Here’s Dr. Klotman’s Week 120 COVID Update. The main messages are that:
- COVID cases worldwide are up 50%
- Europe is seeing a lot more viral activity than it has in weeks
- Houston and San Antonio now have high levels of COVID activity
- Despite this, the US hospitalization and ICU caseloads are holding steady
- The number of COVID fatalities is holding at 400/day
- The most prevalent COVID strain in the US is now the Omicron BA.5 sub-variant
- There is now a confirmed case report of pet cat to person COVID transmission
There is another Public Health disaster evolving, and the US has once again botched the Public Health response. The evolving epidemic is orthopox (Monkeypox). The US response was slow – allowing a handful of cases related to travel to become 700 cases today. Why? Public Health officials dismissed the potential for a disaster because this virus requires very close if not intimate contact to spread. Thus far, it mostly affects the MSM population – men who have sex with men. The missteps in handling this disease include a failure to identify populations at risk and provide both education and vaccination and failure to do contact tracing. The more prevalent a communicable disease becomes, the more difficult it is to do effective contact tracing. Quite simply, it takes a bigger army of contact tracers to do the job.
Public Health figures and Epidemiologists are properly angry over this dropped ball. You would think that after AIDS and COVID we would have learned our lesson – identify emerging infectious illnesses early and respond immediately. Failing to do that because of considerations such as the public’s fatigue with epidemics is just flatly wrongheaded!