Health Canada told CBC News they’ll finish reviewing updated COVID vaccines by “early autumn” on the heels of the U.S. approving two updated vaccines to protect against hospitalizations and deaths.
As COVID looms over the Paralympic Games in Paris that start Wednesday following outbreaks among Olympic athletes, new subvariants of Omicron continue to ebb and flow and make people ill. Doctors and public health experts want people to consider getting immunized as part of their fall plans.
Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Aug. 22 why officials think the updated vaccines are important.
“While the COVID virus continues to mutate and change faster than the flu virus, our underlying immunity from prior vaccines and prior infections provides some protection,” Cohen said. “But we know that protection decreases over time, and certain groups continue to be at higher risk from COVID and other viruses, and we need to continue to protect ourselves and our loved ones.”
“Health Canada is reviewing submissions from Pfizer and Moderna for COVID-19 vaccines that target the KP.2 strain,” a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
So it’s KP.2 based. I like there’s acknowledgement that COVID isn’t seasonal and there are regular peaks throughout the year including during the summer.
I was of the understanding that the seasonality we had observed was somewhat influenced by people’s activity patterns. In the colder months people tend to spend more time concentrated indoors with other people (allowing communicable diseases to spread easier), compared to people being more spread out and more often outdoors in the warmer months.
It is. But in addition flu’s transmission is affected significantly by air conditions and the speed with which it mutates. SARS-CoV-2 mutates faster and it transmits during the summer air conditions just as well as the winter. In effect we get COVID waves every time there’s a new variant that evades the immunity acquired from from the previous variant. That seems to happen every couple of months or so. Spending time indoors still makes things worse so the peaks are typically higher during the winter months. And of course the holiday season is a massive superspreader event.
Influenza spreads better in the winter, but Covid seams to peak twice through the year, once in summer and again in winter. The best way to track it is through wastewater surveillance. This is the US tracking dashboard, not sure if Canada has something similar. https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/index.html
I got my last shot in April so I am expecting my next in October. I have had 8 so far and they have been about 6 months apart.
