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Covid surges across US after holidays amid low booster uptake
Test positivity, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are increasing as expert warns: ‘It’s still dangerous’
www.theguardian.com
Covid is once again surging across the US after an unusual relative lull over the fall, as rates of booster vaccinations remain stubbornly low.
Continuing infections and the evolution of variants underscore the importance of vaccinating, tracking the ebbs and flows of Covid, and employing preventive measures like face masks and clean air – important tools that could undergo greater politicization in coming months and years.
“The Covid pandemic is still ongoing. It’s still dangerous,” said Jeffrey Townsend, Elihu Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health.
“As this new administration comes about, everyone in public health and in public health communication has to be just exceedingly clear” about the state of Covid and measures to combat it in order to minimize misinformation and the potential lack of information, he said.
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Test positivity, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths from Covid are all increasing, and wastewater monitoring indicates the rates first started ticking up a month ago.
Only one in five (21.4%) of adults and one in 10 (10.3%) of children have gotten the newest Covid booster, which became available in late August.
One in three (37%) of nursing home residents are up-to-date on Covid shots, which is higher than 23% at the same time last year but still lower than needed to protect the population most vulnerable to severe illness and death.
“The real worry is that elderly folks will suffer greatly from this disease, if not sometimes die from it,” Townsend said.
But others are also vulnerable to Covid, he said. Beyond illness and death, that can include the economic effects of missing work and school as well as the risk of developing long Covid.
About 5.3% of American adults reported having current long Covid symptoms when the CDC last conducted a survey from August to September, and 17.9% reported ever having long Covid.
“Preventing this disease in anybody, no matter how healthy you are, is a really good thing,” Townsend said. “It’s not just a matter of feeling ill. It’s doing bad things to you that we can’t fully understand.”
It has been five years since the first alarm bell sounded about a mystery pneumonia in China soon identified as a novel coronavirus.
Since then, Covid has settled into an uneasy pattern of two waves each year, in the summer and the winter.
Typically, Covid infections in the fall have continued at a moderate level after summer surges, and winter spikes often peak in late December or early January.
Following the largest summer wave of the pandemic, this fall’s pattern was different from previous years, with a long lull more similar to springtime and an expected peak in coming weeks.
Looking at patterns from other coronaviruses, Townsend and other researchers expect Covid to settle eventually into one winter spike, similar to RSV, the flu and other respiratory viruses.
