Category: Corona Virus Vaccine

(CNN) Covid-19 levels are about the lowest theyve ever been in the United States, but another new crop of virus variants once again threatens to disrupt the downward trend as the country heads into summer.

KP.2 one of the so-called FLiRT variants has overtaken JN.1 to become the dominant coronavirus variant in the United States, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data through May 11 shows that its responsible for more than a quarter of cases in the country, which is nearly twice as many as JN.1. A related variant, KP.1.1, has caused about 7% of cases, CDC data shows.

FLiRT variants are offshoots of the JN.1 variant all part of the broader Omicron family that caused this winters wave. The acronym in the name refers to the locations of the amino acid mutations that the virus has picked up some in places that help it evade the bodys immune response and others that help it become more transmissible.

Covid-19 variants are accumulating mutations that do one of two things: They either cause antibodies that youve accumulated from vaccination or infection to no longer bind to the to the virus we call that escape from immunity or they increase the strength in which the viruses bind to cells, said Dr. Andy Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

This has become a familiar pattern in the way the virus that causes Covid-19 continues to evolve, but experts say we still dont know enough to predict exactly where the changes will occur next or how they will affect the way the virus moves through the population.

The mutations of the FLiRT variants make increased transmissibility and a possible summer wave a real threat. Covid-19 is settling into some seasonal patterns, which have included a summer bump in years past, but the exact level of risk for this year is unclear.

Weve had some variants in the past that start out kind of strong and then dont take over. These subvariants could progressively become dominant, or they could get up to accounting for somewhere between 20% and 40% of the cases and then just stay there. We just have to see, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. The virus continues to be in charge. Its going to tell us what its going to do. All of our crystal balls are rather cloudy.

Covid-19 surveillance has scaled back significantly since the US public health emergency ended a year ago, which also adds to the uncertainty. But the data that is available is consistent. For now, wastewater surveillance suggests that viral activity is very low and decreasing in all regions of the country, and Covid-19 hospitalization rates remain extremely low.

We learned from the laboratories that FLiRT variants appeared, so far, to be as transmissible as the other Omicron subvariants, which means theyre really quite contagious. But they do not appear to be producing more severe disease or any sort of illness thats distinctive from the point of view of clinical presentation symptoms, Schaffner said.

As of May 1, the requirement for all hospitals to report Covid-19 data to the federal government has expired. But Schaffners Vanderbilt University Medical Center is part of a CDC-run surveillance network that continues to track trends based on a sample of hospitals that cover about 10% of the US population. Covid-19 hospitalization rates have fallen from nearly 8 new admissions for every 100,000 people in the first week of the year to about 1 new admission for every 100,000 people at the end of April, the data shows.

While the FLiRT variants pose some risk this summer, experts remain focused on what might happen in the fall.

If I were to predict, I would say that this might result in a few extra cases, a small surge this summer. But its really going to be about which variant is around when we get to the fall, Pekosz said. The fall is probably when we should expect to see a surge of Covid cases. And if we have a variant around there that has a lot of these mutations that avoid immunity, then the potential in the fall to have a larger surge is greater.

The fall and winter pose a greater risk because of the immunity that has built up in the population, he said.

The virus now needs better conditions to transmit, and those better conditions to transmit are probably going to happen in the fall when weather gets cooler, people are spending more time indoors and theyre more likely to be in environments where respiratory virus transmission occurs more efficiently.

Research published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA is a reminder of the burden that Covid-19 continues to have in the US. This winter, while Covid-19 hospitalization rates were far lower than they were in earlier years, it was still deadlier than the flu. A study of thousands of hospital patients found that 5.7% of Covid-19 patients died, compared with 4.2% of those hospitalized for influenza. In other words, Covid-19 carried about a 35% higher risk of death than flu.

People who received the latest Covid-19 vaccine this past fall may still have some protection against the latest variants; that vaccine targeted a different strain but was found to be similarly effective against JN.1, and experts say that some of those benefits may extend to its FLiRT relatives. People who had a recent infection especially since the start of the year, when JN.1 was prominent may also have some protection. But immunity wanes over time.

