COVID mounts late summer surge amid onset of flu season
The coronavirus has faded to the background of everyday life, but it can still threaten vulnerable populations during surges.
File photo
The last year has brought an unusual pattern in COVID surges.
Typically, the virus is worst during the winter with an additional summer surge beginning around June. Last winter, there were fewer infections, hospitalizations and deaths, and while this year’s summer surge has been delayed, it’s now being felt across the region.
As experts observe an uptick in cases, they are reminding people to take basic precautions to minimize the spread of the virus.
There are currently two dominant new omicron variants; the omicron variant initially emerged in late 2021 and was characterized by being more contagious. Reports indicate that one of the two new variants is unique in the way it causes more extreme throat soreness than prior variants.
Haywood County Medical Director Dr. Mark Jaben is among those still closely following these trends. He notes with concern that while hospitalizations are still low, they are typically a lagging indicator that follow a few weeks behind the trends in case counts. With the current rise in cases, he fears that those more severe cases are just around the corner.
Late August also puts the region on the doorstep of respiratory illness season, when influenza and RSV show up in schools and are brought home to parents. In addition, Haywood County still isn’t out of the woods regarding a small wave of 15 pertussis (whooping cough) cases. Jaben said that there must be no new spread in the community over the course of two incubation periods, which for pertussis is a total of 42 days, for the outbreak to be over. It’s been about three weeks since the last new case was reported.
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“We know that every year, three weeks into school, we get a wave of viral illness that’s indistinguishable from either pertussis or COVID, and add to that the fact that a lot of people often times feel like their upper respiratory issues may be allergies,” Jaben said. “With the upswing of COVID starting later in the year than it has before, it just sort of compresses all that together, meaning it’s going to be even more difficult than usual for people to know what they have.”
Dr. Mark Jaben, seen here in 2020, is Haywood County’s medical director. File photo
To make matters worse, the reporting isn’t as good as it used to be, so it’s harder than ever to get a more precise look at where cases are ebbing or surging. Jaben and others are reduced to using anecdotal evidence to estimate trends.
Jaben said that this year’s RSV and flu vaccines have been approved, manufactured and are available. That’s not what’s happening on the COVID front. In June, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with a group that includes known vaccine skeptics and science deniers. Jaben considers that almost none of the people appointed by Kennedy meet the criteria to be “reliable sources” since they both lack expertise and have conflicts of interest.
That committee would normally, after review, recommend the COVID vaccine early on in the summer, but it has yet to make a recommendation. In a draft of the recommendation that was leaked last week, it appears the ACIP will no longer recommend the vaccine for the general public; it won’t even include children or pregnant women, only elderly and high-risk individuals.
Jaben pointed out that insurance companies had covered COVID vaccines up to this point, but that doesn’t mean they will continue to, especially considering that they haven’t even been approved yet.
“This gives them an opening to say, ‘No, we’re not going to cover them,’” Jaben said. “Are people going to pay out of pocket for this? Probably not.”
As of now, insurance companies are still covering last year’s vaccine, and Jaben said that works for now, but it’s uncertain how long they’ll be available or whether the new vaccine, when and if approved, will be made available at pharmacies.
On top of all of that, there are those who will simply never trust the COVID vaccine. While it has a proven link to cases of myocarditis in young men, that side effect is rare and typically mild, especially compared to the severity and likelihood of someone with COVID suffering the same condition.
This creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty — uncertainty that can create quite the headache for professionals like Jaben whose careers revolve around tracking disease patterns.
While COVID is behaving a bit different this year and new vaccines aren’t yet available, the other core tenet to combatting the virus is the same: don’t expose other people. This is a simple concept — stay home if you’re sick, wash your hands, avoid large groups and poorly ventilated areas — but practicing those concepts aren’t as easy, as proven during the uncertain period from 2020 to 2021 when the disease reached pandemic levels.
Jaben said that people, whether they’re vaccinated or not, should be more “cognizant” of how COVID spreads and infects different populations.
“We know that older people, folks with underlying health conditions, people with immunocompromising conditions are vulnerable,” Jaben said. “One of the things that’s happened with the last couple of waves is that we’ve had kids, particularly children under two, with as high of hospitalization rates as older people.”
What this ultimately means is that even healthy people should consider how to protect others in this period of greater spread. Just because an individual and perhaps their family are healthy doesn’t mean that by contracting the virus and spreading it, they aren’t ultimately enabling the infection of someone in the community who is more susceptible to serious illness.
“I would encourage people, if you get viral type illnesses, take a test … because your choices will have other implications that impact other people,” Jaben said.
