We survived the end of the public health emergency. Here’s the state of affairs. Surveillance SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.
yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com
Some takeaways and responses (items quoted are Dr. Jetelina's words):
Surveillance
SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.
She is getting some pushback in the Comments because people are thinking that the wastewater levels are
supposed to eventually end up near zero "
when COVID is all over", and that she is underselling the danger of all those '
cases!'. But that's now how it works -- COVID is now an endemic illness like influenza, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, legacy coronaviruses, etc. If we checked wastewater for those older, familiar pathogens, we'd see natural rises and falls but never to the point of virtually disappearing. So it is and will continue to be with COVID -- it's out there among people in our environments in May 2023, yes. But mere preponderance of cases doesn't broadly affect society so much anymore. And that will be all the more true going forward.
Mask usage. Polling on May 6-9 found 46% of respondents wore a mask at least some of the time in the past 7 days. Just looking outside, I was surprised about this statistic, but probably because I’m white and in the suburbs, two groups with the lowest rates. We really need to improve masking among older adults, especially in times of high transmission.
However: Some context is given in the Comments section:
Kathy
I am very surprised at the 46% of respondents stating that they have worn a mask in the past 7 days. I have not seen anyone anywhere wearing masks. I recently traveled overseas and saw at most maybe two people wearing masks at a very, very busy airport terminal, maybe 1 person on the plane had a mask on. No one wears them in stores, church etc. For reference I live in Pennsylvania.
Melissa Gold
I was a little surprised also, but then I looked at the source of the survey, which is YouGov. I am a YouGov member and receive occasional surveys, and I think the company's typical respondents are people who are socially engaged, politically savvy and who follow current events. I would guess that 46% is accurate among YouGov surveys, but the population surveyed is not necessarily in line with the general population in the US.
I think Melissa Gold is right on here.
Risk of long COVID after second infection. Risk of long COVID decreases after second infections, but is not zero. A new preprint found the risk of long COVID after a second infection is 1 in 40 for those over 16 years old and 1 in 165 for those under 16 years old. (As a comparison, the annual risk of getting into a car accident is 1 in 30 and the annual risk of permanent impairment is 1 in 700.)
Yeah,
it's a preprint ... so this
definitely isn't the last word on the matter. Still, this particular study is interesting to me because it's collecting self-reports of long COVID yet still coming with somewhat low percentages (I'd expect self-reporting to tend to exaggerate reported symptoms). More data will have to be collected to arrive at firmer conclusions, and that's going to take a good bit of time -- especially considering that we're only 16 months past the high point of Omicron (I feel like long COVID data from before Omicron, and especially from 2020, don't tell us a lot about May 2023 long COVID prevalence).