Now the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is tracking a new "variant of concern": BA.4.6.

This week, the CDC included the BA.4 spinoff in its weekly tracking of Covid cases, with the agency's chief data officer tweeting that the new subvariant had actually been "circulating for several weeks" in the US.

The CDC designates strains as "variants of concern" if they display greater transmissibility, reduced effectiveness of treatment, increased severity or decreased neutralisation by antibodies.

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The German news agency, Katholisch.de, reported April 20 that Gänswein has been in isolation since April 11, a time period that included all of the Easter Triduum and Benedict XVI's 95th birthday.

Benedict XVI has tested negative for COVID-19, according to Gänswein, as have all other residents of the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, the retired pope's residence inside of Vatican City.

While the 65-year-old personal secretary was unable to join the pope emeritus in celebrating his 95th birthday on Holy Saturday, Pope Francis paid a visit to Benedict XVI's residence ahead of his birthday on April 13.

Gänswein has said that both he and Benedict XVI have received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Source: CNA

This troubling rise may signal that another wave of Covid-19 is rising in countries just coming out of their own omicron shadows.

Hong Kong now reports the world's highest death rate from the disease.

Hospitals are overwhelmed and the surge is fuelling a mental health crisis and leading to suicides, particularly among elderly residents.

Mainland China is also seeing major outbreaks in metropolises like Shenzhen and Shanghai, putting millions of people under lockdown and halting production in major international manufacturing centres.

These outbreaks are testing China's stomach for its zero-Covid approach to the pandemic, a costly but effective approach where entire cities grind to a halt to control outbreaks.

In South Korea, once hailed as a pandemic success story, case counts have broken a new record with daily reported infections topping 600,000.

Australia and New Zealand, which had previously held cases to enviably low levels, have also seen new spikes in recent weeks. The list goes on: Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

Setting its own agenda

There are some common factors among these outbreaks.

The biggest one is that the virus itself has changed.

The mutations in the omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, first detected in November 2021, make it the most contagious version of the virus known to date and allowed it to evade immunity — both from vaccines and from previous infections — better than other variants.

Many of the earlier omicron waves were caused by a sub-variant known as BA.1.

Another omicron sub-variant known as BA.2 is even more transmissible and is now driving a distinct spike in new cases.

However, there are also variables that make each of these outbreaks unique, namely how leaders in these regions deployed their public health strategies — testing, contact tracing, travel restrictions, vaccination — and when they relaxed them.

The good news is that most Covid-19 vaccines are just as protective against severe disease caused by BA.2 as they are against BA.1. And omicron causes a lower rate of hospitalisations and deaths among vaccinated people compared to other variants.

As the world enters the third year of the pandemic, these surges are a tough lesson about the perils of complacency.

But for countries watching from afar that may be on the cusp of another round of infections, the latest series of outbreaks abroad also offer policy lessons on the best ways to dampen Covid-19's worst effects.

How Hong Kong ended up with the world's highest death rate from Covid-19

Hong Kong, a dense city of 7.4 million people, saw daily new Covid-19 cases climb above 66,000 this month.

The per-capita death rate reached 37 per million residents and one fatality per 20 infections, very high compared to rates among developed countries.

It's a stark shift from how well Hong Kong weathered much of the pandemic, building on its experience with other coronaviruses like the 2003 SARS outbreak.

Hong Kong has also maintained strict border controls.

Visitors face a 14-day quarantine requirement with location-tracking wristbands when they are allowed to enter the city at all. City health officials also maintained a robust contact tracing system.

That cases are surging now is partly a function of the recent emergence of BA.2, but also because governments are starting to relax.

As a result, Hong Kong went long stretches during the pandemic without any cases at all and with life largely continuing as normal.

"We had a period of about six months without a community outbreak of Covid in Hong Kong in the second half of 2021, but I think it was inevitable that an outbreak would occur sooner or later," said Benjamin Cowling, chair of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong's public health school, in an email.

What's changed now is that the BA.2 sub-variant, which is driving the current wave of infections, is very, very easy to contract.

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, are prone to mutation.

The more people they infect, the more likely it is that they will change, and some of those changes can make the virus more transmissible, cause more severe illness, or better evade the immune system. (A variant is a category of a virus with a distinct grouping of mutations. But if two strains of a virus have only a handful of differences between them, they may be classified as sub-variants like BA.1 and BA.2.)

BA.2's reproductive number — how many other people each infected person goes on to infect on average — is around 10.

With stringent public health measures like social distancing, frequent testing, and quarantining, the reproductive number dropped to 2 or 3, "which is a very substantial reduction, but not enough to prevent an outbreak from occurring," Cowling said.

As long as the virus's reproductive number says above 1, it will continue to spread. But BA.2's raging transmission also means that it quickly runs out of people to infect, leading to a sharp rise and rapid decline in cases. Continue reading

The country is in lockdown to manage the delta outbreak, and all the worshippers at Sri Venkateswara, a Hindu temple in Wainuiomata, Lower Hutt, are at home.

Online, though, the bells are ringing.

A priest chants prayers on the Facebook livestream, and for a moment, the screen doesn't seem to matter: this is just another day of worship.

"When you are seeing the holy shrine via a digital channel, it's a different experience," says BMK Lakshminarayanan, the chair of the temple, who oversees the temple activities and performs ceremonies. But "it can still feel like you're there".

