With new COVID vaccines coming soon, review data and data on the summer surge
We are facing a summer COVID wave and will have updated vaccinations soon. Here’s a quick update on what you want to know.
By Meghan Bartels
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COVID has haunted humans for four and a half years, and experts agree there are no signs of it going away. So although we would all like to, we will have to remain vigilant to protect our health. Here you will find a brief overview of the latest information on COVID rates, treatments and upcoming vaccines.
The exact number of cases is no longer tracked, but existing signs show that COVID infections in the United States are widespread. In the week ending Aug. 10, about one in five COVID tests reported to fitness departments was positive, and one in 40 people who visited the emergency room was diagnosed with COVID, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 2% of all deaths reported that week were caused by the disease.
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Wastewater testing is one of our equipment to perceive what is happening with COVID right now. These surveys measure viral RNA released into network sewer systems, a reporting metric that is not biased by adjustments to testing practices.
And the latest data shows that the concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID in those samples are “quite high; in fact, they are, right now, the highest we’ve noticed for a summer surge in recent years. ” “. “” says Marlene Wolfe, an environmental microbiologist at Emory University. That said, the existing degrees are still lower than the concentrations observed after the winter peaks.
Viral concentrations show some variability between communities, though lately the degrees are at their highest across the country, says Wolfe, who is also program director for WastewaterSCAN, a nonprofit that tests wastewater samples from “approximately 150 sites across the country to detect a diversity of infectious diseases for their inhabitants. “predominance. (The CDC also runs a wastewater tracking network, which also detects very high degrees of COVID across the country. )
However, data over the past three weeks shows relatively strong concentrations after stable summer hikes, leading Wolfe to expect that rates can start to fall soon, although that doesn’t mean we’re clear. “When we start to see this slowdown, those concentrations are still very high, which means a lot of other people are inflamed and in poor health right now,” Wolfe says.
New long-term studies are also helping us to improve all the ramifications of the pandemic over time.
According to provisional data recently released through the CDC, COVID deaths dropped dramatically between 2022 and 2023 — the disease fell to the tenth leading cause of death last year, up from fourth.
Despite this improvement, a new study published this month shows the high cost of long COVID around the world. The report estimates that about 400 million more people were diagnosed with the condition between 2020 and 2023 and that it cost, by a conservative estimate, about $1 trillion a year. “These numbers are huge,” says Ziyad al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Washington in St. Louis. St. Louis and study leader of the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Louis, co-author of the new paper. It’s a bleak picture. “
Some other people who get long-term COVID make a full recovery, but they are far from the majority. Many are still struggling a year after infection, al-Aly notes. And studies on the disease have become more complex over the past two years, adding that through the National Institutes of Health’s COVID Research to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative, they are still lagging behind, she says.
The same prevention tactics are still available and effective: vaccines can decrease the risk of severe infection. And wearing a mask can help you avoid contracting the virus or spreading it to those around you if you’re contagious.
Infectious disease experts say waning immunity caused by vaccination or past infection can make other people vulnerable to contracting COVID. But fortunately, updated vaccines will soon arrive that will offer coverage against the newer variants of SARS-CoV-2. Pfizer and Moderna will launch new mRNA vaccines adapted to the KP. 2 variant that have been in circulation lately. Meanwhile, Novavax is generating a classic protein-based vaccine tailored to another variant called JN. 1. Both variants are offshoots of the Omicron variant. As of August 20, KP. 2 and some other variant called KP. 3 are lately the most dominant bureaucracy in the United States. These variants are all very similar and the vaccines give them equally strong immunity.
The CDC recommends updated COVID vaccines for anyone over six months old. The Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on August 22 and is expected to do the same for the Novavax vaccine soon. Representatives from Pfizer and Moderna said their vaccines deserve to be available in a few days. As preventative care, the new vaccines deserve to be fully covered by insurance, says Archana Chatterjee, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Rosalind Franklin University. People without insurance face more obstacles because the federal government has ended a program that was unfinished to access COVID vaccines until the end of this year. Chatterjee suggests those other people look to manufacturers’ access systems to receive a free or discounted shot. Children can also access fee-free vaccines through the federal government’s Children’s Immunization Program.
As with previous versions, the new COVID vaccines are meant to lessen the threat of severe illness, the kind of infection that can hospitalize or even kill other people. While it’s too early to tell how the three vaccine brands will fare with each other, Chatterjee says he doesn’t want other people to live off the other characteristics and just get vaccinated. He also encourages others to get vaccinated early rather than waiting for the winter surge to approach. Although the immune boost of a vaccine is most powerful in the two to three months after the injection, it persists long after.
“My recommendation to others is: Get the updated vaccine as soon as it’s available,” Chatterjee says. Above all, he expects more people to receive the new vaccine than last year. Only one in ten people hospitalized with COVID in the past year had received the most recent vaccine, and as of May, only one in five U. S. adults had received a vaccine for 2023-2024, a figure Chatterjee calls “deplorable. “”This will not be this disease,” he said, adding that this year we will have to do better.
People who are most at risk for severe COVID infections will have the opportunity to get an extra shot a few months after their first dose of the new vaccine to further strengthen their immune systems. And other people with compromised immunity will also have a new option to protect themselves from COVID: Earlier this year, the FDA approved an intravenous treatment called pemivibart, which can be given every three months. The drug is a synthetic antibody intended to generate an immune reaction to COVID infection.
People who get COVID and develop severe symptoms can get treatment.
“The maximum remedy shown now remains Paxlovid, which we still offer to people at highest risk,” says Jonathan Li, a virologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The popular dosage of Paxlovid is 30 tablets of two antiviral medications. which will be taken for five days.
However, Paxlovid may interact with other medications and more COVID remedies may be found. Remdesivir, which lately has only been given as a daily injection in medical settings, remains a valuable tool, says H. Clifford Lane, an infectious disease specialist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as does molnupiravir, another multidose oral medication. which is taken for several days.
Lane says that while all of those features are clearly safe, the cases have particularly been replaced since the time they were first verified and approved. “The host population has been replaced; the virus has replaced,” Lane says. Doctors don’t have the knowledge to determine whether those drugs still make a difference in other people at lower risk of developing serious illness. “It’s just not as clear whether [they’re effective if] you’re a healthy 30-year-old with a runny nose and the result is positive,” Lane says. “I think most [clinicians] wouldn’t prescribe them in this context. “
Meghan Bartels is a New York-based science journalist. She joined Scientific American in 2023 and is now a senior reporter there. Previously, she spent more than four years as an editor and publisher at Space. com, as well as about a year as a science reporter at Newsweek, where she focused on Earth and space science. Her writings have also appeared in Audubon, Nautilus, Astronomy, and Smithsonian, among other publications. She attended Georgetown University and earned a master’s degree in journalism from New York University’s fitness, environmental and science reporting program.
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