COVID-19 Spikes This Summer in Calif. as the Bird Flu Lurks

Officials in California are keeping an eye on a long wave of COVID-19 cases fueled by what medical professionals are referring to as the FliRT variant, which describes the virus’ various mutations and explains why this summer’s wave is not just lengthy but also sending more people to the emergency room.

Are we in for another pandemic?

So far, California has seen 10 weeks of very high levels of coronavirus in wastewater testing. Compare that to last year when the state recorded eight weeks of very high levels and 2022 when there were 16 weeks at that level.

“This is a very large surge that we are seeing currently,” Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times.

This summer’s wave is considered a very large surge, and positive tests were on the rise as of Aug. 12, when 14.7 percent of tests done at medical facilities came back positive. That’s a rate greater than last winter and summer. A month ago the rate was 10.6 percent.

Officials expect the trend to die down, but the United States continues to be vulnerable to another pandemic, according to Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of San Francisco.

“We will continue to be vulnerable to pandemics because we have not yet found a great way to fund public health and cooperate and share across international borders,” Chin-Hong wrote in an email to Emergency Management.

“After all, infectious agents do not respect political borders, as COVID taught us, and an infection in one part of the world is now just a plane ride away,” Chin-Hong wrote. “Domestically we are threatened by lack of a national health system and health information system, as well as the misinformation and disinformation that threaten our receptivity to messaging.”

He said the variants that took over this summer were responsible for the prolonged summer COVID-19 season. “Fortunately, there is no evidence that the FliRT variants cause more serious disease than [their] parent,” Chin-Hong said.

In short, the variants aren’t initially recognized by most people’s immune systems and thus the infection ensues.

There also have been reports of bird flu outbreaks in the United States this summer. Is that a new threat?

Chin-Hong said not in the short term, but “in the medium and long term, a big yes.”

One of the reasons this may be a big problem in the future is that the incidents of major influenza pandemics in the past, such as the 1918 flu, have all arisen from bird flu originally. Chin-Hong said the particular bird fu circulating now (H5N1) has been steadily crossing species from birds to various mammals in the past few years, picking up mutations that enable the virus to infect a new species like cattle.

“We are currently not controlling the outbreak in dairy cattle and the longer we fail to control it, the easier the chance that there will eventually be a mutation that allows it to enter humans efficiently and lead to human-to-human spread,” Chin-Hong said.

He said the whole reason the bird flu is more dangerous in humans is similar to the reason why COVID-19 was more dangerous in the early part of the pandemic: “Our bodies were simply not used to seeing this virus so there is no population-level immunity.”