In June, the US Food and Drug Administrations vaccine advisory committee will meet to discuss recommendations for the version of the Covid-19 vaccine that will be available this fall. The meeting was postponed by about three weeks in order to allow for additional time to obtain surveillance data to have more up-to-date information when discussing and making recommendations, according to a post on the federal agencys website.

For now, experts say, risk remains relatively low.

As with all things Covid, our outlook may change in a week or two. But at the moment, were in really a very good place the best place weve been in for a long, long time, Schaffner said.

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New virus variants threaten a summer Covid-19 wave, but experts say the risk remains uncertain - wlfi.com

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COVID-19 variant FliRT accounts for most cases in US, vaccine info - The News Journal

Alix Martichoux and The Hill

14 hours ago

(NEXSTAR) On March 11, 2020, the director-general of the World Health Organization told the world that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

At the time, fewer than 4,500 people were thought to have died from the virus, but it was spreading quickly, appearing in new cities and countries every day.

Fast forward to 2024, and the virus has taken an estimated 7 million lives. Its still mutating and sparking new variants, sickening thousands of people, and ultimately killing hundreds every day. But we also have far more tools than we did in 2020. We have several effective vaccines and anti-viral treatments to help combat the disease.

With all that in mind, is COVID-19 still considered a pandemic-level threat?

A WHO spokesperson told Nexstar the word pandemic is not binary, its not on or off. To make things even more complicated, theres not one universal agreed-upon definition of a pandemic.

Columbias Mailman School of Public Health says a pandemic begins when a disease is spreading exponentially and across international borders. This wide geographical reach is what makes pandemics lead to large-scale social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship.

On the other hand, a disease is endemic when its consistently present but limited to a particular region.

With COVID-19, its been consistently present for years, but isnt limited to any particular area or population. It still has wide geographical reach, but case counts arent exploding out of control.

The WHO wont make a ruling on when the pandemic is over, a spokesperson told Nexstar. However, they did declare an end to the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) in May 2023. Unlike the term pandemic, a public health emergency is clearly defined under international health regulations.

While the WHO stopped short of determining whether or not COVID-19 still constitutes a pandemic, the agency made it clear the virus remains a global health threat.

There are hundreds of thousands people with COVID-19 in hospital now and there are many suffering from Long COVID, the WHO said. What we can say for COVID-19, is that the crisis is over, but the threat is not and what we need now, is countries to pursue their response and to take action needed to save lives.

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Is COVID-19 still a pandemic? - NewsNation Now

Health-care workers received the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020. A study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that repeat vaccination with updated versions of the COVID-19 vaccine promotes the development of antibodies that neutralize a wide range of variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as related coronaviruses.

The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the virus that caused it is still here, sending thousands of people to the hospital each week and spinning off new variants with depressing regularity. The virus's exceptional ability to change and evade immune defenses has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to recommend annual updates to COVID-19 vaccines.

But some scientists worry that the remarkable success of the first COVID-19 vaccines may work against updated versions, undermining the utility of an annual vaccination program. A similar problem plagues the annual flu vaccine campaign; immunity elicited by one year's flu shots can interfere with immune responses in subsequent years, reducing the vaccines' effectiveness.

A new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis helps to address this question. Unlike immunity to influenza virus, prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, doesn't inhibit later vaccine responses. Rather, it promotes the development of broadly inhibitory antibodies, the researchers report.

The study, available online in Nature, shows that people who were repeatedly vaccinated for COVID-19 initially receiving shots aimed at the original variant, followed by boosters and updated vaccines targeting variants generated antibodies capable of neutralizing a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 variants and even some distantly related coronaviruses. The findings suggest that periodic re-vaccination for COVID-19, far from hindering the body's ability to recognize and respond to new variants, may instead cause people to gradually build up a stock of broadly neutralizing antibodies that protect them from emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and some other coronavirus species as well, even ones that have not yet emerged to infect humans.

The first vaccine an individual receives induces a strong primary immune response that shapes responses to subsequent infection and vaccination, an effect known as imprinting. In principle, imprinting can be positive, negative or neutral. In this case, we see strong imprinting that is positive, because it's coupled to the development of cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies with remarkable breadth of activity."

