, authorities said. Previously, only those 18 and over were eligible.
Those who do not receive the additional shot after 270 days will lose their fully vaccinated status. This is in line with the policy for people 18 and older that was announced earlier this month.
The country also adjusted border measures for people entering the country.

Students in protective masks engage in extracurricular activity in school on Jan. 6, 2022 in Singapore.
Suhaimi Abdullah | NurPhoto | Getty Images

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Separately, Singapore shortened the isolation period for children under 12 and vaccinated people who test positive for Covid from 10 days to 7 days.
The country’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases found through its studies that the viral load for omicron infections is lower than for delta, and has a shorter infectious period.
Those 12 and older who are unvaccinated will still have to isolate for 14 days.

Adjusting border measures

Singapore also said it will continue to limit the number of people who can enter the country through its quarantine-free, vaccinated travel lane arrangement. The sales of flight and bus tickets will be capped at 50% of its quota.
However, those who enter the country from Jan. 24 onward will need to do only unsupervised, self-administered rapid Covid tests for seven days after arrival if they intend to leave their place of residence. Submission of results is not required.
Currently, after arriving in Singapore, travelers must self-test and submit test results on four days and go to a testing center for supervised testing on two days.

Additionally, travelers who are fully vaccinated and have recently recovered from the virus will be exempted from all testing and quarantine requirements if they are able to provide proof.
“As fully vaccinated individuals who recently recovered from infection have a high level of immunity through their recent COVID-19 infection and vaccination, the likelihood of reinfection is low,” the health ministry said in a press release. Such travelers may also test positive without posing any infection risk because they are shedding non-infectious viral fragments, the release added.
Those who are not fully vaccinated but have recently recovered will not need to take a pre-departure test but will be subject to other measures, the release said.
Covid cases in Singapore have been climbing in recent weeks, with the health ministry reporting a weekly infection growth rate of 2.17 on Thursday.
Over the last 28 days, 99.3% of reported cases have had mild or no symptoms. On Thursday, 1,472 infections were confirmed.
The health ministry said 1,001 omicron cases were confirmed on Thursday, of which 952 were local and 49 were imported.
The city-state has reported 297,549 Covid cases and 845 related deaths since the pandemic began.

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