The COVID-19 Seasonal Anomaly and Its Implications for the Outbreaks and Infections in the Northern Hemisphere
It is difficult to predict what the new normal will look like. The flu season next year might be tamer if many of the susceptible people get it in the coming months. It is not yet known if COVID-19 will become a seasonal illness like flu or if it will continue to rise intermittently throughout the year.
Although 2021–22 brought a mild flu season, 2022–23 is shaping up to be much more severe throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Since October, cases have risen sharply in the US and Canada, which is an early start to the flu season.
Some scientists have also posited on social media that the surge in RSV hospitalizations might be the result of SARS-CoV-2 infection causing immune deficiencies that leave people more susceptible to other infections. But Miller says hasn’t seen any evidence for that either, and the surge in hospitalizations could be explained by the large number of people who missed exposures in the past few years. “There’s a slightly bigger naive population, all of whom are at risk. So you’ve got more numbers going into the system.”
“The younger age group is being hit unusually hard for this time of year,” says Alyson Kelvin, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Unusually, flu-based hospitalizations are currently higher for children aged 0–4 years than for people aged over 65.
There is also a lot that researchers still don’t understand about seasonal viruses. For reasons that are not fully understood, COVID-19 restrictions had little effect on one type of seasonal virus, rhinoviruses, which are the most common cause of colds. Miller says that it might be because of their hardy nature. They are more resistant to desiccation and can persist for longer in the environment.
How do the Viruses compete and interfere with one another? A strong innate immune response can be raised from one virus to another. The Omicron surge began to decline in last year’s first wave of Influenza. Perhaps Omicron infection provided some short-lived protection against flu. The Omicron surge may have convinced people to keep their distance.
Why are hospitals filling up now that the COVID-19 Pandemic went out? A CDC study of last week’s hospital bed occupancy data
The peaks and valleys of next year might look like those that occurred before the Pandemic. She isn’t placing any bets. But she says: “I do expect that this winter is probably going to be the last unusual winter.”
A record number of people were in the hospital for flu last week, filling about 6,000 more beds than the previous week. About 1 in 4 lab tests were positive for flu last week and nearly 1 in 10 deaths were due to pneumonia, influenza or Covid-19 – well above the epidemic threshold of about 6%.
All but seven states are experiencing “high” or “very high” respiratory virus activity, according to the CDC. States with moderate, low, or minimal activity are Alaska, Hawaii, Michigan, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.
Data from Walgreens that tracks prescriptions for Tamiflu and other flu treatments suggests that flu hotspots spread from El Paso to southwest Virginia.
Nancy Foster, Vice President for Quality and patient safety with the American Hospital Association, stated in a statement on Friday that an increase of flu patients is a key reason why hospitals are filling up, but they are also facing other diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus and illnesses in people who put
“Workforce shortages have not only made it more challenging for hospitals, but also have diminished the number of patients who can be cared for in nursing homes and other post acute care settings,” the statement said. “Thus, patients are spending more time in hospitals, awaiting discharge to the next level of care and limiting our ability to make a bed available to a patient who truly needs to be hospitalized.”
Kelvin thinks it is concerning to see so many hospitalizations. “There’s [still fewer] than five paediatric deaths reported [in Canada], which I think is standard for a whole season — but we’re only entering the season at this point.”
Seasonal flu typically kills about 389,000 people globally each year, and its impact is most severe in people over 65 years of age, followed by very young children and people who are immunocompromised.
The COVID-19 Pandemic caused the flu to largely disappear because interventions such as mask wearing and school closings caused the viruses to be far from the human body. Health officials were expecting the illness to come back after these measures were phased out.
