United States: California’s COVID-19 emergency room visits and test positivity rate are on the rise as the summer coronavirus wave intensifies.
Some patients are sicker than earlier encounters with the sickness. But there is hope or as they say, the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Figures today are still far below previous years, and health officials are now encouraging a new shot for the flu during the winter in light of new strains of the coronavirus.
California’s emergency room admissions increased by 20 percent in the previous week, with the test positivity rate reaching 10.6 percent — the highest with the indicators since winter’s activity spike in January and almost twice as high as the 4.1 percent rate noted a month ago, as San Francisco Chronicles reported.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), California is among the 39 states where infections are increasing, and no state or territory showed a decrease.
According to Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, “There’s a lot of COVID circulating right now,” and “I don’t think it’s going to taper off anytime soon. I’m expecting those numbers to continue to be high for a few more weeks.”
FLiRT variants activities
The increase is attributed to summer activities and the FLiRT variants, which originated from the omicron subtype that rose in the spring.
Variants KP.3, KP.2, KP.1, as well as the relatively newer offshoot LB.1, now account for about 65 percent of the overall infections in the US, as indicated by the CDC’s current statistics.
According to the CDC, the LB.1 variant may cause more severe disease than the previous variants and may also spread easily to some people due to the deletion of one spike protein, as San Francisco Chronicles reported.
As narrated by Chin-Hong, people requiring medical care at UCSF and previously infected with the virus are experiencing more symptomatic severity than in previous times.
Moreover, he adds, “What’s happening is interesting,” and “Since most people weren’t vaccinated last year and the variants have changed significantly, it is taking longer for their antibodies to respond.”
Only 22.5 percent of US adults received the new and updated COVID-19 vaccine that arrived in the fall of last year, a significantly lower figure compared to the 69 percent of the adults who were fully vaccinated by August of 2021.
Since the time most of the population was last vaccinated or previously infected, there have been many versions of the virus.
As Chin-Hong said, “If people had kept up to date with their vaccines, the course of illness might have been milder now,” and “Many received their shots early in the pandemic but haven’t had one recently.”