Michael S. Diamond, MD, PhD, senior author, the Herbert S. Gasser Professor of Medicine

Imprinting is the natural result of how immunological memory works. A first vaccination triggers the development of memory immune cells. When people receive a second vaccination quite similar to the first, it reactivates memory cells elicited by the first vaccine. These memory cells dominate and shape the immune response to the subsequent vaccine.

In the case of the flu vaccine, imprinting has negative effects. Antibody-producing memory cells crowd out new antibody-producing cells, and people develop relatively few neutralizing antibodies against the strains in the newer vaccine. But in other cases, imprinting can be positive, by promoting the development of cross-reactive antibodies that neutralize strains in both the initial and subsequent vaccines.

To understand how imprinting influences the immune response to repeat COVID-19 vaccination, Diamond and colleagues including first author Chieh-Yu Liang, a graduate student, studied the antibodies from mice or people who had received a sequence of COVID-19 vaccines and boosters targeting first the original and then omicron variants. Some of the human participants also had been naturally infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.

The first question was the strength of the imprinting effect. The researchers measured how many of the participants' neutralizing antibodies were specific for the original variant, the omicron variant or both. They found that very few people had developed any antibodies unique to omicron, a pattern indicative of strong imprinting by the initial vaccination. But they also found few antibodies unique to the original variant. The vast majority of neutralizing antibodies cross-reacted with both.

The next question was how far the cross-reactive effect extended. Cross-reactive antibodies, by definition, recognize a feature shared by two or more variants. Some features are shared only by similar variants, others by all SARS-CoV-2 variants or even all coronaviruses. To assess the breadth of the neutralizing antibodies, the researchers tested them against a panel of coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 viruses from two omicron lineages; a coronavirus from pangolins; the SARS-1 virus that caused the 2002-03 SARS epidemic; and the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. The antibodies neutralized all the viruses except MERS virus, which comes from a different branch of the coronavirus family tree than the others.

Further experiments revealed that this remarkable breadth was due to the combination of original and variant vaccines. People who received only the vaccines targeting the original SARS-CoV-2 variant developed some cross-reactive antibodies that neutralized the pangolin coronavirus and SARS-1 virus, but the levels were low. After boosting with an omicron vaccine, though, the cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies against the two coronavirus species increased.

Taken together, the findings suggest that regular re-vaccination with updated COVID-19 vaccines against variants might give people the tools to fight off not only the SARS-CoV-2 variants represented in the vaccines, but also other SARS-CoV-2 variants and related coronaviruses, possibly including ones that have not yet emerged.

"At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world population was immunologically nave, which is part of the reason the virus was able to spread so fast and do so much damage," said Diamond, also a professor of molecular microbiology and of pathology & immunology. "We do not know for certain whether getting an updated COVID-19 vaccine every year would protect people against emerging coronaviruses, but it's plausible. These data suggest that if these cross-reactive antibodies do not rapidly wane we would need to follow their levels over time to know for certain they may confer some or even substantial protection against a pandemic caused by a related coronavirus."

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Journal reference:

Liang, C.-Y., et al. (2024). Imprinting of serum neutralizing antibodies by Wuhan-1 mRNA vaccines.Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07539-1.

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Study reveals positive impact of repeat COVID-19 vaccinations - News-Medical.Net

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A new coronavirus variant is spreading through the U.S., according to the CDC. KP.2, also known as the "FLiRT" variant, is a mutation of the Omicron strain. Amira Roess, professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University, joins CBS News to discuss.

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What to know about the new FLiRT COVID-19 variant - CBS News

(Precision Vaccinations News)

During the early stages of the recent pandemic, AstraZeneca'sEvusheld antibody was an effective therapeutic option. However,the U.S. FDA withdrew Evusheld's authorization in early 2023.

According to the company's press release on May 16, 2024, positive high-level results from the SUPERNOVA Phase III COVID-19 pre-exposure prophylaxis (prevention) trial showedsipavibart (AZD3152), an investigational long-acting antibody (LAAB), demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in the incidence of symptomaticCOVID19 compared to controlin an immunocompromised patient population.

