Boosters: The Biden administration is expected to begin a Covid-19 booster campaign in September, offering updated vaccines that should prove more effective against the now-dominant Omicron subvariant BA.5.“If a different strain suddenly appears than the ones that we included in the vaccine, we could have a vaccine mismatch, and that leads to a more severe flu season.” Scientists analyze Southern Hemisphere flu activity to determine which strains of the virus to include in flu vaccines in the United States, but when the flu is mild there, “we don’t have as much opportunity to see what strains are circulating,” Dr. So once the flu starts spreading, it may sweep easily through the population.Īlso, ironically, the fact that the flu was so mild in the Southern Hemisphere could work against us. Soniya Gandhi, the associate chief medical officer at Cedars-Sinai. “There’s a lot more commingling, kids are back in school, mask mandates have been lifted,” said Dr. They reported that if flu and flu vaccination levels are typical of prior years, 102,000 more Americans than average could be hospitalized with influenza - a 20 percent increase.Īnother consideration is that Covid-19 precautions, like masking and social distancing, which also help to prevent the spread of the flu, aren’t being used now as much as they were. In a study published on a preprint server in August that has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh used mathematical modeling to predict how severe the upcoming flu season might be based on this increased susceptibility. (Cases are already starting to crop up in the United States, but for the most part, levels remain minimal to low - consistent with what we saw around this time last year.)
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Since we’ve had two light years in a row, we could be in for a bad year if the flu starts spreading, she said. That’s likely because of how the flu evolves and how susceptible people are to the strains circulating during the next season. “When you look across the years, more serious and more severe flu seasons often follow light ones,” Dr.
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Yet there are reasons to be worried as well.