The good news is that, given the significant cumulative protection from previous infections and vaccinations, the two most crucial indicators — emergency room visits and deaths — have not shown similar increases. The weekly percentage of emergency room visits with a Covid-19 diagnosis is low and similar to last year’s summer surge. Deaths are also low, although they are still only provisional numbers from recent weeks.
The FDA has firmly adopted a strategy of offering annual Covid-19 vaccines in the run-up to winter surges, rather than summer surges. The agency’s thinking has always been to encourage Americans to get flu and Covid-19 shots between September and November, just before cold-weather respiratory illnesses hit. A fresh burst of vaccinations could lower rates of severe respiratory illness at a time when health care systems are most at risk of being overwhelmed.
Seasonality
But while seasonal flu and some other respiratory viruses reliably occur almost exclusively in winter, the seasonality of Covid-19 has never been clear. And so far, summer waves have come as regularly as winter ones, creating some challenges for vaccine rollouts.
Some experts recommend getting vaccinated against Covid-19 to protect against the summer surge. “Now is the time to get a dose because of that surge,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN on Sunday.
However, the only vaccines currently available are against last year’s strains (related to the XBB.1.5 omicron variant), which are long gone and may not provide sturdy protection against the current strains (JN.1 and KP.2 omicron variants). Even if a vaccine for the 2024-2025 KP.2 strains is approved by the FDA this week and hits pharmacy shelves next week, the dose would need two weeks to provide full protection. By then, the summer surge will likely have begun to ebb. In fact, it appears to have already peaked in parts of the country, including parts of the South and West.
Another thing to consider is the timing of maximum protection from the likely winter surge. For well people ages 5 and older, the CDC Only one dose was recommended last yearVaccines provide peak protection for about four months. If you get your annual jab in early September, your protection may fall if Covid-19 peaks again at the turn of the year, as it has done in the past two years.
Under the 2023-2024 guidelines, people aged 65 and over can receive a second booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine four months after receiving the first. People with moderate or severe immunocompromise can also receive additional doses of the updated Covid-19 vaccine.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.