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I have not heard about covid-19 all winter - did it fade away? Is it likely to mutate and come back with a vengeance...or another coronavirus may arrive sometime in the future?
Covid isn鈥檛 gone, but there is less testing and active surveillance being conducted and attention by the public and media has declined. The good news is that most people have at least received vaccination or been infected (and survived) so the trends are much less worrisome than at the height of the pandemic.
According to the updated numbers, there were 3.3 hospitalizations per 100,000 people in the last week of December 2024 (the peak last year was ~8 hospitalizations per 100,000 people per week and at the height of the pandemic it was ~35 hospitalizations per 100,000 people per week). As for deaths due to Covid, there were 1.6 deaths per 100,000 people over the past 3 months due to Covid. So, Covid is not gone, it is still causing hospitalizations and deaths but not as bad as before.
There is a chance for mutations, but we don鈥檛 expect it will come back to the situation of the height of the pandemic. The mutations may cause a temporary surge in hospitalizations, ED visits, doctors visits, sick leaves, and a few more deaths but I would not call this 鈥渃oming back with a vengeance鈥�. On the other hand, it is something that public health officials and medical folks want to be prepared to handle. Could another coronavirus arrive in the future? Well, we had SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 (killed 774 people), MERS-CoV in 2012 (killed 953 people and is still around), and SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 (>7million deaths globally).
That鈥檚 not all. We have avian H5N1 influenza that is lurking and plain old season influenza and RSV is currently in season. According to CDC, plain seasonal influenza is causing 32.6 hospitalizatons per 100,000 people for the week of early January 2025. RSV is causing 3.4 hospitalizations per 100,000 people for the week of late December 2025.
