New coronavirus cases surge across the U.S. after the holidays while booster doses are low | Coronavirus

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.”

All test positivity rates, emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths due to the new coronavirus infection increaseand wastewater monitoring shows rates first started rising a month ago.

Only one in five adults (21.4%) and one in ten children (10.3%) got it The latest Covid booster became available in late August.

One in three nursing home residents (37%) Latest While the rate of COVID-19 vaccinations is higher than the 23% rate for the same period last year, it is still lower than needed to protect those most vulnerable to severe illness and death.

“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. That could include not only illness and death, but also the economic impact of missing work or school and the risk of prolonged COVID-19 infections.

The last time the CDC tested, about 5.3% of American adults reported currently having long-term coronavirus symptoms. investigation From August to September, 17.9% of respondents said they had been infected with the coronavirus for a long time.

“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.

Next, biggest wave of summer Due to the pandemic, this fall's pattern was expected to be different than usual, with a long lull similar to spring, before peaking in the coming weeks.

Townsend and other researchers are looking at patterns in other coronaviruses expect The coronavirus, like RSV, influenza, and other respiratory viruses, will eventually subside into a winter surge.

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 season Started earlier than expected influenza The peak is usually between December and March.

Although COVID-19 remains a pandemic, two main factors will influence when a surge in infections occurs and its severity. It's the emergence of new variants and people's level of immunity to them. vaccination Or infections during previous case spikes.

“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 that the coronavirus would: go away By itself.

“If we stop testing now, there will be very few, if any, infections,” 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.

“The last time this government was in power, there was real chaos, and chaos is not very predictable,” Townsend said. “So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”