By now, it’s as familiar as sunscreen hitting the shelves: Americans are heading into a new summer with new coronavirus variants and a likely surge in cases.
This is shaping up to be the first wave of Covid with virtually no federal pressure to limit transmission and little data to even declare a surge. People are no longer advised to self-isolate for five days after testing positive. Free tests are hard to find. Soon, uninsured people will no longer be able to get a free coronavirus vaccine.
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“If a surge materializes this summer, we are less prepared to navigate choppy waters,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist and longtime Covid researcher at the Veterans Affairs Health System in St. Louis.
So we are left with a virus that continues to hum in the background like an omnipresent pathogen and sporadic killer. The public health establishment no longer considers covid as an absolute priority. Only a handful of passengers still wear masks on trains and planes. Weddings, holidays and conferences are proceeding as normal. Many of those who get sick will never know it is Covid. Or care.
Covid has returned to the headlines following the rise of new variants called “FLiRT”, much more eye-catching than the JN.1 variant which fueled the winter wave. In the United States, KP.2 leads the pack of these variants, accounting for 28% of all infections as of early May, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But public interest appears driven more by the name than the biological characteristics of the variants, which seem mundane beyond the expected evolution of a virus to more easily infect people.
Summer is a reminder of why covid is different from the flu, a more predictable fall and winter respiratory virus. The coronavirus fluctuates throughout the year, and hospitalizations have historically increased during the summer months, when people travel more and hot weather drives people indoors. For now, covid activity is low nationwide, the CDC said Friday. The number of Americans dying from covid is less than half what it was a year ago, with the death toll at around 2,000 in April. The virus poses a greater threat to severely immunocompromised people and the elderly. But it may still surprise younger, healthy people, for whom a covid attack can range from negligible sniffles to rarer long-term debilitating effects.
When Lauren Smith, a 46-year-old triathlete from New Jersey, contracted covid in late April, she thought it would be a “nothing hamburger” like her first case two summers ago. Instead, she said she developed persistent fatigue for weeks that made training difficult, and she decided to withdraw from her next competition. Her case is one that doctors would call mild, but Smith says that obscures the reality of a virus more complicated than the flu.
“There’s no attention paid to the fact that it’s serious,” Smith said, noting that she was one of the only masked attendees at a recent Guster concert in Philadelphia. “I feel like so many people have said, ‘I’m sick of this, I don’t want to deal with this anymore.’ And I don’t feel like the CDC or any other agency is doing anything to combat this.
The Biden administration and the CDC no longer talk much about covid, except for sporadic updates on data and variant tracking, and criticism of the president, during his campaign, over his handling of covid. predecessor. CDC Director Mandy Cohen hasn’t tweeted about covid since March. The agency declined to make an official available for an interview about its response.
The CDC and health officials continue to promote the coronavirus vaccine, last updated in fall 2023 for a subvariant that is no longer in circulation, as the best form of protection against the disease. Only 23 percent of adults have received a dose of the latest vaccine, the CDC estimates. Experts say the existing formula should still provide protection against severe disease caused by FLiRT variants. People 65 and older are eligible for a second dose, but only 7 percent have received two shots.
Expert advisers to the Food and Drug Administration are expected to recommend in June the composition of the coronavirus vaccine to be released in the fall to protect against the latest variants.
But people without health insurance will no longer be eligible for free vaccines under the CDC’s Bridge Access Program, which ends in August after providing more than 1.4 million free vaccines. Funding for the program has dried up, and efforts to establish a broader national program offering free vaccines to adults have stalled.
Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said the decline in covid data collection will make it harder to persuade Americans that the virus poses enough of a threat to merit getting vaccinated.
In April, hospitals stopped reporting confirmed cases of covid-19, ending the most commonly cited metric for measuring the virus’ toll. The CDC still tracks levels of coronavirus detected in wastewater and discloses the percentage of emergency room visits with a diagnosed covid-19 case, which has been declining since February. But Hotez said that the available measures are no longer enough to properly understand the Covid situation.
“We’re kind of shooting blindly now,” said Hotez, who is also dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Public health officials are treating covid with less urgency, in part because hospitals are no longer reporting that covid patients pose a significant threat to their capacity.
Raynard Washington, who heads the Mecklenburg County Health Department in North Carolina, noted that while covid remains deadlier and more transmissible than the flu, the virus has become much more manageable thanks to vaccination.
“It doesn’t disrupt our daily lives like it used to,” Washington said.
While health systems can handle waves of covid, Otto Yang, deputy chief of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said immunocompromised people and older adults are at high risk of developing illness. serious are often neglected.
“These people unfortunately carry a heavy burden,” Yang said. “I’m not sure there’s a good solution for them, but one thing could be better preventative measures.”
Covid protection measures that were a staple of previous summers – requests for testing before attending weddings, mask requirements at conferences, outdoor locations for celebrations – are being abandoned.
Many summer campers, for example, will no longer be required to isolate for Covid while asymptomatic since the CDC revised its quarantine protocols to allow people to re-emerge after fevers subside, a said Tom Rosenberg, president and CEO of the American Camp Association. But other covid protection measures have remained blocked: opening windows to improve ventilation, detecting symptoms of illness and discouraging parents from helping their children unpack their bags when they arrive. Regardless of the severity of the pandemic, Rosenberg said, camps seek to minimize disruption from the disease.
“Kids can have more fun,” Rosenberg said. “We want to keep them in camp as much as possible as long as they are healthy and ready to participate. »
Others who try to keep precautions in place face greater challenges as they become outliers.
Organizers of Dyke Fest, a gathering of the LGBTQ+ community in Washington, D.C., wanted to include immunocompromised people when they asked attendees to wear masks and test themselves before heading to a bar where more than 250 attendees drank , browsed jewelry and artwork and joined packed crowds in viewing. drag racing performances. But compliance was spotty and enforcement tricky when rain drove people indoors, where drinking and masking don’t easily go together, and where pandemic masking standards eroded.
“Culturally, we’re moving away from it as a society, so it’s becoming much harder to ask people to be really consistent, because they’re not doing it anywhere else,” said Dr. Schwartz, one of the organizers. “You walk into a movie theater now, you see maybe five people wearing masks. »
Medically vulnerable people are adapting to a world where they can no longer rely on people wearing masks, even at the doctor’s office. In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers proposed legislation in May that would criminalize wearing masks in public, even for medical reasons, in response to growing protests against the war in Gaza, where many demonstrators wore medical masks.
The proposal disconcerted Cat Williams, who received a double lung transplant and faces increased danger of covid infections because she takes medications that suppress her immune system. During her medical appointments, she had to ask medical staff to cover her face while she took her blood and took X-rays. The prospect of being arrested for wearing a mask and being forced to take it off in a crowded prison makes her even more fearful of leaving her home. And she worries that mask skeptics will be encouraged to harass people who wear them.
“We have a target on our back,” Williams, 53, said of Charlotte. “They don’t want anyone to remind them that Covid is here.”
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Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
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