This Week in COVID

Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 195 COVID update. The highlights this week are:

• This most recent variant is JN.1 – a descendant of BA.2.86. JN.1 is now the second most common variant identified in the US.
• The numbers suggest that JN.1 is more contagious than prior strains,
• Fortunately JN.1 does not seem to cause more severe disease, and it is identified by existing COVID tests, responsive to Paxlovid, and covered by the existing vaccine.
• The onslaught of viral respiratory infections is in full swing.
• Currently, the most COVID activity is in the Northeast and mid-West, and hospitalizations are up accordingly.
• The South is seeing a rapid increase in Flu cases – likely due to low vaccination rates.
• He also reports on some interesting papers.

Although Dr. Klotman does not mention it, a new COVID m-RNA vaccine that has been approved in Japan. It uses a much smaller dose of m-RNA combined with an enzyme that makes copies of the m-RNA once it is injected. This novel vaccine technology is called an sa-RNA vaccine – where the sa prefix stands for self-amplifying. The goal of type of vaccine is to avoid severe dose-related vaccination side effects that some people experience – muscles aches, headaches, and fever. I haven’t experienced any of these with the COVID m-RNA vaccines, but Susan and my brother Ed have.

I met a nice, male African nurse today. His name was Promise. We chatted on and off as I sat waiting for lab results and for ER discharge by the doctor. I and many patients were being attended in a hallway. “Is this hospital overflow?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “This happens when we run out of rooms and sometimes, we have hospital beds all the way down the hall.” By visual evaluation, that would be dozens of patients being attended in the hallways – maybe 100. “I bet it was like that during the peak of the COVID apocalypse,” I said. Absolutely, he said. “It was awful. Spending all day in PPE was hot and miserable. I am lucky that I didn’t get it. I was afraid of taking it home to my family. We really dodged that bullet – none of my children came down with it. But you know what the worst thing was? It was the politics around the pandemic. I hated that!”

All the time we spent today, Promise was humming the tune to The Lion Sleeps Tonight and reciting some of its lyrics. I asked him whether it was The Lion, and he answered that it was adding, “I love that song.”