A(H3N2) is a variant of the flu first emerged in 1968 and has become endemic. Vaccines are notoriously less effective against A(H3N2) than against other subtypes, partly because this subtype tends to undergo more frequent genetic change: while scientists are propagating the virus to make a vaccine, this virus subtype tends to mutate in ways that more frequently make its surfaceproteins different from those the vaccine aims to protect against. Researchers are investigating ways to make more effective A(H3N2) vaccines.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been reported in China, and there will be a resurgence in the coming Lunar New Year
While the seven day rolling average of hospitalization cases has come down in recent weeks, experts warn there could be a resurgence as people travel and gather for the holidays.
More than 100 million cases have been reported in the United States since the start of the pandemic. However, the actual number of cases is likely much higher, as many individuals who are infected do not test or do not report the results of tests taken at home. Hospital stays are becoming a better indicator of disease trends as cases are undercounted.
The flu and other respiratory illnesses often have overlapping symptoms, such as congestion and coughing. But some are unique. Respiratory syncytialvity can cause asthma, and Covid can make you have a shortness of breath. Testing can help determine which illness is at play, which health experts say is helpful to ensure individuals are receiving the appropriate treatment in a timely manner. For example, the antiviral Tamiflu can help treat flu, while Paxlovid is available for Covid patients.
He noted that China has a narrow definition of a Covid death, which is part of the issue, but acknowledged that many countries have lags in reporting hospital data. Some Covid patients who died with respiratory failure are only listed by the country. In the two weeks prior to January 4, China reported fewer than 20 deaths from local Covid cases.
“There’s a lot more data that needs to be shared from China and additionally from around the world so that we can track this pandemic as we enter this fourth year,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid, said Wednesday.
He said the WHO is worried about the risk of life in China and that booster doses are important to protect against disease and death.
There, the outbreak has overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums, triggered shortages of basic medicines, and sparked fears of an even darker month ahead as experts warn of a spread to less resourced rural areas during the upcoming Lunar New Year.
A Study of the Spread of Influenza in Southeast Asia and its Implications for the WHO and the United Nations Office on Epidemiology
On Wednesday, the European Union encouraged member states to require a negative Covid test for passengers entering the EU from China, according to the Swedish presidency of the bloc.
Tedros said Wednesday that it was understandable that some countries were taking these steps because of the high circulation in China.
The need for more forthcoming genomic data is emphasized by the group and WHO. The UN body faced criticism at the beginning of the epidemic because it did not push China hard enough for data, which led to fears that Beijing was hiding critical information. Beijing has repeatedly defended its transparency.
She called for more information on how to sequence the country and for the sequences to be uploaded to publicly available databases so that deeper analyses can be done. There is a global initiative that provides access to the genomic data of different influenza viruses.
Saudi Arabia recorded 179 cases of the respiratory tract disease Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, more than any other country, and was followed by China, which had 262 such cases, of which 218 of them were of the flu. There were few reports with countries in Eastern Europe.
Katz says that the diversity in reporting patterns results from the disparate surveillance capacities of various countries, along with the diseases that national health authorities prioritize and, ultimately, what the WHO decides to concern itself with. “There are a lot of humans involved here, and humans are making different calls,” she says. For instance, Ebola is reported much more often than other haemorrhagic fevers that periodically erupt in Africa.
The team’s searchable database could be a useful tool in providing verified information about large outbreaks and documenting the history of infectious diseases, says Mark Smolinski, president of the non-profit organization Ending Pandemics in San Francisco, California. Having transparent, complementary outbreak-reporting systems is an important goal, he adds. “The faster we find out there’s a real threat anywhere around the world and make that information available, the better off we all are.”
The database will allow researchers to look at the factors that determine how much money is spent to suppress a specific outbreak, or how external circumstances such as conflicts or weather events affect them, says Katz. However, the study notes that DON reports do not mention all known outbreaks in every region.
A spokesperson for the WHO said it is drafting a publication detailing its decision-making process and criteria for DON reports, as well as restructuring its website to make the reports easier to search. The agency adds that it standardized the structure and format of the DON reports in 2021 — after the period that Katz’s study analysed. “WHO is a learning organization, and this extends to the DON,” the WHO wrote in a statement.