every year is the same. As soon as it starts to get cold, people gather inside. The windows are closed. Commuters forego walking or biking in favor of crowded buses and subways. Our entire world withdraws to where it is hot, our breath condenses on the windows of homes, offices, schools and transport, showing how well we have isolated ourselves from the outside. In short, we create the perfect breeding ground for viruses.
When respiratory virus season begins, it is usually quite predictable. Patients begin to be admitted to hospitals with influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) around October in the northern hemisphere. Thousands of people get sick and many die, but apart from the odd year, health systems in Europe and North America are rarely at risk of being overwhelmed.
But the pandemic has derailed this predictability. You’ve added another virus to the seasonal mix, and flu and RSV are coming back this year with a bang. A “twin” or even a “triple epidemic” could be on the way, with all three viruses striking at once, disease on the rise, and healthcare systems creaking under pressure. There are already signs that this is happening.
Many hospitals in the US are full and are caring for large numbers of children infected with RSV and other viruses, many more than would be expected at this time of year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t track RSV cases, hospitalizations, and deaths like it does for the flu, but hospitals across the country have reported maximum levels normally seen in December and January. Nearly one in five PCR tests for RSV came back positive in the week ending October 29, and this rate doubled over the course of a month. Generally speaking, the higher the proportion of tests that come back positive, the more common a virus is in the community at large. In the three years before the pandemic, an average of just 3 percent of tests came back positive in October.
This is a hangover from the pandemic. In the last two years, RSV and flu have been kept low thanks to the protective measures people have taken against the coronavirus: wearing masks, washing hands, and isolating. Between the start of the pandemic and March 2021, the weekly positivity rate for RSV tests stayed below 1 percent, according to the CDC, below where it was in pre-pandemic times.
In July of this year, health specialists warned in The Lancet that the benefits of these pandemic precautions could end up having a negative effect this winter season. Reducing exposure to common endemic viruses such as RSV and influenza, experts argued, risked creating an “immunity gap” in people born during the pandemic or who had not previously developed sufficient immunity against these viruses.
That prediction now appears to be coming true, as children contract these viruses for the first time, without having developed any prior immunity, and become seriously ill. “We’re seeing older children get RSV who previously would have gotten it at a younger age,” says Rachel Baker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University in Rhode Island, who co-authored the Lancet commentary paper. “That is putting some pressure on hospitals.”
Source: news.google.com