A new dataset from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the number of emergency department visits for the three viruses combined – flu, Covid-19 and RSV – have dropped to the lowest they’ve been in three months.
“There’s the chief complaint.
While the surge in emergency department visits early in the year was due almost entirely to Omicron, the most recent spike was much more varied.
“There’s a strong interest in thinking about respiratory diseases in a more holistic way,” Hamilton said.
More new data from the CDC shows that overall respiratory virus activity continues to decline across the country.
Whether that pattern will hold is still up in the air, as vaccination rates for flu and Covid-19 are lagging and respiratory viruses can be quite fickle.
RSV particularly affects children, and sales for over-the-counter children’s pain- and fever-reducing medication were 65% higher in November than they were a year before, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
But this RSV season has been significantly more severe than recent years, according to CDC data.
Flu hospitalizations – about 6,000 new admissions last week – have dropped to a quarter of what they were at their peak a month and a half ago, and CDC estimates for total illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths from flu so far this season have stayed within the bounds of what can be expected.
The Covid-19 spike has not been as pronounced as flu, but hospitalizations did surpass levels from the summer.
Still, the XBB.1.5 variant – which has key mutations that experts believe may be helping it to be more infectious – continues to gain ground in the US, causing about half of all infections last week.
And three years after the first Covid-19 case was confirmed in the US, the virus has not settled into a predictable pattern, according to Dr.
“We’re just not utilizing most effectively around the world.