Raphael Stevens

Formally known as AY.4.2, the “delta plus” subvariant includes two new mutations to the spike protein, A222V and Y145H, which allow the virus to enter the body.
The AY.4.2 subvariant has been detected in at least five cases in the U.S.: in Washington, D.C., California, North Carolina, Washington state and Massachusetts.
Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, said it could be 10%-15% more contagious than delta.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on May 11, 2021.
Jim Lo Scalzo | Pool | Reuters

U.S. health officials are keeping a close eye on an emerging Covid-19 subvariant, dubbed “delta plus,” that some scientists say may be more contagious than the already highly transmissible delta variant.
Formally known as AY.4.2, delta plus includes two new mutations to the spike protein, A222V and Y145H, which allow the virus to enter the body. Those mutations have been found in other Covid variants, so it’s unclear how dramatically those changes affect the virus.

Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, said it could be 10%-15% more contagious than delta, which first appeared in India and spreads easier than Ebola, SARS, MERS and the 1918 Spanish flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Delta has an R-naught, or reproductive rate, of eight or nine, according to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, meaning that every person who has Covid will spread it to up to nine other people. The “wild type” or original strain of Covid had an estimated R-naught of about three. Someone infected with the delta variant carries 1,000 times the viral load of the original Covid strain.
India’s Ministry of Health reported in June that delta plus was more transmissible than the delta variant, adding that the subtype binds more strongly to lung cell receptors and could even reduce the effectiveness of monoclonal antibody treatments.
The mutation has been detected in the U.S., but there hasn’t been a noticeable uptick in delta plus cases nationwide, Walensky said at a White House Covid briefing Wednesday.
“We particularly monitor for sublineages that could impact therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibodies and vaccines,” Walensky said. “At this time, there is no evidence that the sublineage AY.4.2 impacts the effectiveness of our current vaccines or therapeutics.”

The AY.4.2 subvariant has been detected in at least five cases in the U.S. since August: in Washington, D.C., California, North Carolina, Washington state and Massachusetts, according to Outbreak.info. The website collects data from GISAID, a global genomic database on Covid and influenza cases.
Top health authorities have cautioned for weeks that more powerful and potentially vaccine-resistant Covid variants could develop as long as widespread outbreaks continue to occur, fueled by billions of people worldwide who remain unvaccinated. White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said in August that the U.S. could be “in trouble” if another mutation surpassed delta, asking the unvaccinated to get their shots in hopes of curbing a surge that crushed the nation’s health-care systems this summer.

CNBC Health & Science

Delta plus could also eventually affect the age groups eligible to receive Covid booster doses, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s lead vaccine regulator, said Wednesday night. The FDA and CDC have authorized Covid boosters for a wide array of adults in the U.S. from all three manufacturers in the U.S.: Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.
“The exact age of that will be based on what we see of the emerging situation, which is quite dynamic right now because we continue to see reports of new variants coming up,” Marks said. “And we’re also seeing changes in the epidemiology of Covid-19 in our country right now with new hotspots coming up even as certain places die down.”
Concerns over delta plus are running high in the U.K., where officials are battling a surge in cases and facing a renewed health crisis. Delta plus cases represented roughly 6% of all sequenced Covid cases as of the week beginning Sept. 27, according to the latest data from the country’s Health Security Agency. The sublineage is “increasing in frequency” in the U.K., the agency noted, and doctors from the National Health Service Confederation in London are calling for a return to stricter Covid protocols heading into the winter.
But global health leaders are urging the public not to panic. Though the emergence of a Covid subtype isn’t the same as an entirely new variant evolving, keeping track of delta’s progression could allow the medical community to better understand the mutation, Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, Covid-19 incident manager at the World Health Organization’s regional branch for the Americas, said at a briefing Oct. 6.
“Looking to these additional changes, it may help researchers to track the variants on a fine scale,” Aldighieri said. “But they do not imply any functional or biological difference.”
— CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt in London contributed to this report.

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Champagne sales are surging back to near what they were before the Covid pandemic hampered sales and kept people away from celebrations.
The gradual reopening of global bubbly markets is expected to drive sales to an estimated 305 million bottles worldwide in 2021, according to the General Syndicate of Champagne Winegrowers.
“If I have to guess, I think that consumers are ready to celebrate even just the little things in life,” said Natalie Pavlatos, a spokeswoman for the Champagne Bureau, USA.

GP: Various champagne bottles are seen on a store shelf.
Paul Zinken | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Pop those corks.
Champagne sales are surging back to near what they were before the Covid pandemic hampered sales and kept people away from celebrations.

