‘Tripledemic’ is raging on: fever-filled weeks lie ahead
WASHINGTON » It has become wearyingly routine: Americans are embarking upon yet another holiday travel season in the midst of a viral onslaught.
New, immune evasive versions of the omicron variant are spreading, and COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are once again rising, although the figures remain far below last winter’s peak. But this year the coronavirus has company: Common seasonal viruses, which lay low for the last two winters, have come roaring back.
“And as it turns out, they have some makeup work to do,” said Peter Graven, who directs the office of advanced analytics at Oregon Health & Science University.
In particular, influenza and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, hit early and hard this fall, causing major outbreaks that are now overlapping with a resurgent coronavirus. This viral pileup — what some are calling a “tripledemic” — has already set off an exhausting season of sickness, triggering sky-high demand for pain and fever relievers and pushing children’s hospitals to the brink.
But each of these three viruses is on a slightly different trajectory. Although there is considerable geographic variation, in most parts of the country RSV has probably already peaked, while flu is now surging, experts said. And COVID-19 is still ramping up.
That means that more difficult, fever-filled weeks still lie ahead. “A lot of sniffly kids,” said Andrew Lover, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health
Sciences. “There’ll be a lot of respiratory illness floating around from all these different sources.”
It is not too late to get a COVID-19 booster or a flu shot, which appears to be well-matched to the influenza strains circulating this year, scientists said. And experts repeated their now-common exhortations to take basic precautions, such as wearing masks in crowded indoor spaces, using rapid COVID-19 tests before visiting vulnerable people and staying home when feeling unwell.
“I know people are kind of tired of hearing some of that stuff,” Graven said. “Right now, for the next some number of weeks, we’re in not a great spot.”
Scientists are hopeful next winter will be better, noting that this brutal season is an unfortunate, and not entirely unexpected, byproduct of several years of pandemic precautions, such as masking and social distancing. These measures shielded many people from routine winter infections and may have spared overburdened health care systems from even bigger surges.
But many children and adults also missed out on the opportunity to build or bolster their immune defenses against flu and RSV, leaving the viruses with an unusually vulnerable population this fall.
“There was a bit of a buildup of susceptibility at the population level,” said Virginia Pitzer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. ”
The first virus to surge this fall was RSV, which usually causes mild illness but can be severe, or even fatal, in older adults and young children. By the time children in the United States are 2 years old, almost all have been exposed to the virus.
The virus typically peaks in December or January. But this year, cases of RSV began rising steeply in September, and by midNovember pediatric hospitalization rates had hit the highest level since tracking began in 2018. Hospitalization rates for older adults have surged, too. Flu took off in October, about six weeks ahead of schedule, and has already caused at least 150,000 hospitalizations and 9,300 deaths, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.