Specialists place the start of the influenza season in the United States in October, with peaks between December and February.
MIAMI, USA —
The administration of President Joe Biden expects the next flu season to be very active, with rates similar to those seen in 2019, and urged all Americans to get immunized with the new COVID-19 vaccine boosters, which they hope to have. Available mid-September.
“We expect the fall and winter to be very similar to the fall and winter of 2019, with much less mitigation,” White House COVID-19 Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned Tuesday at an event sponsored by the White House. US Chamber of Commerce and broadcast on the C-SPAN network.
According to the doctor, in normal pre-pandemic times, the flu puts the US health system under pressure. “If we add to that the incidence of COVID, the system could be in serious trouble if we do not act very proactively to prevent it and we just sit idly by hoping for the best,” Jha emphasized.
Specialists place the start of the influenza season in the United States in October, with peaks between December and February. Mitigation measures against COVID-19 such as the use of masks and social distancing have kept flu transmission rates very low in the country.
This scenario will very possibly change with the relaxation of the restrictive measures announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which eliminated quarantines and social distancing.
As a forecast, the White House COVID-19 coordinator insisted on the importance of getting vaccinated with the new vaccine boosters, specially designed to combat the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Ómicron.
“Those vaccines are going to come very, very soon. It’s going to be very important for people to get vaccinated this fall and winter. These boosters are designed for the variants of the virus that are out there. According to what we have seen so far, all the information collected suggests that the new vaccines are going to be highly effective,” said the specialist.
The Biden administration is preparing to leave the crisis phase of the COVID-19 pandemic behind and announced that it will stop buying vaccines, treatments and tests in the coming months. This transition will mean that very soon doctors and hospitals will be in charge of providing these services on their own and the responsibility will not fall on the Government.
“My hope is that in 2023 we will see the commercialization of most of these products. Some of them in the coming months”, anticipated Jha, who pointed out that the commercialization of
drugs and treatments is delicate but that the Biden administration is working so that the result is successful.
“We are in a better place than a year ago and we will continue working to maintain what we have achieved,” said the specialist.