There's a Huge Covid Surge Right Now and Nobody Is Talking About It [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-huge-covid-surge-right-now-you-probably-didnt-notice/

Seemingly everyone has come down with at least one bout of illness this winter: sniffles that theoretically pass as “just some bug” if you don’t test for Covid.

But there’s a solid chance, with or without a test, that those sniffles were Covid after all. We’re in the midst of the largest global surge in daily Covid infections since Omicron, with nearly 2 million new infections per day estimated in the US alone. Odds are, you barely noticed.

The massive rise in cases is being driven by coronavirus variant JN.1, which emerged in September and quickly became the dominant strain. But hospitalization rates are generally lower than they were this time last year (90 admissions per million people in the US, roughly 65 percent the size of last year’s spike). “It’s really encouraging that we don’t have a big parallel spike of hospitalizations,” says Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

But infection rates haven’t peaked yet, and we can expect hospitalizations and deaths to rise over the next few weeks. “That’s really troubling for a variant that’s rapidly taking over,” says Mark Cameron, an infectious disease researcher at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine—and especially worrying during the winter flu season.

*snip*