A newstrain of COVIDis rising in California with clusters detected in San Francisco and Kern County.
The “Cicada” strain is ahighly mutated subvariantthat has recently gained traction in California due to its ability to evade immunity from past infections and vaccinations.
It is arriving just as COVID-19 has increasingly behaved like a summer virus in California, with the last two years showing higher peaks in warmer months than in winter.
“This Cicada variant may be increasing just in time for what for COVID is more of a summer hit,” Dr. Neil Silverman, the director of the Infections in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA told the paper.
“COVID doesn’t seem to play by the samerules that influenzatends to play by, where its cycle is predictable.”
The nickname reflects the way the variant seemed to lie low before reappearing, similar to cicadas that emerge after periods of dormancy.
In contrast to earlier phases of the pandemic, recent winters have been dominated more by the flu, while COVID activity has shifted into the summer months.
“Although widespread infection- and vaccine-conferred immunity have decreased rates of severe COVID-19 over time, the public health impact of COVID-19 is still considerable,” scientists recently wrote in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
State health officials advised that individuals at higher risk for COVID-19 — such as older adults and those with weakened immune systems — should receive two updated vaccine doses, given six months apart.
“To me, the biggest threat … is the low vaccination rate in seniors,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious diseases expert , told the Times. “The landscape of divisiveness around vaccines is leading people to be confused and to think of COVID as being political when it’s not.”
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
