Several key COVID-19 trends that authorities track are now accelerating around the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. It’s the first major nationwide uptick in the spread of the virus seen in months.
The largest increases are in the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic, the agency said in its weekly report updated Friday, though virtually all regions of the country are now seeing accelerations.
Data reported by the agency from emergency rooms and wastewater sampling have tracked some of the steepest increases so far this season in the region spanning Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Rates of infections of nursing home residents across this Midwestern region have also soared in recent weeks, higher than in most other parts of the country, approaching levels not seen since the peak of last winter’s COVID-19 wave.
Flu is a dangerous virus, I wouldn’t say we’ve “adapted to it.” Viruses evolve much quicker than humans. They go through countless generations in the time we have one. Flu in addition has an interesting genetic mechanism for change most other viruses don’t have, where it can exchange entire large sections of its genome at once with other distinct flu viruses, very quickly creating an entirely new strain. This is one of the reasons we’re constantly updating the vaccine.
I’m the US, it hospitalizes half a million or so a year and kills between 10,000-50,000 a year, comparable to all people who die from gun violence in a year in the US including suicide. We’re always only one unlucky recombination event away from another 1918 flu pandemic, and the more infected people and the more it spreads the more chances for that to happen.
Sorry, I don’t know if this was your intention, I just have a pet peeve for flu getting written off as no big deal. It’s a huge deal and we should be continuing to work on vaccine and treatment improvements. Oddly our anti viral treatments for covid are probably more effective than anti viral flu treatments at this pont, if people actually take them.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
I also cannot believe that after this recent experience governments around the world aren’t pouring even more investment into pandemic monitoring and response. I mean I can, we’re notoriously short sighted, but seems governments and people in general are all pretending the pandemic never happened and can never happen again.