{"id":4243,"date":"2023-08-01T19:27:08","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T00:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=4243"},"modified":"2023-08-01T19:30:49","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T00:30:49","slug":"one-more-covid-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/08\/01\/one-more-covid-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"One More COVID Summer?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A mid-year wave might be brewing for the fourth year in a row. Will it always be like this? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the pandemic\u2019s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting<\/a> for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But three and a half years into the outbreak, the coronavirus is still stubbornly refusing to take the warmest months off.\u00a0Some<\/a>\u00a0public-health experts<\/a>\u00a0are now worried that, after a relatively quiet stretch, the virus is kick-starting yet another summer wave. In the southern and northeastern United States, concentrations of the coronavirus in\u00a0wastewater<\/a>\u00a0have been slowly ticking up for several weeks, with the Midwest and West now following suit; test-positivity rates, emergency-department diagnoses of COVID-19, and\u00a0COVID hospitalizations<\/a>\u00a0are also on the rise. The absolute numbers are still small, and they may stay that way. But these are the clear and early signs of a brewing mid-year wave, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University\u2014which would make this the fourth summer in a row with a distinct coronavirus bump. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even this far into the pandemic, though, no one can say for certain whether summer waves are a permanent COVID fixture\u2014or if the virus exhibits a predictable seasonal pattern at all. No law of nature dictates that winters must come with respiratory illness, or that summers will not. \u201cWe just don\u2019t know very much about what drives the cyclical patterns of respiratory infections,\u201d says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. Which means there\u2019s still no part of the year when this virus is guaranteed to cut us any slack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That many pathogens\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0wax and wane with the seasons is\u00a0indisputable<\/a>. In temperate parts of the world, airborne bugs get a boost in winter, only to be stifled in the heat; polio and other feces-borne pathogens, meanwhile, often rise in summer, along with gonorrhea and some other STIs. But noticing these trends is one thing; truly understanding the triggers is another. Some diseases lend themselves a bit more easily to explanation: Near the equator, waves of\u00a0mosquito-borne illness<\/a>, such as Zika and Chikungunya, tend to be tied to the weather-dependent life cycles of the insects that carry them; in temperate parts of the world, rates of Lyme disease track with the summertime activity of ticks. Flu, too, has pretty strong data to back its preference for wintry months. The virus\u2014which is sheathed in a fragile, fatty layer called an envelope and travels airborne via moist drops\u2014spreads best when it\u2019s cool and dry, conditions that may help keep infectious particles\u00a0intact<\/a>\u00a0and spittle aloft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic A mid-year wave might be brewing for the fourth year in a row. Will it always be like this? Since the pandemic\u2019s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4244,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4243\/revisions\/4244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}