As the winter stew of respiratory infections simmers, a lot of individuals are currently feeling awful. However, this year’s fevers, sneezes, and coughing are all caused by a few odd tendencies.
The first piece of positive news is that the COVID-19 increase this winter has been moderate.
Winter illnesses return with a vengeance
The season for the yearly winter respiratory virus is already underway. Along with the rise in COVID-19, RSV, and other respiratory viral diseases, the number of persons getting the flu is also soaring.
According to epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, this year’s winter wave is milder than past ones. Since the start of the epidemic, we have never experienced a smaller winter wave.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the weekly rate of hospitalizations for COVID-19 peaked at approximately 4 per 100,000. This is in contrast to the previous season’s rate of approximately 8 per 100,000, the 2022–2023 season’s rate of approximately 11 per 100,000, and the 2021–2022 season’s rate of 35 per 100,000.
The extremely strong summer COVID wave that began relatively late in the United States may be one reason for the comparatively mild COVID winter. Many people may therefore still be somewhat immune from their summertime COVID infection.
According to Rivers, fewer people are available to contract the disease because their immunity has just increased.
Flu may be crowding out COVID
However, according to Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, no new variation has emerged that is any more effective at circumventing the immunity humans have developed.
“Viral interference is another potential factor,” she explains. This process is what happens when one virus drives out other viruses. According to some researchers, that could be one of the causes of the decline in infections with other respiratory viruses, such RSV and the flu, during the early, severe COVID waves.
Gordon adds that this year, viral interference might be a factor. A lot of influenza is in the air. It might produce a certain amount of nonspecific immunity or protection, which would then sort of crowd out other respiratory illnesses like SARS-CoV-2.
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Nevertheless, COVID is still causing a lot of people to miss work, kids to miss school, and some individuals to become so unwell that they have to go to the hospital or die. Therefore, Rivers advises people to remain vigilant, particularly since taking precautions against COVID can also protect against other viruses, such as the flu and RSV.
Flu rebounds and could stick around
This year, the flu is the bad news trend.The flu season this year began abnormally early and has been spreading widely across the nation. And now, it appears that flu activity is reaching a second peak in the United States this winter.
Around the start of the new year, in late December or early January, influenza activity first peaked. After that, activity decreased for a few weeks straight, which is typically an indication that the season is coming to an end, according to Rivers. Then, however, it truly took a strange turn and began to climb once more. As a result, activity has reached a second peak that is equal to the one that occurred at the beginning of the year. It’s not like that.
According to Rivers, the percentage of people visiting a doctor for a fever, cough, or sore throat—one method the CDC monitors the flu—decreased from 6.8% to 5.4% before beginning to increase once more, reaching 7%.
According to her, the severity of this year’s flu season may have a lengthy tail. According to Rivers, this could be an exceptionally harsh flu season.
The second peak’s reason is yet unknown. Testing hasn’t found any evidence yet that the H5N1 flu virus, which has been spreading among dairy cows and poultry, is now spreading broadly among humans and is causing the second peak.
Thus, the cause is still unknown, according to Rivers. It might simply be the natural fluctuation that occurs when the virus strikes.
Nonetheless, the likelihood of contracting both the common flu and avian flu viruses increases with the number of persons who contract the illness. Additionally, that might allow the bird flu to exchange genes with the common flu and develop into a more hazardous strain.
“That’s definitely a big worry,” Gordon says. Flu activity poses a risk because there are so many people infected with seasonal viruses that it may raise the likelihood that you will co-infect someone with one of these viruses and H5N1, which creates the possibility of a new virus that spreads easily from person to person. And that’s one way a pandemic can spread.