The gradual reopening of global bubbly markets is expected to drive sales to an estimated 305 million bottles worldwide in 2021, according to the General Syndicate of Champagne Winegrowers.
People are ready to party again after spending many months apart.
“If I have to guess, I think that consumers are ready to celebrate even just the little things in life,” said Natalie Pavlatos, a spokeswoman for the Champagne Bureau, USA.
In 2020, the region suffered an 18% drop compared to the year prior, bringing in $4.8 billion and exporting 244 million bottles, according to data compiled by the Comite Champagne, a trade association representing the growers and houses of Champagne.
Turnover for the sector, which remains France’s second-biggest export industry after aeronautics, totaled a loss of approximately $980 million. The last time the region posted similar shipment totals was back in 2017 at 307 million bottles.

The full picture for Champagne sales this year won’t emerge until after the holidays, starting with Thanksgiving and winding up with New Year’s Eve, Pavlatos said. But, she added, that the Champagne Bureau is hearing that producers are tracking sales that are well above last year’s levels. In some places, they’re ahead of the pre-pandemic pace, she said.
“So we may actually be seeing not only a return to normal but even better performance than we had in 2019,” Pavlatos said.
In 2019, Champagne houses shipped 297.6 million bottles globally, with the lion’s share destined for the United States and valued at more than $753 million.

Bottles of Champagne Rene Geoffrey’s Rosé de Saignée Premier Cru Brut champagne ages in the cellars of the family-owned boutique winery.
David Silverman | Getty Images News | Getty Images

London-based IWSR Drinks Market Analysis is also tracking higher sales of Champagne in 2021.
“The category was down almost 18% last year after declines of 2% in 2019,” an IWSR analyst said, citing the group’s Drinks Market Analysis figures.
The group expects global Champagne volume growth of about 4% this year, as well as similar annual increases through 2025.
The U.S. Champagne market is expected to put up similar numbers.

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A Peloton Bike became a must-have of the pandemic as people looked for ways to stay fit while staying at home.
But that increased demand coupled with the onset of the global supply chain crisis put extra pressure on the company to get its connected fitness products to customer homes.
Peloton has spent nearly $1 billion to improve its production and supply chain this year, including a plan to build its first U.S-based factory.

The extended disruptions to the global supply chain have created shortages in everything from groceries to home furnishings to toys. Peloton’s bikes and treadmills are no different.
While White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently joked in a press briefing about the “tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed,” supply chain snags on top of the massive uptick in demand during the pandemic have been a major issue for Peloton.

“It was certainly a problem over the last 18 months,” Peloton co-founder and chief product officer Tom Cortese said about the supply chain during the CNBC Disruptor 50 Summit on Thursday. “We pulled all the levers that we can pull.”

Struggling to meet demand for Peloton Bikes

A Peloton Bike became one of the hottest commodities amid the pandemic as people tried to find new ways to work out at home. While that helped the company achieve 100% total revenue growth from its 2019 to 2020 fiscal years, it also created a massive backlog of orders with some customers having to wait months for their purchase — Peloton reported that it had $230 million in backlogged orders for its products in June 2020.
That was further exacerbated by the onset of the supply chain crisis. In a letter sent to customers on Feb. 4, CEO John Foley wrote that “The global increase in shipping traffic has added significant delays to all sorts of goods coming into US ports, including Peloton products. These unpredictable delays have resulted in painful delivery reschedules for many people as Peloton Bikes, Treads, and accessories have been held at Port for upwards of five times longer than usual.”

Cari Gundee rides her Peloton exercise bike at her home on April 06, 2020 in San Anselmo, California.
Ezra Shaw | Getty Images

While Foley said that the company increased its manufacturing supply “more than 6x in the last 12 months,” there were still delays as Peloton could not get their products to customers. That led the company to invest over $100 million in air freight and expedited ocean freight to try to improve order-to-delivery windows, an investment that it said would “dampen our near-term profitability.”
“It was reported at some point, you know, we were putting bikes and treads on planes in order to be able to get them here,” Cortese said of the company’s wide-ranging efforts.

