It’s been 3 years since the novel coronavirus first appeared, and while the sense of normalcy would possibly have returned for many people, experts say the pandemic is over.
COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are still provided in the U. S. Experts are warning of the emergence of more potent variants as the virus continues to spread and mutate globally. At the same time, researchers are working on what they hope will be more effective vaccination. strategies and remedies for acute illnesses and the lingering long-term effects of long COVID.
This is something we can expect to see this year.
The number of COVID-19 cases reported in the U. S. The U. S. economy has so far remained solid this winter compared to previous years, however, cases are expected to rise due to recent indoor holiday gatherings. People get tested right away at home, Dr. Brown said. Susan Hassig, professor of epidemiology at Tulane University, whose study spaces come with infectious disease outbreaks.
“It’s probably 10 or 15 times higher at least what we’re measuring now,” he said of existing national counts, which are counted from tests done through hospitals and other physical care providers. “Rapid testing is reported, so you don’t have a smart concept of the actual point of infection that exists in the United States. “
There are also considerations that COVID-19 hospitalizations will increase dramatically as fewer people have gained the updated bivalent vaccine booster, which is specifically designed to protect against COVID-19 caused by the omicron variant and the original strain of the virus.
In early January, omicron offspring made up the majority of cases in the U. S. According to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 15 percent of the U. S. population is in the U. S. population. The U. S. Department of Health has received an updated booster shot.
One of the new dominant maximum descendants, XBB. 1. 5, was last week called the “maximum transmissible variant” by the World Health Organization. studies and existing hospitalization rates, WHO senior epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove told a news conference.
Update on the Omicron XBB. 1. 5 subvariant via @WHO’s @mvankerkhove #XBB15 pic. twitter. com/cflH0tpitH
“Omicron is highly transmissible and fewer people consume it. That doesn’t bode well,” said Dr. Thomas A. LaVeist, dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, on existing vaccination rates for COVID-19. bivalent thrusters. ” I think we’re probably heading for headwinds because we’ve let our guard down. “
“We in America want COVID not to end,” Hassig said. “We’re still wasting the equivalent of a plane of other people falling from the sky every day because of COVID. “
According to CDC data, an average of another 385 people died from the virus last month.
Last fall, White House officials reported that COVID-19 vaccines could only be annual for most people, like flu shots.
That would feature a “radically different variant” that didn’t emerge and disappointed in the effectiveness of existing vaccines, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a leading White House medical adviser. a year, he added.
A single combined COVID-19 and flu vaccine is also in the works, and Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Novavax launched trials last year. Moderna said it hopes to market its exclusive vaccine, which would also come with a vaccine opposed to syncytial breathing. virus, or RSV, until fall 2023.
Hassig said he expects “booster” shots to be replaced with an annual shot, just because it might be a less difficult call for the public.
“I would rather increase the likelihood that they get it annually,” he said. families annually. “
It is unlikely that one day annual vaccines will no longer be necessary for COVID-19, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s partly due to the temporary way RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and the flu mutation, which can lead to vaccine resistance, Hassig said.
“This virus mutates when it passes from one user to another,” he said. “That’s the challenge with those organisms, which have a mechanical way of replicating and if we don’t behave in a way that makes them less effective, they’re just going to keep doing what they’re doing. Interruption of transmission is valuable.
While annual vaccines will disappear soon, many researchers expect needles to disappear as well.
COVID-19 vaccine nasal sprays are still in development, and researchers tout them as potentially better at preventing coronavirus infection than intramuscular injections, as the virus spreads respiratory droplets that enter airlines where the spray is administered.
“Administering vaccines into the nose and airways is one of the most promising tactics for gaining immunity in the airways, which could prevent mild COVID infections and transmission of the virus better than injected vaccines,” said Dr. Adam Ritchie, of the University of Oxford’s lead vaccination program. He said in a recent press release about his university’s collaboration with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca on a nasal spray. “It also has the merit of avoiding the use of a needle. Many parents know that nasal sprays are already being used for the flu vaccine that is presented to schoolchildren in some countries, adding the United Kingdom.
Recent studies have shown that much more remains to be done for its success. Although similar COVID-19 nasal vaccines have been developed and approved for foreign use in places like China, India, and Russia, there has been little information about their effectiveness. , according to the weekly clinical journal Nature.
A recent COVID-19 outbreak in China hit hospitals and prompted restrictions abroad, as the government feared the government would fail to report cases and deaths from the virus.
A high rate of transmission creates new dangers not only for other people in China, but also for the world’s population because of the likelihood of a more potent variant of COVID-19 emerging “that will be transmitted around the world, as those viruses will, and come for us as well,” Hassig said.
“China is really scary, frankly, not only because of the effect it has on them, but because of the likelihood that there are many, many, many infections, and this virus mutates as it moves from one user to another,” he said. “There’s no way to wait for what the variant will look like. “
LaVeist expressed concern.
“My biggest fear remains that we’ll get a variant that has the transmissibility of the omicron combined with the lethality of the delta,” LaVeist said, referring to existing variants and beyond the dominant ones. “Along with that, it would be the Frankenstein edition of the virus, and this variant would be very problematic, especially if the new multivariate recall was not effective against it. There would be a time when we would have to catch up.
China reopened its borders to the outside world on Sunday, allowing its citizens to travel abroad for the first time since the pandemic began without extensive restrictions under its strict “zero COVID” policy. testing in China’s ers, prompting a backlash from the Chinese government, which called the requirement exaggerated and unacceptable.