SUPERNOVA is a large Phase III global trial providing the only efficacy data in immunocompromised patients, demonstrating the potential benefit of a COVID-19 antibody against recent SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Sipavibart was well tolerated in the trial, and preliminary analyses showed that adverse events were balanced between the control and sipavibart arms.

Iskra Reic, Executive Vice President, Vaccines and Immune Therapies, AstraZeneca, commented,"Immunocompromised patients currently have limited or no options for COVID-19 protection and continue to face a significant burden of disease, despite often being fully vaccinated."

"Sipavibart has the potential to prevent COVID-19 in the immunocompromised, and we will now work with regulatory authorities globally to bring sipavibart to these vulnerable patients."

Sipavibart is not a preventive vaccine.

It has been engineered using the same antibody scaffold asEvusheldand optimized with the same half-life extension, reduced Fc effector function, and complement C1q binding platform.

The reduced Fc effector function aims to minimise the risk of antibody-dependent enhancement of disease - a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies promote, rather than inhibit, infection and/or disease.

AstraZeneca is in dialogue with regulatory authorities on potential authorization or approval pathways.

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SUPERNOVA Study Shows Long-acting Antibody Prevents COVID-19 in Immunocompromised People - Precision Vaccinations

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The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the virus that caused it is still here, sending thousands of people to the hospital each week and spinning off new variants with depressing regularity. The virus's exceptional ability to change and evade immune defenses has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to recommend annual updates to COVID-19 vaccines.

But some scientists worry that the remarkable success of the first COVID-19 vaccines may work against updated versions, undermining the utility of an annual vaccination program. A similar problem plagues the annual flu vaccine campaign; immunity elicited by one year's flu shots can interfere with immune responses in subsequent years, reducing the vaccines' effectiveness.

A new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis helps to address this question. Unlike immunity to influenza virus, prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, doesn't inhibit later vaccine responses. Rather, it promotes the development of broadly inhibitory antibodies, the researchers report.

The study, available online in Nature, shows that people who were repeatedly vaccinated for COVID-19initially receiving shots aimed at the original variant, followed by boosters and updated vaccines targeting variantsgenerated antibodies capable of neutralizing a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 variants and even some distantly related coronaviruses. The findings suggest that periodic re-vaccination for COVID-19, far from hindering the body's ability to recognize and respond to new variants, may instead cause people to gradually build up a stock of broadly neutralizing antibodies that protect them from emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and some other coronavirus species as well, even ones that have not yet emerged to infect humans.

"The first vaccine an individual receives induces a strong primary immune response that shapes responses to subsequent infection and vaccination, an effect known as imprinting," said senior author Michael S. Diamond, MD, Ph.D., the Herbert S. Gasser Professor of Medicine. "In principle, imprinting can be positive, negative or neutral. In this case, we see strong imprinting that is positive, because it's coupled to the development of cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies with remarkable breadth of activity."

Imprinting is the natural result of how immunological memory works. A first vaccination triggers the development of memory immune cells. When people receive a second vaccination quite similar to the first, it reactivates memory cells elicited by the first vaccine. These memory cells dominate and shape the immune response to the subsequent vaccine.

In the case of the flu vaccine, imprinting has negative effects. Antibody-producing memory cells crowd out new antibody-producing cells, and people develop relatively few neutralizing antibodies against the strains in the newer vaccine. But in other cases, imprinting can be positive, by promoting the development of cross-reactive antibodies that neutralize strains in both the initial and subsequent vaccines.

To understand how imprinting influences the immune response to repeat COVID-19 vaccination, Diamond and colleagues including first author Chieh-Yu Liang, a graduate student, studied the antibodies from mice or people who had received a sequence of COVID-19 vaccines and boosters targeting first the original and then omicron variants. Some of the human participants also had been naturally infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.

The first question was the strength of the imprinting effect. The researchers measured how many of the participants' neutralizing antibodies were specific for the original variant, the omicron variant or both. They found that very few people had developed any antibodies unique to omicron, a pattern indicative of strong imprinting by the initial vaccination. But they also found few antibodies unique to the original variant. The vast majority of neutralizing antibodies cross-reacted with both.

