I guess the CDC updated their page.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/covid-19-can-surge-throughout-the-year.html
Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer, driven by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations. You can protect yourself from serious illness by staying up to date with vaccinations, getting treated if you have medical conditions that make you more likely to get very sick from COVID-19, and using other strategies outlined in CDC's respiratory virus guidance.
I've been seeing this on my unit (peds). There's not really a respiratory illness season anymore, just a bump in fall/winter. Still getting obvious RSV or whatever viral illness but micro is saying they won't test unless the docs talk to the microbiologist until the next official season...
Since you work in medicine, should the rest of us get RSV vaccines?
I'm but a humble pediatrics nurse. There's no proper RSV vaccine where you get immunity for a long long time, you can get a prophylactic monoclonal antibody (that they'll call a vaccine usually) that lasts a few months but they usually only prescribe those to people with really bad lungs and poor immunities (for me that's mostly preemie babies). It's also expensive as fuck.
For most healthy adults, a bout of RSV is basically just an annoying cough - not fun, not deadly. For the 60+ crowd, it can be quite hard. For babies up to maybe 3, it makes them so stuff they can't breathe and fills up their bronchioles (bronchiolitis).
You should get a covid and flu shot yearly though.
The thing that was pretty spooky to see this winter was IGAS where relatively health people would get influenza b and strep throat then the strep goes septic and they end up in the icu. Like a healthy 30 year old with what feels like a kind of shitty flu going from emerg to ICU in a couple days. IGAS (invasive group a strep) seems like it's calmed down but we're probably going to see these random weird things yearly from now on. Covid infections damage immune systems in ways we don't really predict - like we keep getting really gross ruptured appys and swathes of newly diagnosed type 1 diabetic 12 year olds in DKA in amounts that just never used to happen before 2020.
Thanks for you expert yet humble opinion.
So I spend a fuckton of time reading medical research, but I still know so little. Nearly all of my decisions are "hey let's go see a doctor". I don't get the RFK, I learned about vaccine injuries through Facebook crowd.
I have a friend in a nursing home, and I don't know how it's going for other illnesses, but for the past two years they have been getting 3-4 covid outbreaks a year, and it seems to take out a few residents each time. Better than the start, were it was taking out dozens, I guess, but they clearly need to implement some kind of plan to prevent the spread of airborne illnesses year round. I still can't believe the government okayed going back to normal in hospitals and places serving the medically vulnerable.
HVAC is a big one, putting in HEPA filtration but also turning over air. Might as well maintain/improve AC while it's being done I guess - but all that costs money and so many nursing homes are for-profit so they'd rather not spend money on capital improvements when it can go to ownership. Otherwise, they could be stricter with PPE and not letting people in with symptoms but there's just so much fucked up shit that's happening to make workers feel okay or even needing to come in when they're sick.