COVID cases rise in summer

I feel strongly that you can’t just kind of cry wolf all the time.

Dr. Allison Arwady, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, on watching COVID cases rise but holding back on citywide restrictions, such as re-imposing a mask mandate.

• Overall, COVID cases have risen in recent weeks in 40 states; rates of hospitalizations due to COVID have also risen.
• Health officials point to a variant of Omicron that hasn’t been shown to cause more severe disease but also appears to be more transmissible than previous variants.
• Why It Matters: Over the past two years, the U.S. has experienced a surge in COVID cases in the summer (the reason? TBD). Questions remain about whether these *known* cases will lead to more deaths and also how that will impact the lives of Americans moving forward.

Something To Note: “Not since the earliest months of the pandemic has there been so little precise information about the number of actual infections in the United States. As public testing sites have closed and at-home testing — if people test at all — has grown common, the publicly reported data has become scarce and spotty.” (The New York Times)

P.S. We’re watching to see if/when the CDC will recommend the Novavax vaccine to the American public after it received FDA approval for emergency use authorization last week. READ MORE HERE

Covid Rises Across U.S. Amid Muted Warnings and Murky Data

Omicron subvariant BA.5: These are the symptoms to look out for