Covid surges across US after holidays amid low booster uptake | Coronavirus

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.

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.

But Covid has not yet fallen into the predictability of viruses like these because it has not yet reached a steady, endemic state, Townsend said. “It does look like we’re approaching it; it doesn’t look like we’re there yet.”

And it’s not that unusual for the timing of a winter virus surge to vary, Townsend said; in recent years, the RSV season started earlier than expected, and the flu typically peaks somewhere between December and March.

While Covid remains in a pandemic state, there are two main factors affecting when surges happen and how severe they are: the emergence of new variants and the levels of immunity people acquire to them, whether through vaccination or infection during a preceding spike in cases.

“It depends on all kinds of things: the evolution of the virus, people’s immunity, when the last surge was – all these things that are difficult to assemble together into a prediction of exactly when a surge will happen,” Townsend said.

That’s one reason why it’s so important to monitor wastewater, hospitalizations and other indicators, in order to respond quickly to waves when they begin, he said.

During the first year of the pandemic, President Donald Trump repeatedly said that Covid would go away on its own.

“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” he said in June 2020.

It’s not clear how much of a priority the second Trump administration will give to measures like tracking Covid and updating vaccines.

“The last time this administration was in power, there was just so much chaos, and chaos is not very predictable,” Townsend said. “So I don’t know what is going to happen.”