Everywhere we turn, people are feeling sick. Not always terribly sick, but just stuffy, groggy, I’d-rather-stay-in-bed sick. It seems inescapable.
Is an extra-sniffly winter going to be our new normal?
Pandemic Lessons: Is the virus even still around?
We can paraphrase the legendary Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy on this one: Getting a grasp on our new relationship with respiratory viruses is simple, but not easy.
“We can look at this simplistically,” said Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “Pre-pandemic, pre-Covid, the viruses we really worried about the most were RSV and influenza, because they are potentially lethal.
“Then, Covid comes along.”
Pandemic Lessons: What to know as the Covid-19 emergency ends
Nearly four years ago, Covid-19 became that new enemy lurking in the woods of winter. We’ve become good at fighting it, but not necessarily avoiding it. And those two original foes – flu and RSV – aren’t going anywhere.
So yes, our new reality is that we have more to handle this winter, and likely every winter. But there is every reason to believe we, and our immune systems, will continue to get better at it.
Q: At this point, nearly all of us have experienced Covid-19. We’ve almost certainly been exposed to it, and many of us have had the virus, or the vaccine, or both. Aren’t our immune systems helping us out here?
Yes, which is part of the reason why you see fewer people getting severely ill with Covid-19. While physicians in Western New York and far beyond are reporting surges in respiratory cases, and hospitalizations have been trending upward, the level of severe Covid-19 illness is far less than two years ago during the hottest parts of the pandemic.
We can still catch Covid-19 pretty easily, but on the…
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