{"id":5549,"date":"2023-12-19T18:30:51","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T00:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=5549"},"modified":"2023-12-19T18:30:54","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T00:30:54","slug":"winter-illness-this-year-is-a-different-kind-of-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/12\/19\/winter-illness-this-year-is-a-different-kind-of-ugly\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Illness This Year Is a Different Kind of Ugly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a> Facing down simultaneous surges of flu, COVID, and RSV, most Americans still aren\u2019t getting the vaccines that could temper the worst effects. Earlier this month, Taison Bell walked into the intensive-care unit at UVA Health and discovered that half of the patients under his care could no longer breathe on their own. All of them had been put on ventilators or high-flow oxygen. \u201cIt was early 2022 the last time I saw that,\u201d Bell, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician at the hospital, told me\u2014right around the time that the original Omicron variant was ripping through the region and shattering COVID-case records. This time, though, the coronavirus, flu, and RSV were coming together to fill UVA\u2019s wards\u2014\u201call at the same time,\u201d Bell said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since COVID\u2019s arrival, experts have been fearfully predicting a winter worst: three respiratory-virus epidemics washing over the U.S. at once. Last year, those fears didn\u2019t really play out, Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University, told me. But this year, \u201cwe\u2019re set up for that to happen,\u201d as RSV, flu, and COVID threaten to crest in near synchrony. The situation is looking grim<\/a> enough that the CDC released an urgent call<\/a> last Thursday for more vaccination for all three pathogens\u2014the first time it has struck such a note on seasonal immunizations since the pandemic began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nationwide, health-care systems aren\u2019t yet in crisis mode. Barring an unexpected twist in viral evolution, a repeat of that first terrible Omicron winter seems highly unlikely. Nor is the U.S. necessarily fated for an encore of last year\u2019s horrors, when enormous, early waves of RSV, then flu, slammed the country, filling pediatric emergency departments and ICUs\u00a0past capacity<\/a>, to the point where some hospitals began to pitch temporary tents outside to accommodate overflow. On the contrary, more so than any other year since SARS-CoV-2 appeared, our usual respiratory viruses \u201cseem to be kind of getting back to their old patterns\u201d with regard to timing and magnitude, Kathryn Edwards, a vaccine and infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Atlantic Facing down simultaneous surges of flu, COVID, and RSV, most Americans still aren\u2019t getting the vaccines that could temper the worst effects. Earlier this month, Taison Bell walked into the intensive-care unit at UVA Health and discovered that half of the patients under his care could no longer breathe on their own. All […]<\/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":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-headlines"],"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\/5549","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=5549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5550,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5549\/revisions\/5550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}