The confluence of COVID-19, flu, RSV, cold weather and expensive energy pose a threat. Worldwide, the official count of COVID cases has increased over the last six weeks from 322,000 to 571,000, around 77%. (These are 7-day averages of reported cases.) Just in the last three weeks, Germany’s count started back up, from 24,000 to 31,500, up around 31%. However, in that same period, the United States has gone from 37,000 to 64,000, up about 73%.
In the U.S., the latest “subvariants,” BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, now comprises about 70% of the new cases. While all the variants and subvariants classified under “Omicron” are thought to attack the upper respiratory system more than the lungs, and to be less virulent, still COVID deaths in the U.S. over the last ten days are 50% higher than the level of the last couple of months (420/day instead of 280/day). Hospitalized COVID cases have risen 45% over the last three weeks, from 22,700 to 32,600—for hospitals that are already dealing with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) along with a level of influenza much higher than the last two years.
While the changes in the count of new cases are coherent with the changes in hospitalizations and deaths, the count of new cases has been significantly off since the advent of home testing (and the non-reporting of those results). A better indication of the spread of the coronavirus is provided by testing for the coronavirus by sampling wastewater across the U.S. While the latest figures for such do not include the last two weeks, in the month of November, there was a 30% increase in the presence of the coronavirus—whereas the rise in the count of new cases in that same period was less than 11%. So, the gap between the registered new cases and the actual presence of the coronavirus is widening.