I do not share his faith, but as I watch the video, I can nearly smell the ghee and incense, familiar to me from a childhood visiting temples in India.

A click away, though, is the rest of my Facebook feed: promoted MasterClasses, people making bread, and American Chopper memes. Is there any space for the sacred among the endless scroll of the mundane?

It's not just Hinduism.

More than half of New Zealanders say they are religious, and in lockdown, these millions try to replace their physical communities of faith with online equivalents. Around Aotearoa, faith leaders are learning to use laptops, not altars;

WhatsApp, not home visits.

Circumstances of necessity like the pandemic encourage technological uptake, but what challenges does online worship pose? And will it last?

Online worship requires faith leaders to work on a practical level: microphones, links, cameras.

Often, the results are unsatisfactory.

"Some churches are better at it than others, but unless they were good at it already, digital churches will have low production values," says Michael Toy, a PhD student studying digital religious expressions at Victoria University of Wellington.

This is particularly true of Zoom services.

Even within the uses, it was designed for - business meetings where one person speaks at a time - it can easily glitch.

The problems multiply when elements of worship, such as singing, praying out loud, and sharing different screens are added: people freeze in the middle of songs, the wrong person gets pinned to the main screen, and there's an explosion of noise as people try to greet each other.

Dave Moskowitz is a shamash at Temple Sinai, a progressive Jewish congregation in Wellington.

In-person, a shamash (the Hebrew word for a synagogue attendant) will open the temple, arrange chairs, and organise music. When the congregation meets on Zoom, he becomes an "e-shamash", organising a link to the meeting, and welcoming people as they arrive on screen.

The platform can be limiting. "Our members are older and not as technically literate," Moskowitz says.

"Some have trouble operating Zoom, or staying muted."

Technical knowledge is essential for online services at the Wellington Anglican Diocese, where assistant bishop Ellie Sanderson preaches on YouTube each week; off-screen, someone with a soundboard and lots of monitors can flick between her, musicians, and people giving announcements.

"We are really thankful that we had people with the technical know-how to create digital services for us," she says.

The practical facilitation of online worship has positive sides.

Digital services can be vital for people who cannot come to physical services - those who live far from their places of worship, and those who are ill or have disabilities.

"Would-be worshippers can't always be present in person, for varied reasons, and there is greater recognition of the ways technology can helpfully connect people in these circumstances," says Geoff Troughton, assistant professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, who studies contemporary religion in Aotearoa.

"This will drive ongoing innovations."

Sanderson, the Anglican bishop, knows this first hand: last year, after surgery on her neck, she couldn't leave the house for weeks. But she still had Zoom church.

"My vehicle for worship was the online service," she says, "and I really felt that God broke my heart in fresh ways, encouraged me, spoke to my grief."

Online prayer and teachings has also meant faith communities can expand their reach, including people who would never come to in-person gatherings on their own.

"It might help for people who are new to our religion," says Tahir Nawaz, a Muslim chaplain involved with mosques across Wellington.

"They used to hesitate to come and ask questions… but now there's an entry to online [interactions]. It definitely will help bring us together."

Despite the tedium of muting microphones or the hilarious irreverence of accidental Zoom filters, those with a faith find that digital worlds can be a place of genuine spiritual encounter.

Attesting to this is Elisa Choi, who organises "Rally" meetings with the Rice movement, an evangelical organisation focused on young Asians.

She was praying with a friend before a Rally gathering, with people across Aotearoa linked via Zoom.

A pastor started praying for someone with a bad ankle, asking God for healing.

The prayer ended, and Choi's friend jumped up; the pain in her ankle, which had been sprained for weeks, was gone, says Choi.

According to Choi, it's not a one-off.

"There's so many more stories and testimonies of people who have mental health prayed over [online], finding healing and release."

That online prayer can be answered is encouraging, because creating digital space that is both sacred and communal is a difficult task.

For a start, there's the well-documented phenomenon of screen fatigue, meaning online faith content can simply be tiring.

Many religious groups choose not to offer anything at all and encourage their communities to spend time in individual prayer and worship instead.

Digital services may be poorly attended.

There's also the problem of focus.

"What digital life does well is distract us," says Toy, the PhD student in Wellington.

"In a physical space with no screens around it's easier to direct your attention to God or the sacred. If your phone is on the table, part of your brain is having to work to ignore it."

I'm interviewing Toy in a sterile study room at the university, my laptop on the table and my phone recording. I try to disregard the devices, and pay even more attention.

There are also potential ethical snags: in choosing to use giant digital platforms to offer worship, religious leaders expose their congregants to the extractive practices of offshore corporations.

Google and Facebook are international companies that offer social functionality as a way to gather data to sell to advertisers; partaking in a worship service using their platforms creates privacy implications that aren't at issue when attending a local place of worship.

On these websites, the intimacy of religious expression is subject to the same profiteering as tagging a friend in a giveaway or liking a video.

But more fundamentally, online worship raises thorny theological questions about what makes rituals real and meaningful.

"Slick performances and high production values only carry so far, and it is hard to reproduce the communal feel and emotional energy of ‘main show' event religion online," says Troughton, the religious studies professor.

"Rituals are about affect, emotion, and experience as much as they are about ideas. Most are embedded in community and community relationships, and simply don't translate in a satisfying way online." Continue reading