I might just be running in terrible luck, because I haven’t seen much about this in the news this week, or read about it here, but five of my closest friends have contracted Covid very recently, all of them Covid virgins, one of them just about to host a visit from me that had to be canceled at the last minute, incurring hundreds of dollars in lost airline fares, making me particularly sensitive to wondering WtF is going on. None of these totally vaxxed people know each other, (except for one couple), they live all over the place, Ontario, NYC, Denver, Florida etc, so contact between them is not the cause, and I’m starting to freak out, thinking that there’s some massive upsurge in Covid that has somehow escaped my notice. (Four of them have gotten mild cases, but one hasn’t tasted or smelled anything in a month, suffers from brain fog, and is thoroughly miserable.) My bad luck, or is something going on?
Covid test positivity rate is certainly up recently, around 17%. Last time it was that high was in Jan 2022 when it hit 30%. Since then it’s been under 15% and even under 5% quite often until this recent peak. It was 3.1% in May of this year.
No big surprise really. New strains of varied virulence and infectivity keep popping up.
Might depend on what news you’re reading, or what days you’re reading it on. I’ve been seeing news about a covid surge for a couple of weeks now.
Does anyone know if the current strain is making people sicker?
The CDC page seems to have a lot of measures that are presumably high because the number of cases is high, rather than measures that would indicate illness severity.
I’m just starting to look for the info–my mother-in-law is in the hospital, on oxygen due to Covid at the moment and my spouse is asking me to find some reliable info.
I had covid around three weeks ago and my doctor’s office indicated there was an outbreak in our local area.
Where is your “local area”?
It’s spiking nationwide, according to the NPR article and the CDC link. (If we’re talking USA local areas)
Western PA about an hour north of Pittsburgh.
School started.
My mother-in-law has some complications I haven’t heard about before. Just thought I’d share.
She has a paralyzed vocal cord, which can apparently be caused by, among other things, upper respiratory viral illnesses. It has made it impossible for her to eat or drink, because her trachea doesn’t get blocked off properly. So, she has a nasogastric tube.
The speech language pathologist who diagnosed her ordered a fluoroscopically guided nasogastric tube placement. There were 4 (not guided) attempts to place the tube that were unsuccessful. The first time wasn’t determined to be wrong until 8 hours later when they took an X-ray to check the placement. It was apparently quite painful.
My spouse had to tell them the procedure that was ordered. Then they did the right procedure and finally got it placed.
Her blood oxygen is staying at 93% now – up from the high 80s.
She has a middle ear infection.
They keep telling her she’s being discharged, then taking it back.
3 Things to Know About XEC, the Latest COVID Strain > News > Yale Medicine
It’s become a familiar refrain, but the new variant is expected to be highly transmissible. “XEC” sounds like a computer brand.
A new highly transmissible coronavirus subvariant is starting to spread in the United States. Experts say it could become the dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain just in time for winter, when COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations tend to peak.
The variant is called XEC. It’s a subvariant of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron strain, which has spawned multiple descendants since it surfaced in the U.S. in 2021. XEC first appeared in Germany in June 2024 before spreading rapidly throughout other parts of Europe.