Remember early pandemic Thanksgivings?
Scouring store shelves for rapid tests. Turkey dinners in the backyard. Panic over a stray cough.
Hard to believe we are in our fourth holiday season with COVID-19 potentially crashing the party — always an unwelcome guest.
“It’s going to be a persistent threat,” says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. “I suspect that next year will look just like this year and the year after that with some variation, just like we see with flu.”
And by all accounts, most Americans are essentially back to business as usual. One recent poll found at least two thirds of the public are not worried about getting COVID over the holidays or spreading it to people who are close to them. Meanwhile, half said they plan to take at least one precaution over this fall and winter.
While there was an uptick of cases in the late summer, the virus is now a fixture of the winter respiratory illness season. As expected, emergency department visits and the number of people being admitted to the hospital are ticking up around the country, alongside other bugs.
Hospitalizations have risen more than 8% in recent weeks, but it’s not yet clear how severe a wave the U.S can expect this season, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.
“We’re also seeing very high levels of RSV, and influenza is also starting to cause trouble,” she says. “So there’s quite a bit heading into this holiday season.”
Luckily, Rivers says there’s nothing about the new omicron variants that looks particularly alarming and the updated vaccines still match those circulating strains of the virus…
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