Hospitals nationwide are preparing for another winter with Covid — the first one that’s also expected to include high levels of influenza and other respiratory illnesses that have simmered quietly in the background for the past two years.
Flu cases are already rising in parts of the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pediatricians, too, are seeing a growing number of children sick with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and enteroviruses.
And despite a downward trend in Covid, tens of thousands of new cases are still being diagnosed every day.
A recent analysis from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, predicts that average Covid cases per day nationwide will increase by more than 10 percent in the coming weeks.
“We’ll see an increase in Covid cases — probably not to the extent that we saw in the winter of 2020 and winter of 2021 — but we will see a rise,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic. “Most of those will be infections that lead to mild to moderate illness.”
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What’s happening in Australia could be a preview: The country is exiting its worst flu season in at least five years, according to the country’s Department of Health and Aged Care.
