COVID has developed a pattern that is different from other diseases, like the flu for example. Instead of cases only increasing during the winter, COVID can also increase during the summer. Researchers at the CDC have found that COVID activity has peaked during both late summer and winter a couple of time already.
That makes the current increase in COVID activity we are seeing less shocking. Late summer is also a time when a lot of people are traveling, spending time with other people and then returning to schools and colleges. All of those situations give these viruses many opportunities to spread.
The good news is that COVID today is very different from COVID at the beginning of the pandemic. The population now has immunity from vaccines and previous infections, and there are treatments available for people who are at higher risk, like the elderly. The CDC continues to track COVID through systems including hospital surveillance, laboratory testing and wastewater monitoring.
I think one interesting lesson from all of this is that COVID probably is never going to just disappear, and public health agencies have to figure out how to monitor it and respond when cases go up.
Wastewater surveillance is really interesting to me. A lot of people don’t take COVID tests anymore or even know they have COVID, so counting positive tests wouldn’t give us a very accurate picture of how much virus is actually out there. Wastewater can give health officials another way of seeing whether or not COVID is increasing in a community.
After everything that happened during the pandemic, hearing about another “COVID surge” can sound scary. But an increase in infections does not automatically mean we are going back to 2020. The challenge now is learning how to live with a virus that continues to change and comes back in waves while still protecting people who are most likely to become seriously sick.
The Global Pulse 