BALTIMORE, MD — COVID, RSV, the flu, the 3 respiratory viruses that are causing the most trouble this holiday season.
"Influenza is rising or is at really high levels across much of the United States. We have cases of COVID and RSV or respiratory syntactical virus, both of which have sort of stabilized, they aren't really increasing but they're still at relatively high levels," said Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins.
For a while, respiratory viruses didn't spread as easily because of COVID precautions.
Now, they've rebounded.
"This year's influenza season seems to be similar to what we saw pre-COVID-19 so we may finally be back to some kind of regularity of those kind of infections we saw before the COVID-19 pandemic," said Pekosz
The good news, for people who got the flu shot, it seems to be effective.
"Everything we know so far about the viruses that are circulating say they are a pretty good match with the vaccine strains so we expect to see good vaccine induced protection in the population," said Pekosz.
There's still a chance for 2 more surges in the next few weeks as the holidays impact case counts.
"What we usually see at this time of the year is a surge that starts a couple days after the end of the Christmas holidays because everybody is traveling and they're getting infected where they are, bringing things back infecting other people across different households. Then we'll probably also see another surge once school gets back in. Against schools are a great place for respiratory viruses to spread," said Pekosz.
Andrew says there's still a chance to get your flu and COVID shot and have some protection before the end of the respiratory illness season.
