This winter’s COVID-19 surge in the U.S. appears to be fading without hitting nearly as hard as many had feared.
“I think the worst of the winter resurgence is over,” says Dr. David Rubin, who’s been tracking the pandemic at the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
No one expected this winter’s surge to be as bad as the last two. But both the flu and RSV came roaring back really early this fall. At the same time, the most contagious omicron subvariant yet took off just as the holidays arrived in late 2022. And most people were acting like the pandemic was over, which allowed all three viruses to spread quickly.
So there were big fears of hospitals getting completely overwhelmed again, with many people getting seriously ill and dying.
But that’s not what happened.
“This virus continues to throw 210-mile-per-hour curve balls at us. And it seems to defy gravity or logic sometimes,” says Michael Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“People all assumed we would see major transmission. Well, every time we think we have some reason to believe we know what it’s going to do, it doesn’t do that,” Osterholm says.
‘The Worst’ Of The Surge Of COVID, Flu And RSV May Be Over
Infections, hospitalizations and deaths did increase in the U.S. after New Year’s. But the number of people catching the virus and getting hospitalized and dying from COVID soon started to fall again and have all been dropping now for weeks, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The fall flu and RSV waves continue to fade too. And so the…
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