‘Tripledemic’ rages on in America: Fever-filled weeks lie ahead
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This viral pileup – what some are calling a “tripledemic” – has already set off an exhausting season of sickness.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON – It has become wearyingly routine: Americans are embarking upon yet another holiday travel season in the midst of a viral onslaught.
New, immune-evasive versions of the Omicron variant are spreading, and Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths are once again rising, although the figures remain far below last winter’s peak. But in 2022, the coronavirus has company: Common seasonal viruses, which lay low for the last two winters, have come roaring back.
“And as it turns out, they have some makeup work to do,” said Dr Peter Graven, who directs the office of advanced analytics at Oregon Health and Science University.
In particular, influenza and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, hit early and hard this fall, causing major outbreaks that are now overlapping with a resurgent coronavirus.
This viral pileup – what some are calling a “tripledemic”
But each of these three viruses is on a slightly different trajectory. Although there is considerable geographic variation, in most parts of the US, RSV has probably already peaked, while flu is now surging. And Covid-19 is still ramping up, with cases likely to continue rising.
That means that more difficult, fever-filled weeks still lie ahead.
“A lot of sniffly kids,” said Dr Andrew Lover, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. “There’ll be a lot of respiratory illness floating around from all these different sources.”
It is not too late to get a Covid-19 booster or a flu shot, which appears to be well-matched to the influenza strains circulating in 2022, scientists said. And experts repeated their now-common exhortations to take basic precautions, such as wearing masks in crowded indoor spaces, using rapid Covid-19 tests before visiting vulnerable people and staying home when feeling unwell.
“I know people are kind of tired of hearing some of that stuff,” Dr Graven said. “We’re not saying people need to change your life forever. Right now, for the next some number of weeks, we’re in not a great spot.”
Scientists are hopeful next winter will be better, noting that this brutal season is an unfortunate, and not entirely unexpected, byproduct of several years of pandemic precautions, such as masking and social distancing. These measures shielded many people from routine winter infections and may have spared overburdened health care systems from even bigger surges.
But many children and adults also missed out on the opportunity to build or bolster their immune defences against flu and RSV, leaving the viruses with an unusually vulnerable population this fall.
“There was a bit of a buildup of susceptibility at the population level,” said Dr Virginia Pitzer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “It’s a worse than normal winter, but one that hopefully will not be repeated next year.”
Scientists are hopeful next winter will be better, noting that this brutal season is an unfortunate, and not entirely unexpected.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
A viral comeback
The first virus to surge this fall was RSV, which usually causes mild illness but can be severe, or even fatal, in older adults and young children. By the time children in the United States are 2 years old, almost all have been exposed to the virus.
The virus typically peaks in December or January. But in 2022, cases of RSV began rising steeply in September, and by mid-November paediatric hospitalisation rates had hit the highest level since tracking began in 2018. Hospitalisation rates for older adults have surged, too.
Flu took off in October, about six weeks ahead of schedule, and has already caused at least 150,000 hospitalisations and 9,300 deaths, according to estimates from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The cumulative hospitalisation rate is higher for this time of year than it has been in more than a decade.
“We had a huge pool of people, compared to what we normally do, who could be infected by RSV and could be infected by flu because we’ve basically missed two seasons of it,” said Dr Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University.
As a result, he said, the viruses were “able to go to work early and infect a lot of people. And that’s why we’re seeing these very large, marked outbreaks early on.” NYTIMES