The next question was how far the cross-reactive effect extended. Cross-reactive antibodies, by definition, recognize a feature shared by two or more variants. Some features are shared only by similar variants, others by all SARS-CoV-2 variants or even all coronaviruses. To assess the breadth of the neutralizing antibodies, the researchers tested them against a panel of coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 viruses from two omicron lineages; a coronavirus from pangolins; the SARS-1 virus that caused the 2002-03 SARS epidemic; and the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. The antibodies neutralized all the viruses except MERS virus, which comes from a different branch of the coronavirus family tree than the others.

Further experiments revealed that this remarkable breadth was due to the combination of original and variant vaccines. People who received only the vaccines targeting the original SARS-CoV-2 variant developed some cross-reactive antibodies that neutralized the pangolin coronavirus and SARS-1 virus, but the levels were low. After boosting with an omicron vaccine, though, the cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies against the two coronavirus species increased.

Taken together, the findings suggest that regular re-vaccination with updated COVID-19 vaccines against variants might give people the tools to fight off not only the SARS-CoV-2 variants represented in the vaccines, but also other SARS-CoV-2 variants and related coronaviruses, possibly including ones that have not yet emerged.

"At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world population was immunologically nave, which is part of the reason the virus was able to spread so fast and do so much damage," said Diamond, also a professor of molecular microbiology and of pathology & immunology. "We do not know for certain whether getting an updated COVID-19 vaccine every year would protect people against emerging coronaviruses, but it's plausible. These data suggest that if these cross-reactive antibodies do not rapidly wanewe would need to follow their levels over time to know for certainthey may confer some or even substantial protection against a pandemic caused by a related coronavirus."

More information: Chieh-Yu Liang et al, Imprinting of serum neutralizing antibodies by Wuhan-1 mRNA vaccines, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07539-1

Journal information: Nature

Originally posted here:

Repeat COVID-19 vaccinations elicit antibodies that neutralize variants, other viruses - Medical Xpress

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A policy brief published yesterday by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies suggests antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policies need to take socioeconomic and sociocultural factors into account.

The brief notes that while efforts to understand AMR have focused on the biomedical model, interactions between socioeconomic and sociocultural determinants of health and AMR, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, have not been studied extensively. Among the factors the authors highlight are gender, living situations, healthcare access, educational access, poor governance, mobility, conflict, and climate change.

Although how these factors contribute to the spread of AMR are complex, the authors say that understanding them could inform development of interventions. Such interventions could address, for example, why women are more likely than men to experience exposure to drug-resistant infections and be prescribed antibiotics, why people in urban and overcrowded environments are associated with a higher risk of AMR, how limited access to healthcare can result in more inappropriate antibiotic use, and how human mobility and conflict can lead to the introduction and spread of new strains of drug-resistant organisms.

"Policy that understands these and the way they interact with one another will be more likely to achieve its aims," the authors write.

The brief suggests that a policy framework to respond to these socioeconomic and sociocultural factors should focus on antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention and control, equitable access to diagnostics and effective treatments, and increased investment in incentives to stimulate research and development into new treatments. It should also be people-centered, multifactoral, and evidence-based and emphasize effective governance.

"There is increasing evidence of the critical role that socioeconomic and sociocultural factors play in driving AMR, shaping the health and economic impacts of AMR, and influencing the effectiveness of innovations and progress to tackle AMR at the individual, health system and societal level," the authors write. "It is essential that AMR policy takes these socioeconomic drivers and impacts into account moving forward."

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COVID, other misinformation varies by topic, country on social media - University of Minnesota Twin Cities

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Thrombotic Microangiopathy Post-COVID-19 Vaccination | Article - Cureus

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, health officials have gauged the threat of COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu.

At first, it wasnt even close. People hospitalized in 2020 with the then-novel respiratory disease were five times more likely to die of their illness than were patients who had been hospitalized with influenza during the preceding flu seasons.

Immunity from vaccines and past coronavirus infections has helped tame COVID-19 to the point that when researchers compared the mortality rates of hospitalized COVID-19 and seasonal influenza patients during the height of the 2022-23 flu season, they found that the pandemic disease was only 61% more likely to result in death.