Investing in new U.S.-based facilities

Peloton has tried to address that issue over the last year through a more targeted approach in North America.
In December 2020, it acquired exercise equipment manufacturer Precor for $420 million, which included Precor’s two U.S.-based factories. In May, Peloton announced a plan to build a $400 million factory in Ohio, the company’s first U.S.-based factory. Previously, the company has had its products manufactured in Taiwan.
“We have a very robust supply chain that we’ve been building over the last number of years. We have a big investment in Taiwan and our partners and in our facilities, and we have great relationships with carriers,” Cortese said. “And through both our investment in the state of Ohio and our new partners … we’ve been building out our North America production and supply chain capabilities.”
Cortese said that Peloton has been “attacking this across every aspect of the supply chain with everything we’ve got,” giving the company a more positive outlook at what’s potentially ahead as supply chain woes don’t seem to be fading away.
“We feel very comfortable about being able to chase this opportunity as the globe sort of settles out of this chip shortage and ocean shortage that we’re seeing right now,” he said. More

Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed two test firings of the engines on its Starship 20 prototype on Thursday.
In a series of tweets, Musk explained that SpaceX continues to work on improving its Raptor engines.
The company is preparing for the rocket’s first orbital launch while the Federal Aviation Administration reviews its license request.
Musk on Friday said that Starship 20 will be “will be ready for its first orbital launch attempt” in November, “pending regulatory approval.”

A view from the launch tower as SpaceX stacks Starship prototype 20 on top of Super Heavy rocket Booster 4 on August 6, 2021.
@elonmusk on Twitter

Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed two test firings of the engines on its Starship 20 prototype on Thursday, as the company prepares for the rocket’s first orbital launch while the Federal Aviation Administration reviews its license request.
SpaceX installed a Raptor vacuum engine – essentially a version of the engine that is optimized for use in space – and fired it up for the first time while connected to a Starship rocket. The rocket at the company’s facility in southern Texas was held down during the test in a process known as a static fire. The engine fired for just a few seconds.

Later the same evening, SpaceX performed a second short static fire test. This time it used two engines: a standard or “sea level optimized” Raptor engine, and the vacuum engine.
Musk, in a series of tweets, explained that SpaceX continues to work on improving its Raptor engines. He said that Raptor is “currently at ~270 bar, but working on upgrades to get it over 300 bar.” Musk referenced the amount of chamber pressure within the engine, which effectively measures its performance.
Starship is the massive, next-generation rocket SpaceX is developing to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. The company is testing prototypes at a facility in southern Texas and has flown multiple short test flights.
Musk, in another tweet on Friday, said that Starship 20 will be “will be ready for its first orbital launch attempt” in November, “pending regulatory approval.”
SpaceX wants Starship to be fully reusable, with both the rocket and its booster capable of landing after a launch to be recovered for future flights. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets are partially reusable. The company can regularly land and re-launch the boosters but not the upper portion, or stage, of the rocket.

Earlier this week, Musk emphasized that “full & rapid reusability is the holy grail of orbital rocketry.” He was responding to a report that small rocket builder Rocket Lab is making advancements in recovering and reusing its Electron vehicles.

Ongoing FAA environmental review

SpaceX rolls out Super Heavy Booster 4 in preparation for the company’s first orbital Starship launch.

SpaceX’s next major step in testing Starship is launching to orbit. First, the company needs a launch license from the FAA for the mission.
The FAA is performing an environmental assessment of SpaceX’s facilities and operations in Boca Chica, Texas. Earlier this week, it held two public virtual hearings for members of the public to give feedback on the process. SpaceX has rapidly expanded its facility, which it calls Starbase, since development work on Starship began in earnest in early 2019.
The public hearings featured a wide dichotomy of testimonies, with 120 speakers in total. Commenters included those expressing whole-hearted support of Musk and the Starship project, with many calling in from out of state. Criticism came from representatives of local environmental groups.
Less than half of the commenters stated that they lived locally near SpaceX’s facilities. The final comment of the first hearing came from Brownsville city commissioner Jessica Tetreau, who said she has been working with SpaceX for the last 10 years and noted the company employs more than 2,000 people in the region.
“I don’t just ask you, I beg you to give them that permit. There are so many people here in the Brownsville area who have benefited from this project coming to our area,” Tetreau said.
The FAA is at step four of eight in its review.
It will evaluate public comments on its draft assessment, incorporate the feedback into its assessment and publish the final assessment. The FAA will then decide whether to issue a “finding of no significant impact” (FONSI) or give notice that it will begin a more in-depth review, known as an environmental impact statement (EIS). The latter would put any further Starship launches on hold until the review is complete.
SpaceX’s Starship proposal to the FAA includes up to 20 suborbital launches per year and up to 5 orbital launches per year.

Morgan Stanley, after CNBC reported SpaceX has reached a $100 billion valuation, found in a survey of institutional investors and industry experts that Musk’s space company is expected to become even more valuable than Tesla. Musk’s automaker currently commands a market value more than eight times higher than SpaceX’s valuation.
“Investors are beginning to appreciate the potentially wide-ranging use-cases for SpaceX’s reusable launch architecture across communications, transportation, earth observation and other space-related domains,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note on Tuesday.