LaVeist believes public attention would eventually have to shift to coronavirus prevention and instead COVID-19 remedy features if vaccine rates don’t increase and public education doesn’t improve. This “healing style of attention,” as he puts it, would concentrate on remedies like prescription or over-the-counter drugs.
“That’s how we take care of the flu. People get the flu and then go to the supermarket or the pharmacy, buy over-the-counter medications to control the symptoms,” he said. “Well, with COVID, we’re moving to therapies that are more effective than over-the-counter remedies that treat symptoms. “
Of course, it’s more expensive to treat or recover from an illness than to avoid infection, and other people will die as they do from the flu, he said.
“It’s not ideal,” he said, LaVeist. No I think many fitness professionals think that would be the most productive way to do it. But I think that’s the kind of where we’re headed.
The Food and Drug Administration approved two antivirals, Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir, to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 at home. There are also emergency remedies for hospitalized patients.
“If we can get them to the point where they’re seamlessly accessible, I think maybe that’s how we want to deal with COVID in the future,” he said.
Federal fitness officials continue to show up clad in masks indoors and in populated areas, especially if you are unvaccinated or at the highest risk of getting sick, or if you are in a network reporting the highest levels of viral transmission. You can get a list of those places. discovered on the CDC website.
Those who suspect they have COVID-19 or who have a proven case should still stay home, wear a mask around others, and isolate for at least five days.
“Wherever there are crowds, and by that I mean a dense urban population or an overcrowded social environment, there is the option of transmission of a respiratory virus,” Hassig said. “I’m still nowhere to be found in a public position without a mask and would inspire other people to do the same. “
LaVeist also pleaded with other people not to let their guard down, even if others around him did.
“I think even well-informed people, who have a very complicated understanding of this, can be complacent. It happened to me,” he said of his own COVID-19 diagnosis last year after traveling on a plane without a mask.
Wearing a mask is only useful to prevent transmission of the coronavirus, but also to protect against other respiratory viruses such as influenza and RSV.
Another 13,000 people are estimated to have died from the flu so far this season, a significant drop from recent years when the death toll stood at five2,000 just five years ago. children under five, according to CDC estimates.
The CDC warned that flu vaccination policy has declined in some age teams than in other seasons and that there have been more hospitalizations due to the virus than in the past decade. Most of those hospitalizations concerned other people over age 65 and younger children. five years old.
“The flu is transmitted very well through young people, and they also suffer quite serious consequences from the flu. COVID is not having as much effect on young people, but it still has very serious consequences for some of them,” Hassig said. , who attributed mask wearing and distance learning to the significant reduction in flu cases amid the pandemic.
Many unknowns remain about the lingering effects of the coronavirus, which for some others can last for months or even years. But there are encouraging advances toward longer-term treatment.
“We have a lot more equipment now than we did 3 years ago,” said Dr. Andrew Schamess, an internal medicine physician who has treated long-term COVID patients as part of the post-COVID recovery program at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next two or three years we start to perceive this at the point where we perceive other immunological situations and could treat it with disease-specific drugs. “
While they don’t fully understand the cause of the long duration of COVID, doctors say they’ve been lucky to treat it, adding some rehabs and repurposing other medications to treat symptoms of long-lasting COVID, such as administering drugs that are used to treat brain damage. fog.
“I think other people deserve to pay more attention to [prolonged COVID] as possible end outcomes if they get infected. This is not necessarily the experience of an acute illness with this virus.
“We know that there is a kind of lethargy of certain areas of the brain, which causes brain fog and confusion, as well as difficulty and fatigue in locating words,” Schamest said. “We have rehabilitation techniques and medication to treat this. “
There are more case studies and clinical trials underway than ever before, further fueling optimism.
“We’re getting a broader idea at the fundamental clinical point of some of the physiological abnormalities of the long duration of COVID, but there’s still work to be done in this field to have a unified understanding of the causes of symptoms, probably this isn’t going to work. “be the same for everyone who has prolonged COVID,” said Dr. Benjamin Abramoff, director of the COVID Assessment and Recovery Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He added that the cure is probably far on the horizon.
Like Schamess, Abramoff said his clinic has noticed a steady flow of COVID-19 patients for a long time, with spikes holding to spikes in acute COVID-19 cases within a few months. At Wexner Medical Center, Schamess said there is a waiting list of 60 to 70 other people seeking treatment.
“There are just more calls than we can handle,” he said, expressing frustration that there are more doctors who know about the disease or take it seriously. head’ or ‘It’s not serious’, ‘Maybe it’s serious, but we don’t know what to do’. about it,” or giving them impromptu advice, which doesn’t really help them. »
Delaying care prolongs recovery, he said, raising some considerations about the long-term effects on the workforce, which Hassig likened to “a ticking time bomb. “
“I think other people deserve to pay a lot more attention to this as an end result imaginable if they’re infected. It’s not necessarily about experiencing acute illness with this virus,” he said. relatively mild COVID infection. “
That’s the explanation for why it’s enough to contract the virus, whether you have a strong immune formula or not, he said.
Abramoff said one of the most common things he sees among his most severely affected patients is difficulty returning to work for days or longer, though he said he has had success with structured, incremental plans that use hotels as if they were running from home.
Schamess also said most patients just want to rest.
“It would possibly be Victorian medicine, but that’s what other people want to hear, and other times it’s drugs and sometimes it’s more complicated things,” he said, as he implored employers to be more accommodating to their employees.
“Regardless of what doctors and scientists may do, it is vital that employers perceive how debilitating this condition is,” he said. hotels and slowly painting again and going back to therapy, you’re going through to get that painter back. “
The option is that the worker may lose their job, lose their health insurance when they want it most, and for the employer, “you’ve potentially lost a very smart worker,” he said.