Barbeques, Sunshine and COVID-19: Summer Brings Another Coronavirus Surge – University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Hold on to those life vests. As COVID-19 joins barbecues and rain showers on the list of Colorado summer staples, this seasons latest nationwide wave is hitting the West the hardest.

Very high levels of SARS-CoV-2 infect the wastewater in nearly all Western states, with high or very high levels being registered in most states throughout the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With no signs of the surge slowing, some experts are predicting it could be the biggest summer swell yet.

What if I or my child heading back to school gets sick? The CDC recommends that people with COVID infections stay home until symptoms have been improved and fever absent for at least 24 hours without the use of fever-reducing medications. Then precautions such as masking in public are recommended for five days.

We are seeing the highest level of positive tests since January of 2022, said Kellie Hawkins, MD, MPH, an assistant professor of infectious disease at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Cases continue to increase in both the clinic and the hospital, although they do not seem as severe as during previous outbreaks, said Hawkins, who practices at Denver Health.

Public health experts hope to keep it that way, as they anxiously await approval of the latest updated COVID vaccines, she said. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTechs mRNA vaccines targeting the KP.2 variant are expected first with the more time-intensive, protein-based Novavax vaccine targeting J.N1 not far behind.

The top three variants currently circulating are KP.3.1.1, KP.3 and KP.2.3, respectively. All are Omicron descendants and members of the FLiRT family, named after the technical names for their mutations.

We expect the vaccines really any day now, so they can get rolled out for the fall vaccination campaign, said Hawkins, who shared more details in the following Q&A. We really want to combine this with flu vaccination and make it as easy as possible on people to get both vaccines.

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Barbeques, Sunshine and COVID-19: Summer Brings Another Coronavirus Surge - University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus