COVID-19 rates are surging nationally, but the country is unlikely to revel in the kind of widespread infections and hospitalizations seen over the past three summers, Mavens said.
The summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022 saw a backlog of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. This summer, recovery comes later and is much weaker, knowledge about hospitalization and wastewater suggests.
Furthermore, while COVID-19 will most likely never go away completely, vaccines, antivirals, masks and other prevention tools, as well as enhanced care for the very sick, have turned a pressing crisis into a manageable one, Mavens said.
“The existing scenario is even close to where we were,” said Bill Hanage, who co-directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Unlike last summer’s surges that were primarily due to the arrival of a new variant of COVID-19, experts say the rates lately have been due to human behavior.
“This is the first time I’ve noticed a buildup that’s not particularly similar to a new variant of concern,” said Jodie Guest, professor and senior vice chair of the epidemiology branch at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.
Summer and recent heat waves and severe storms that have brought other people indoors have likely contributed to increased transmission.
Americans are also getting tested less often, meaning they’re more likely to unknowingly bring the virus before attending meetings or traveling, Guest said.
And behaviors treated with caution a year or two ago, such as dining indoors in restaurants, are back to normal, said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist and clinical instructor at Columbia University in New York.
Griffin, who treats hospitalized patients at Optum, said he has noticed an increase of about 20 to 30 percent in the number of COVID-19 patients in recent weeks. “It’s back on the radar,” he said, “and other people keep asking what’s going on. “
But unlike previous years, Griffin said, virtually all of his current patients are over 65 or immunocompromised. “The common denominator is that they received no remedy in that first week,” he said. Manage an infection smoothly and did not prescribe the antiviral Paxlovid, which will have to be administered at the beginning of an infection. “Right now, there’s not much we can do. “
Severely immunocompromised people and the elderly vulnerable to all respiratory infections will continue to bear the brunt of COVID-19, Hanage said.
“Is there preventable suffering and death? The answer to this is ‘Yes’. We have to stay focused on that,” he said.
Infection rates have risen again in several states, New York, Florida, California and Massachusetts, according to state and surveillance data.
But it’s difficult to get a transparent picture of current COVID-19 transmission, as fitness officials dismantled surveillance systems after the disease was no longer a public fitness emergency.
Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s knowledge is outdated for several weeks and no longer tracks infections. Most Americans get tested at home and don’t report results.
The CDC’s most recent data, from July 22, shows a 12% increase in hospitalizations from a week beyond and nearly one-third of wastewater testing sites showed a sharp increase in virus levels in recent months. beyond two weeks.
Helix, a genomics and viral tracing company, has noticed a 30% to 40% increase in positive control effects every two weeks since last June, about double last month’s rate, said Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics. infectious diseases.
“We’re still seeing an upward trend and we haven’t noticed a spike yet,” he said.
Helix is partnering with the CDC, retail pharmacies and other organizations to get more insight from the data, but Luo said it’s still to compare it to last summer’s surges.
Wastewater data, which shows the amount of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a community, has also shown increases in the virus that causes COVID-19 in recent weeks.
WastewaterSCAN, which tracks 170 processing plants in 35 states, is seeing an increase in sites serving larger populations, but a “mixed bag” from plant to plant, said Ali Boehm, the project’s principal investigator.
“It looks like the trends are starting to pile up,” said Boehm, who is also a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University. Most of the construction appears to come from larger communities in the West and South, with less construction in smaller communities and those in the Midwest and Northeast, he said.
In the past, such increases in giant cities and in virus concentrations have tended to lead to more widespread outbreaks.
“We all wonder what will happen next,” Boehm said. “There seem to be signs that we are building ourselves in the future. “
Previous waves have been largely due to the arrival of new variants or sublineages, Boehm and Luo said.
A variant called EG. 5, known informally as “Eris,” is on the rise now and accounts for 17% of all infections in the U. S. UU. al Aug. 5, according to the CDC, up from just 12% the week before. . .
Although it is rapidly emerging, many variants compete at the same time with differences in “shades of gray” and none capable of delta or “micron hit,” said Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
XBB. 1. 16 is the current maximum non-unusual variant, accounting for more than 15% of all infections. Helix found that this variant accounted for only about 5% of cases in states such as California, Maryland, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and New Jersey.
XB. 1. 5, which had been the dominant variant this spring and summer, now accounts for about 10% of cases.
There is no indication that EG. 5, which has been circulating in countries longer than the United States, is more harmful than previous variants, Pekosz said.
The spike protein, the target of vaccines and maximum antibodies, has largely not changed between the EG. 5 and XBB lines. Therefore, anyone who caught COVID-19 while circulating the XBB variants or who receives the updated vaccine this fall deserves to be well protected the winter months, he said.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a huge challenge in terms of immunity evasion” for other people with those protections, Pekosz said.
It’s to expect what the infection rate will look like in a few months, Mavens said.
While peak respiratory viruses accumulate in winter, it’s unclear to what extent those COVID-19 spikes were caused by the virus and to what extent by human habit — other people to see relatives and spend more time indoors as temperatures drop.
Although Helix found that SARS-CoV-2 is lately the most common respiratory virus (accounting for more than 94 percent of pathogens in other people over the age of 12), that wouldn’t be the case this fall and winter. Data shows that last year, other respiratory pathogens, such as influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), surpassed or matched COVID-19 cases, Luo said.
But this time, hospitals and labs receive the maximum number of respiratory pathogens and treat them accordingly, Dr. Brown said. Emily Volk, president of the College of American Pathologists and vice chair of systemic pathology and laboratories at the University of Louisville Health.
“We use a dashboard to monitor patients only for COVID-19, but also for influenza, RSV, whooping cough and other types of illness,” he said. “We have normalized COVID-19 as one of many underlying reasons for higher respiratory illness. “
Although the government no longer sends loose tests to homes, experts say there are still enough from local retailers.
And don’t throw house checks too temporarily with expired timestamps. The Food and Drug Administration has extended the expiration dates of COVID-19 house checks for months or even years. Extended expiration dates through check type and logo are available on their website.
Experts sometimes agree that other severely immunocompromised or older people (older than 65 or 70) receive booster shots, probably at least twice a year if they are frail.
For others, knowledge is less clear.
Most other people who have been vaccinated and/or inflamed multiple times are likely due to serious infections and hospitalization, Hanage and others said, as long as the virus isn’t dramatically replaced.
“That’s the question we don’t have smart answers to,” Hanage said. Younger, otherwise healthy people “probably wouldn’t get much benefit” from the boost.
Health care workers, who are especially needed during the winter flu and bloodless season, when hospitals tend to fill up, deserve to get vaccinated to provide a little more coverage against infection during that time, he said. Teachers like him or others who don’t want to miss paintings or important private events deserve to get vaccinated this fall or early winter, he said.
Even for those who don’t get the vaccine, there are many preventive measures to take, Hanage said.
Good ventilation will decrease the spread of infections indoors. Mask yourself in crowded interior spaces, add when traveling. Stay home when you feel sick. And testing before visiting other vulnerable people will reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, Hanage said.
Despite the recent increase, there’s less reason for most people to worry about COVID-19 now than they did at the start of the pandemic, Griffin and others said. died, the figure is now closer to 0. 2%, he said, and long-term hospitalization and COVID rates have also dropped dramatically.
“If you mix immunity and then load the right drug at the right time and at the right dose, your chances of having poor end results have become pretty low,” Griffin said.
Contact Karen Weintraub in kweintraub@usatoday. com and Adrianna Rodriguez in adrodriguez@usatoday. com.
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