A fair amount of immunity to COVID-19 now is due to people having gotten sick themselves, not just the vaccine, and I think that’s providing some ongoing protection now. Could that be why we’re anecdotally hearing about more people getting sick? We also just had the Fourth of July, when a lot of people were gathering. So people may still be getting sick, but they’re not getting really sick. We really aren’t seeing that at all this summer, for the first time since the start of the pandemic. Both of the last two years, we saw a noticeable summer peak in COVID admissions and deaths. We are seeing a slight uptick in wastewater surveillance, but it’s important to couch that in the probably more meaningful data on hospitalizations and deaths being at an all-time low. We’ve seen some reports of an uptick of COVID in some wastewater surveillance. But we don’t have any evidence to strongly suggest that things are going to be much, much worse this coming year than they were pre-pandemic. We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen this year, but given that COVID hospitalizations and deaths are at all-time lows, and people are getting back to behaving as they did before the pandemic, I think we’re likely to get back to the way things used to be with respiratory viruses as well. Last year, we did have quite a large spike in RSV, and the flu season was earlier but not necessarily worse than usual. The COVID pandemic threw us all for a loop. I think people have reason to be on edge. Should we be worried about another difficult season this year? Last year we saw a big respiratory virus season after a couple of years of not seeing as much flu and RSV.
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