Now the same researchers have analyzed data for the the fall and winter of 2023 and 2024. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, and his colleagues expected to find that the two respiratory diseases had finally equalized.

Theres a narrative out there that the pandemic is over, that its a nothingburger, Al-Aly said. We came into this thinking we would do this rematch and find it would be like the flu from now on.

The VA team examined electronic health records of patients treated in Veterans Affairs hospitals in all 50 states between Oct. 1 and March 27. They zeroed in on patients who were admitted because they had fevers, shortness of breath or other symptoms due to either COVID-19 or influenza. (People who were admitted for another reason, such as a heart attack, and were then found to have a coronavirus infection werent included in the analysis.)

The COVID-19 patients were a little older, on average, than the flu patients (73.9 versus 70.2 years old), and they were less likely to be current or former smokers. They were also more likely to have received at least three doses of COVID-19 vaccine and less likely to have shunned the shots altogether.

Yet after Al-Aly and his colleagues accounted for these differences and a host of other factors, they found that 5.7% of the COVID-19 patients died of their disease, compared with 4.2% of the influenza patients.

In other words, the risk of death from COVID-19 was still 35% greater than it was for the flu. The findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

There is undeniably an impression out there that [COVID-19] is no longer a major threat to human health, Al-Aly said. I think its largely driven by opinion and an emotional itch to move beyond the pandemic, to put it all behind us. We want to believe that its like the flu, and we did until we saw the data.

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, said the study results are right in line with what he sees in his hospital.

COVID continues to make some people in our community very ill and die even in 2024, he said. Although most will not get seriously ill from COVID, for some people it is like 2020 all over again.

Thats particularly true for people who are older, who havent received their most recent recommended COVID-19 booster, and who havent taken full advantage of antivirals such as Paxlovid. Chin-Hong noted that only 5% of the COVID-19 patients in the study had been treated with antivirals before they were hospitalized.

Even if the mortality rates for the COVID-19 and flu patients had been equal, COVID-19 would still be the bigger health threat because it is sending more people to the hospital, Al-Aly said.

Between Oct. 1 and the end of March, 75.5 out of every 100,000 Americans had been hospitalized with influenza, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same period, the hospitalization rate for COVID-19 was 122.9 per 100,000 Americans, the CDC says.

COVID still carries a higher risk of hospitalization, Al-Aly said. And among those hospitalized, more will die as a result.

Yet Al-Aly noted with frustration that while 48% of adults in the U.S. received a flu shot this year, only 21% of adults are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, according to the CDC.

Chin-Hong added that more than 95% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 this past fall and winter had not received the latest booster shot, according to the CDC.

Considering all the tools available to prevent hospitalizations and deaths and especially the fact that they are readily available to patients in the VA system the 35% relative risk of death from COVID-19 compared with the flu was surprisingly high, Chin-Hong said.

And its not like the flu is a trivial health threat, especially for senior citizens and people who are immunocompromised. It routinely kills tens of thousands of Americans each year, CDC data show.

Influenza is a consequential infection, Al-Aly said. Even when COVID becomes equal to the flu, its still sobering and significant.

The researchers also compared the mortality rates of VA COVID-19 patients before and after Dec. 24, when the Omicron subvariant known as JN.1 became the dominant strain in the United States. The difference was not statistically significant.

In just the last two weeks, JN.1 appears to have been overtaken by one of its descendants, a subvariant known as KP.2. Its part of a family of subvariants thats taken on the nickname FLiRT, a moniker that references some of the mutations that have cropped up on the viruses spike proteins.

So far, theres no indication that KP.2 is any more dangerous than JN.1, Al-Aly said.

Are the hospitals filling up? No, he said. Are ER rooms all over the country flooded with respiratory illness? No. Nor are there worrying changes in the amount of coronavirus detected in wastewater.

When you look at all these data streams, were not seeing ominous signs that KP.2 is something the general public should worry about, Al-Aly said.

Its also too early to tell whether KP.2 or whatever comes after it will finally erase the mortality gap between COVID-19 and the flu, he added.

Maybe when we do a rematch in 2025, that will be the case, he said.

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Despite its 'nothingburger' reputation, COVID-19 remains deadlier than the flu - Los Angeles Times