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Amazon chief health officer Vin Gupta says the biggest health challenge for public and work spaces this century will be ventilation and air quality.
This is not because of Covid alone, but the current pandemic should reinforce and elevate what existing public health research has shown: air quality at work is directly correlated to brain function and productivity.
Air quality researchers estimate we spend 90% of our lives, or 72 years of an 80-year life, indoors.

The U.S. is by no means out of the woods when it comes to the pandemic. While booster shots are being approved and the number of deaths may be plateauing, thousands of Americans are still dying each week and we are entering an uncertain cold and flu season with health systems already overwhelmed by Covid cases. New virus strains are also being monitored. But Vin Gupta, who is a health data and respiratory disease professor at the University of Washington and chief health officer for Amazon, says that over the course of the next four to five months, the nation should emerge from Covid feeling safer, and by March or April “renormalizing” what workplaces look like.
If workplaces are to be safer, though, and healthier and more productive, one big change needs to be made. Improvements to air filtration and ventilation systems were needed well before Covid, and Gupta says air quality will be the biggest challenge for public and workspaces of this century.

“Go back 100 years. The big issue that was killing people were communicable diseases passed fecal to oral,” Gupta said at the recent CNBC @Work Summit. The lack of good sanitation led to a rethinking in how society sanitized, and the development of sewer systems.
“100 years later, it is how do we ventilate public space and workplaces,” he said. “The big challenge of our time is how do we ventilate.”

Decades of research shows improving ventilation systems in work spaces improves brain function, but investment has lagged.
sturti | E+ | Getty Images

Gupta stressed that while Covid may be a catalyst for buildings to adopt better air quality systems, the research supporting investment in ventilation pre-dates Covid and shows that cognitive function and worker productivity get a boost with better air.
The research conducted by scientists at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health has shown across multiple studies that better-ventilated workspaces generate a return on investment.
“That’s just creating a better, healthier environment,” Gupta said. “These are the types of innovations that are cost-effective.”

The latest research on the impacts of air quality on cognitive function, the third study in a series, just came out last month. It concluded that, on average, cognitive scores were between 61% and 101% higher in green building designs than in conventional buildings, findings that the authors wrote have “wide-ranging implications” because the study was designed to mimic many typical daily indoor environments.
Before the pandemic, the science linking air quality to worker productivity wasn’t getting through to the decision makers in the world of building design and office management. The researchers noted in their work that three decades of supporting data has not led to an approach when it comes to building ventilation standards based on anything beyond “acceptable minimums.”
Adoption of enhanced ventilation strategies is lagging, and one of the primary authors of the ongoing research, Joseph Allen, who is an associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of its university’s Healthy Buildings program, has been calling for greater awareness and investment in air quality. In a piece for The Atlantic last week, Allen wrote the time has come to treat air quality as a must-have work benefit rather than trendy perks of the recent office era like gyms and coffee bars.
“Before the coronavirus pandemic, the interior designers and HR professionals who decide how offices look paid little attention to ventilation — an invisible variable that determines whether people can think well at their desk and whether coughs, colds, and other respiratory ills will circulate within a company,” Allen wrote.
One stat Allen likes to cite: People spend 90% of their lives indoors, or in an 80-year life, 72 years in spaces that probably haven’t taken care to design ventilation for optimal well-being.
Gupta said at the CNBC event that HVAC system improvements are not only cost-effective when measured by long-term productivity gains, but are good for workforce retention, a significant issue amid a tight labor market and health and safety concerns among many Americans about returning to physical workplaces.
Amazon has many health issues among its workforce and health-care solutions it is working on, from putting its new Amazon Care services in reach of its entire workforce, expanding those services as a nationwide business, to pharmacy services and solving chronic issues among workers in its warehouses, where it has been rolling out a slew of new wellness initiatives aimed at reducing physical injuries among manual laborers. Working conditions within Amazon warehouses are a major issue that has led to labor strife and union organizing drives.
Amazon and its large-tech peers may be in a better financial position to spend on health-care solutions than small- and medium-sized firms, but Gupta said employer spending on health — not only air quality but access to health-care services, including telehealth and virtual mental health services which he said will be a “raging” trend in the next decade — should not be viewed by the finance department as a cost, Gupta said, but as a cost-effective investment in the workforce.
He also said investment by companies in workplace health should include elevating medical strategy to a C-suite position. Gupta, who has been chief health officer at Amazon for 20 months, said, “If you don’t have a chief health officer or someone fulfilling this role for your organization, you should recruit one.” More