Here is BCM’s Dr. Paul Klotman’s Week 194 COVID Update. The highlights are:
- After a couple of months of flat COVID activity, the wastewater data show an increasing viral burden. It’s what we should expect of winter respiratory viruses.
- Despite the increasing wastewater viral burden, the number of COVID hospitalizations remains low.
- Following the trend of COVID hospitalizations over the last three years, it is clear that they are decreasing. More on this later.
- Influenza and RSV cases are cresting. This year’s Flu vaccine is well matched to the dominant circulating strains of Influenza A & B viruses.
- Most Flu hospitalizations this year are, as in prior years, among my age cohort 65+.
- If you want to stay out the hospital this winter, get your Flu shot now – it’s late, but not too late considering the close contact that the holiday season usually creates for all of us.
- Vaccine uptake among kindergarten-age children is well below what we, as a society, need to prevent epidemics of vaccine-preventable illnesses – especially Measles (more on this later).
So, the lower rates of COVID hospitalization are probably due to: 1) human immunity caused by prior infections and/or COVID vaccinations, and 2) a decrease in the virulence of SARS-CoV-2. The latter is of special interest to me as a biology watcher.
I have mentioned in other posts that a virus that is rapidly fatal to its host is destined to extinction. A virus needs a living host in order to replicate. If you kill your host rapidly, you don’t get to infect other hosts and continue your viral evolution. So, as an evolutionary principle, it is better to use your host to replicate and infect others. Strains that do this will continue to circulate and evolve. Those that are rapidly fatal will meet an evolutionary dead end, as it were.
With respect to measles, 2022 saw a 45% increase in worldwide measles cases. In order to prevent a rampant US measles epidemic, we need 95% of potentially susceptible individuals to be vaccinated. We have states in which the vaccination rate is in the 80-90% range. When, not if, those states host an infected individual, we will see a significant outbreak – perhaps even an epidemic. But hey, I’m just an ignorant doctor, shill for the American medical system, and you do your own research on the web – never having studied medicine, never having treated an infected patient, never having attended a preventable death. I wish you luck, you and yours will need it.