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The U.S. is officially in the midst of another summer COVID surge as wastewater levels continue to peak for the second week, with no sign of slowing down.
Already rivaling last year’s surge (and surpassing in places), nearly half of the U.S. population is living in areas that have measured “very high” for COVID wastewater viral activity, according to CDC reporting. States with “very high” wastewater levels include Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming, as well as Washington, D.C.
What’s happening and what can we do about it?
A FLiRT-y COVID summer
The so-called FLiRT subvariants are taking advantage of the uptick of summer travel, creating highly contagious but relatively mild infections.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, “there are no indications the FLiRT subvariants are associated with increased illness severity that would trigger a substantial increase in hospitalizations.”
The surge is expected to continue to rise in states with lower wastewater COVID levels, according to the CDC.
This rise in the FLiRT subvariant is in keeping with this year’s trends.
“At the end of March, the KP.2 variant (one of several variants being referred to as ‘FLiRT variants’) was causing about 4% of infections in the U.S., according to the CDC, while its parental strain, JN.1, was causing over 50% of infections at that time,” explains Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “As of early May, KP.2 makes up about 28% of infections, overtaking JN.1 as the dominant variant.”
“This is the term being used to describe a whole family of different variants—including KP.2, JN.1.7, and any other variants starting with KP or JN—that appear to have independently picked up the same set of mutations,” Andy Pekosz, Ph.D., a professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, explained in the article. “This is called convergent evolution. They are all descendants of the JN.1 variant that has been dominant in the U.S. for the past several months.”
This summer, the CDC estimates that 80% of all COVID infections are FLiRT subvariants. This is in comparison to only 65% in June.
As FDA adviser, Dr. Melinda Wharton, suggested during a June meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, while there are no FLiRT-variant vaccines, getting vaccinated with current COVID vaccines will give patients protection and may help curb the surge.
More reasons to get vaccinated
Researchers have been working to understand the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the body. The inflammatory effects can linger long after a patient tests negative.
Researchers have been particularly interested in COVID-19’s effects on the brain. We all know brain fog is associated with COVID infections, but more and more research is showing brain fog can threaten to become more insidious. “Compared with healthy controls, survivors of mild-moderate acute symptoms group and severe-critical group had a significantly higher score of cognitive complaints involving cognitive failure and mental fatigue,” according to a recent study published in May of this year. The study “suggests that individuals recovering from COVID-19 continue to experience cognitive complaints, psychiatric and neurological symptoms, and brain functional alteration” as a result of “changes in brain function in regions such as the putamen, temporal lobe, and superior parietal gyrus may contribute to cognitive complaints in individuals with long COVID even after 2-year infection.” COVID infections can even result in chronic headaches in some patients, and possibly worsen dementia-oriented cognitive function in patients over 65.
These studies indicate that the benefits of vaccines, especially in older populations, increase when it comes to long-term brain health.
Good news for mothers
According to a study done by a Nordic research group, there is no evidence of “increased risk of any major congenital anomalies after infection with COVID-19 during the first trimester… Likewise, we did not find an increased risk of specific subgroups of congenital anomalies after maternal infection.”
This is good news for mothers as the paper also confirms that expectant mothers can be safely vaccinated for COVID as there is no connection between COVID vaccination or infection in the first trimester of pregnancy and congenital birth defects.
In fact, getting vaccinated or boosted while pregnant is often a good idea since, as the paper notes, “Women infected with COVID-19 during pregnancy have a higher risk of pregnancy complications.” Most international healthcare regulatory bodies recommend pregnant women get vaccinated in order to avoid these complications.
“We add to the current evidence with our results showing that there appears to be no robust evidence of an increased risk of any of the subgroups of congenital anomalies,” the study authors concluded. “Overall, our findings support the current recommendations to vaccinate pregnant women against COVID-19.”
