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Maybe it’s time to dust off your mask and air purifiers.
The United States is in the midst of a significant wave of COVID-19, with degrees of viral activity in wastewater recorded since July 2022, according to the Wastewater Panel of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC’s measure of national COVID viral activity in wastewater increased to 8. 82 on Aug. 10, down from the July 2022, peak of 9. 56. The CDC says that most recent knowledge is incomplete and may change. Before starting to retreat in May, it stood at 1. 36.
“Currently, the level of COVID-19 wastewater viral activity is very high nationally, with degrees in the western region of the United States,” said Dr. Jonathan Yoder, deputy director of the wastewater monitoring program. from the CDC, in an email. “This year’s COVID-19 wave is earlier than last year’s wave, which occurred in late August or early September. “
Emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are also rising, but not to the same extent as infections, according to the CDC’s COVID dashboard. As of late July, the CDC panel shows that about four more people are hospitalized with COVID, along with another 100,000 people. in a given area, to a low in May of about one COVID hospitalization compared to another 100,000 people, the lowest point since the pandemic began.
CDC’s knowledge of wastewater also largely matches what they see in the national WastewaterSCAN network.
“This is a very significant increase. The degrees are very high. They’re the ones we’ve ever noticed in a summer surge,” said Dr. Kelly. Marlene Wolfe, assistant professor of environmental fitness and public fitness at Emory University and a researcher. Director of the WastewaterSCAN program. ” Lately we are detecting SARS-CoV-2 in one hundred percent of our samples throughout the country. “
WastewaterSCAN also began tracking in early 2022 and the number of sites it monitors has changed over time.
“Despite those changes, it is notable that existing WastewaterSCAN grades are much higher than last summer’s peaks and yet are still below average concentrations at the peak of the 2023, 2022 winter peaks. and 2021,” said Dr. Alexandria Boehm, professor. in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and director of the WastewaterSCAN program.
Health officials are no longer following the coronavirus as closely as they did with the public fitness emergency, and there are no longer reliable estimates of new daily or weekly infections in the United States. Instead, the country relies heavily on wastewater levels to track the number of new cases.
Wolfe says the amount of virus in wastewater isn’t exactly correlated with the number of infections. This is because a multitude of points can influence the amount of virus provided in the wastewater, also adding up the amount of water flowing into the wastewater formula sample. such as the amount of virus that other people can eliminate with a given variant. Despite those variables, he says sampling over time has shown that there is a strong relationship between the number of infected people in a given domain and the amount of virus in the local. sewage.
“We can’t say precisely how many more cases there might be compared to previous years, because some of those adjustments would have possibly occurred in the virus in the spaces that we’re measuring,” he said.
The accumulation of cases is due to waning immunity in the population and a trio of new variants that have moved far enough away from their original virus, JN. 1, to escape our antibodies’ ability to neutralize them quickly.
Cases are also emerging as young people return to study halls in many parts of the United States, giving the infection plenty of opportunity to spread.
It is unclear when this increase will peak and begin to decline.
“Here in Houston, Texas, the amount of wastewater is still high and decreasing. They’ve been stuck at a peak for several weeks,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease expert and director of the Center for Vaccine Development in Texas. Children’s Hospital.
The rise in cases also preceded the availability of an updated COVID-19 vaccine, designed to provide greater protection against new variants, which could help slow the spread of the virus.
“It’s a little disappointing that those products aren’t available now, as COVID surges,” Hotez said.
The U. S. Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the latest changes to COVID-19 vaccines, but experts say they have heard that updated vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax will be available in the coming weeks.
In June, the FDA, following its overall process of reevaluating the need to replace COVID vaccines, asked brands to update their vaccines for the fall to better accommodate variants that made others sick.
“We keep hearing rumors that he’ll be here until the end of September, so we have to wait too long,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
What other people can do, at their own risk, is get vaccinated when it’s available, Hotez said.
“Then, of course, there’s an N95 or KN95 smart mask for when you’re in crowded indoor areas,” Hotez said, and look for the antiviral drug Paxlovid if the result is positive. That’s why it’s also a good idea to take inventory of COVID-19 checks to find out if the coronavirus causes a cough or runny nose.
This story has been updated with the latest wastewater surveillance data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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