(CNN) — As millions of Americans gather with friends and a circle of family in the coming days, there’s a smart chance covid-19 will follow.
Experts hope the Thanksgiving meetings will shake up social media and give new coronavirus subvariants a new portfolio of other vulnerable people to infect. As a result, cases and hospitalizations could pile up after the holidays, as they have for the past two years.
Covid-19 is unique in this regard. Thanksgiving gatherings also have the potential to increase the spread of other viruses, adding respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and influenza, both of which are already at their highest levels for this time of year.
“We’ve seen, in some areas, the amount of RSVs being transmitted. The amount of flu continues to rise,” Dr. Anna Stuart told CNN on Tuesday. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and PreventionU. S.
But things have been quiet on the Covid-19 front. Experts say it might not stay that way for long.
“Covid positivity is increasing,” said Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics and infectious diseases at genetic company Helix, which monitors coronavirus variants. “Increases faster in people aged 18 to 24” in the Helix sample.
This is the first time that positivity in Helix knowledge is higher since July.
When check positivity increases, it means that a higher proportion of Covid-19 checks are positive, and this would possibly imply that transmission is increasing.
“We look forward to more instances,” Luo said. If they measure the way we’re measuring instances right now, I don’t know, but I think in general, you’re seen more in people in poor health. I definitely am. “
The accumulation of cases may not be temporarily detected through official counts, as other people usually check for Covid-19 at home and fail to report its effects, if at all.
Omicron’s BQ subvariants have higher transmission to dominate in the United States. BQ. 1 and its branch BQ. 1. 1 are descendants of BA. 5; They have five and six key mutations in their spike proteins, respectively, that allow them to evade immunity created through vaccines and infections. Because of those changes, they grow faster than BA. 5.
For the week ending November 19, the CDC estimates that BQ. 1 and BQ. 1. 1 are part of all new COVID-19 cases in the United States. But so far, they have achieved dominance without much impact.
COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have remained stable for the past four weeks. But it’s not over: On average, more than 300 Americans die and another 3400 people are hospitalized for covid-19 per day, according to CDC data.
No one knows exactly what will happen to the BQ variants. Many experts say they hope we won’t see the big waves beyond winters; in fact, nothing like the original variant of Omicron, with its mind-boggling peak of nearly a million new ones. infections daily.
There are reasons to be positive on several fronts.
First, there’s the delight of other countries like the UK, where BQ. 1 has outperformed rivals to dominate transmission even as cases, hospitalisations and deaths have declined. Something happened in France and Germany, says Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease specialist. disease expert who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“Cases increased in France and Germany before subvariants arrived. Then the subvariants came in and the cases decreased,” he said.
Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. La Chan School of Public Health, believes that our habit and social contacts may be more determinative of whether cases will develop this circular than any variant that is in mind.
He thinks we’ll most likely see a backlog of cases that may peak around the current week of January, as has been the case in recent years, but that probably wouldn’t have a huge impact on hospitalizations and deaths. .
Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says it’s probably because BQ. 1’s benefits are progressive, not drastic.
“It has a little more merit about fitness, so we’re seeing slow replacement without a large replacement in the total number of covid-19 cases,” he said.
All this is not to say that BQ. 1 and BQ. 1. 1 will have no impact. They showed marked resistance to the antibodies needed to protect and treat others vulnerable to severe Covid-19 infections. From this perspective, there are smart reasons for other people to be careful if they have a weakened immune formula or if they are around someone who does.
But those subvariants will land at a time when population immunity is better than ever, thanks to vaccines and infections. This is a very different context than the virus faced when Omicron emerged a year ago, and it also helps mitigate any prolonged problems. run waves, says Pekosz.
“With a lot of other people now being reinforced and vaccinated and with other people having some immunity to an Omison infection, it’s also a very, very different kind of demographic landscape for a variant to emerge,” he said. “All the symptoms are, I think, the most productive component of the situation in terms of not seeing those big increases in cases. “
If there is an explanation of why to care about BQ in the US, there is an explanation for BQ. In the U. S. , it may be just this: Americans are just as well vaccinated or beefed up as other countries. CDC knowledge shows that two-thirds of the population has finished the number one series of Covid-19 vaccines, and only 11% of those who meet the requirements have obtained an updated bivalent booster. In the UK, 89% of the population over the age of 12 have completed series one and 70% have received a boost.
New indicates that a country’s vaccination rate is more important than anything else when it comes to the effects of variants on a population.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Labs recently finished a study exploring what drove the effects of thirteen dominant coronavirus variants as they moved from one to another in two thirteen countries. The study includes data up to the end of September and was published as a preprint earlier. Peer review.
Of the 14 variables that influenced the speed and height of new waves of covid-19, the population’s vaccination rate is by far the largest.
The number of previous instances in a country, the percentage of other people who wore masks, average income, and percentage of the population over 65 ranked second, third, fourth, and fifth respectively.
The number of other variants in the combination when a new one appears is also an important factor, says lead researcher Bette Korber, a laboratory researcher in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos.
It highlights the Alpha variant, B. 1. 1. 7, and how it drove in the UK to the US.
“When it passed through England, it was incredibly fast, but much slower in the Americas,” Korber said.
When Alpha arrived in the U. S. , we were developing our own California and New York variants “that were very unique and had competitive merit over what they faced in England,” Korber said, slowing their progress here.
The CDC tracks a soup of more than a dozen Omicron subvariants that cause cases in the U. S. This variety could end up helping to mitigate waves during the winter.
But Korber doesn’t make predictions. She says it’s too difficult to know what’s going to happen, pointing to Asia as the source of her uncertainty.
Asian countries have faced waves driven by recombinant XBB, a subvariant that hasn’t had much of a presence in the U. S. U. S. The BQ variants arrived later, but she says they look impressive compared to XBB, which is also very immune.
“BQ is actually taking a stand there,” Korber said. “So I think it’s still not imaginable to be sure” of what might happen in the United States.
“For me, it’s a smart time, when possible, to wear masks,” she said. It covers the user and those around them. ” And get the reminder if you’re eligible and it’s the right time for you, “especially when we gather around the table for dinner with our friends and family.
“Now is the time to be a little more cautious to avoid this wave that we don’t need to happen, or at least make it a smaller bump,” Korber said.
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