Dr. Klotman’s Week 213 COVID update is on YouTube. The highlights are:
- All the viral respiratory illnesses continue to decline – especially hospitalizations
- Of those illnesses, Influenza continues to be the most common
- The wastewater virus levels are the lowest since 2020 nationwide
- The dominant COVID strain continues to be JN.1 with JN.1.13 coming in at about 9% of new cases
- New COVID strains are emerging much more slowly now that cases (and hence viral replication) have diminished
- We now have two large European studies that show that long COVID is much less common among those who have been vaccinated against COVID
Dr. Klotman devotes some thoughtful discussion to the next pandemic. If you follow such things, you most likely know that we have viral respiratory pandemics about every ten years. The most common have been Influenza pandemics – the Spanish Flu, the Hong Kong Flu, the H1N1 swine Flu of 2009, and so on. Of course, in recent decades we have had Coronavirus outbreaks and pandemics – SARS, MERS, and COVID.
Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers shut down the Pandemic Response Team that Bush and Obama had nurtured. The national stockpile for pandemic response was allowed to languish and not replenished as its supplies aged and became unusable. That left America less prepared to face COVID, and many of the lives lost during the pandemic were the result of an incompetent Trump administration response.
President Biden, in his first term, has done his best to prepare the country for the next pandemic because it is a certainty. The only things that are uncertain are:
- When will it occur
- Who will it affect the most (the healthy, the very young, the very old, or the pregnant)
- What pathogen will cause it (Influenza, Coronavirus, or some old scourge like Measels)
Stay tuned.