Why it is too early to say there will be a “covid

Dołączył: 11 Mar 2024 Posty: 1

Autumn arrived along with flu vaccines at pharmacies, while pediatricians remain alert to a rebound in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) . In other words, it's infection season . Covid deaths and hospitalizations in the United States also began to rise in late July, and monitoring of wastewater for the virus in it has maintained a slow upward trend.

So do we currently have a “covid season”? It's an important question, because know Phone Number List ing when cases will rise would help public health officials and healthcare administrators plan for vaccines, treatments and hospital staff, and prompt everyone else to do a little more self-protection.

But the experts who are in charge and analyzing the data consider that it is too early to declare that covid is seasonal . Reviewing the previous three years, they observe patterns: a peak at some point in the summer, such as the arrival of the Delta variant in 2021, and one in late fall or winter, such as the increase in Omicron that same year, around Thanksgiving. . But those spikes haven't happened at exactly the same time from year to year, and they may not have all arisen for the same reasons.

Difficulties in determining a "covid season"
“Looking at the data, you might think this is a biannual virus, compared to influenza and RSV, which have unique seasonal peaks,” says Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease physician and professor at the U.S. School of Medicine. Duke University (USA). “But that's much harder to say when you consider that, as a society, we behave very differently, depending on the season. And that we handled ourselves in different ways in the different years of the pandemic, depending on how restricted we were, the number of measures we took and how immune we were, whether due to the vaccine or having been infected.”

In other words, what looks like a season may be an artifact created by our behavior , not that of the virus. How our bodies react to SARS-CoV-2 would also play a role in navigating it along the timeline.

“As we get used to living with this virus, our immunity gets better and better, lengthening the gap between the winter and summer peaks,” says David Dowdy, a doctor and professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the University of California. Johns Hopkins University. “What could happen is that it goes on longer and longer, until it happens every winter. It would be very interesting to see if the same winter wave of Covid returns this year, because we had a fairly late spike in the summer. “The population will have even more immunity.”

In fact, the latest data reflects this. The epidemic curves published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which showed a constant upward trend for two months, began to decline; Between September 10 and 16, although deaths increased 2.7%, hospitalizations decreased 4.3%. This decrease could not be due to the new reinforcements of the covid vaccines, because they did not go on sale until September 13.

But the degree to which people accept the new vaccines may determine whether and when a winter wave arrives. “We know from this virus that, year after year, people's immune response to each vaccine or booster begins to decrease from that moment [of its application] six to eight months [later],” highlights Mark Cameron, professor Associate of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at Case Western University.

Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health and coordinator of the White House Covid-19 response for 14 months, stated at a press conference last week that his “expectation is that we will see a further decline, "probably over the next month or two, and then we'll notice the virus starting to rebound as we get closer to the holidays and beyond."

Saying that a virus is seasonal seems obvious: at a certain time of the year, cases appear; in another, they decrease. But “seasonality” hides unknowns, even for the flu. Environmental changes , such as temperature, humidity or the duration of ultraviolet light, combine to create optimal conditions for flu infections. Anatomical responses to these changes also contribute , such as the effect of colder or drier air on the mucous membranes and epithelium of the respiratory tract. And behavioral modifications may have the same impact: gathering indoors to escape the colder weather and sharing spaces that offer less air circulation than outdoors in summer.

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