COVID-19 infections are surging again across the United States after an unusual relative lull since the fall as vaccination rates remain low.
Continued infections and evolving variants highlight the importance of vaccination, tracking the rise and fall of the coronavirus, and adopting preventive measures such as masks and clean air, but these critical measures will not be available in the coming months. It is likely to become even more politicized in the coming years.
“The coronavirus pandemic is still here. It’s still dangerous,” said Jeffrey Townsend, Elihu professor of biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health.
“As this new administration takes office, everyone involved in public health and public health communications must be extremely up-to-date on the current state of the coronavirus and its countermeasures to minimize misinformation and potential lack of information,” he said. We need to communicate this clearly.”
Positive test rates, emergency room visit rates, hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 are all increasing, with wastewater monitoring showing that rates have started rising for the first time in a month. shown.
Only one in five adults (21.4%) and one in 10 children (10.3%) have had the latest Covid booster, which became available in late August.
One in three (37%) nursing home residents have received the latest COVID-19 vaccination, up from 23% at the same time last year, but they are among the most vulnerable to serious illness and death. We are still not at the level needed to protect people.
“The real worry is that older people will suffer severely from this disease, and sometimes die,” Townsend said.
But other people are also susceptible to the coronavirus, he said. Beyond illness and death, that could include the economic impact of being absent from work or school and the risk of prolonging the spread of COVID-19.
From August to September, the last time the CDC surveyed, about 5.3% of American adults reported currently having long-term coronavirus symptoms, and 17.9% had ever experienced long-term coronavirus symptoms. It was reported that there is.
“It’s very good to prevent this disease, no matter how healthy you are,” Townsend said. “It’s not just a matter of not feeling well. It’s doing something wrong with you that we can’t fully understand.”
Five years have passed since alarm bells were first sounded about a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in China that was soon discovered to be a new coronavirus.
Since then, coronavirus infections have settled into a disturbing pattern of two outbreaks each year, once in summer and once in winter.
Typically, coronavirus infections in the fall remain at a moderate level even after the summer surge, and the winter surge often reaches its peak in late December to early January.
Following the pandemic’s biggest summer wave, this fall’s pattern is unusual, with a long lull similar to spring, with a peak expected in the coming weeks.
Looking at patterns with other coronaviruses, Townsend and other researchers predict that the new coronavirus will eventually settle into a winter spike, similar to RSV, influenza and other respiratory viruses. I am doing it.
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But because the coronavirus has not yet reached steady-state epidemic status, Townsend said the virus has not yet reached this level of predictability. “It certainly seems like we’re getting close to it. It doesn’t seem like we’re there yet.”
And it’s not that unusual that the timing of winter virus surges is different, Townsend said. In recent years, RSV epidemics have started earlier than expected, with influenza peaking usually between December and March.
Although COVID-19 remains a pandemic, there are two main factors that will determine when a surge in infections will occur and how severe it will be. It’s the emergence of new variants and the level of immunity people develop against them, whether through vaccination or infection during previous spikes in cases.
“It depends on all sorts of things, including the evolution of the virus, people’s immunity, and when the last surge was. All of those things combine to make it difficult to predict exactly when a surge will occur.” Townsend said.
That’s one reason why monitoring wastewater, hospitalizations and other indicators is so important to respond quickly when a wave starts, he said.
During the first year of the pandemic, President Donald Trump repeatedly said the coronavirus would disappear on its own.
“If we stop testing now, there will be very few, if any, cases,” he said in June 2020.
It is unclear how much priority the second Trump administration will give to measures such as tracking the coronavirus and updating vaccines.
“There was so much chaos the last time this government was in power, and chaos is so unpredictable,” Townsend said. “So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
