You are not imagining it: COVID-19 cases are on the rise again.
Fortunately, since a vast majority of Americans have some sort
of immunity, either from vaccination or a prior infection, or both, most people
who get infected now will have a mild illness.
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And while there are multiple strains circulating (nearly all of
them descendants of the omicron XBB variant), they are unlikely to cause the
“wildfire spreading” that occurred with the delta variant and the first omicron
variant, said Dr. David Boulware, a professor of medicine specializing in
infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota Medical School. That
includes EG.5, which was recently named a “variant under monitoring” by the
World Health Organization and now accounts for about 17 percent of U.S. cases.
“I am not sure if it’s a surge, per se, or just uptick,”
Boulware said of the current situation. Either way, he added, it’s a reminder
“that, yes, COVID still exists.”
Below is a quick refresher on how to navigate an outbreak in
your community or home.
TrackingMonitoring where and how much the virus is spreading has become
significantly more difficult since the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention stopped tracking cases in May, with the end of the federal public
health emergency. However, there are still a few metrics to pay attention to —
in addition to anecdotal evidence that people around you are getting sick.
The two best metrics to monitor local infection levels are
hospitalization rates and wastewater data, which can both be found on the CDC
COVID Data Tracker website. For hospitalization rates, go to the map and select
your county. For wastewater data, scroll down to the surveillance map and
locate your nearest monitoring site.
Because fewer people tend to have severe cases these days,
hospitalization data is less representative of how many people are infected.
But it can still be useful for measuring trends: Nationwide, about 9,000 people
were hospitalized for COVID in the past week, a roughly 12 percent increase
over the prior week.
Many experts say that wastewater testing is a more accurate
metric for identifying how much virus is circulating in a community. More than
1,300 sewage treatment plants across all 50 states currently monitor levels of
the virus, which infected people shed in their stools.
“Wastewater is the only data source we have that gives us early
warnings of new outbreaks,” said Aparna Keshaviah, the director of wastewater
research at Mathematica, a research consultancy firm. “Hospitalizations and
deaths are like these contrails of COVID infections; they show you the
aftermath of what’s already happened.”
TestingCOVID symptoms haven’t changed much since the start of the
pandemic — sore throat, congestion, fatigue, fever and cough remain the most
common, said Dr. Paul Sax, the clinical director of the division of infectious
diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Some people may also experience
gastrointestinal symptoms, and there are reports that the XBB.1.16 strain can
cause pink eye.
These generic symptoms mean it can be “extremely difficult to
tell one virus from another,” Sax said. The easiest way to know if you have
COVID or just a summer cold is to take a rapid test.
If the rapid tests in your bathroom are past their expiration
dates, check the manufacturer’s website to see if the dates have been extended
before you toss the tests. When at-home rapid tests were initially authorized,
the Food and Drug Administration required strict expiration dates, but many
have since been relaxed.
Rapid tests are still effective for all of the variants that are
circulating, and if you test positive, you can trust that you’re infected. If
you have symptoms but get a negative result, wait two days and test again;
so-called serial testing, where you test multiple times over the course of
several days, is more than 90% effective at detecting a symptomatic infection.
“If the virus is not present in large quantities,” you may get a
negative result even when you’re symptomatic, said Dr. Apurv Soni, an assistant
professor at UMass Chan Medical School who has researched rapid test accuracy.
“By doing serial testing, you give yourself a chance to catch the virus when it
has increased to a higher quantity in your body.”
TreatingIf you test positive for COVID and you’re over age 60 or have a
condition that increases your risk for a severe infection, ask your doctor to
prescribe Paxlovid as soon as possible. For people in these groups, the drug
reduces the risk of hospitalization if they start taking it within the first
five days of an infection. For young, healthy people, the benefits are less
clear: Paxlovid doesn’t provide additional protection against severe disease,
but it may help prevent the development of long COVID.
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