It appears the feared double-whammy of simultaneous COVID-19 and influenza peaks won't happen. The CDC influenza data are a little harder to interpret because of the omicron peak affecting counts of influenza-like illness (ILI); ILI is high, though coming down, but likely most of the numbers are omicron, not influenza. Most of the influenza that is being identified is influenza A H3 which could contain a clade that has a bit of a mismatch with this year's vaccines. CDC's influenza web site is always informative.
More on Vaccine Myocarditis in Adolescents
The New England Journal published brief correspondence from Israel updating Pfizer vaccine-associated myocarditis in teenagers. The latest numbers, looking just at ages 12-15 years, are 1 case per 12,361 second vaccine doses in males and 1 per 144,439 in females. These numbers are in the same ballpark as previously reported in US and Israel. The current data are based on hospitalizations for myocarditis. Note that the illness still looks to be very mild so the Israeli data could be missing cases managed as outpatients.
UK.gov
My new BFF in the world of COVID-19 listservs is from the United Kingdom. I signed up for daily alerts a while back. They come through at around 3 or 4 AM Eastern time and range from 1 to many different updates. All have summaries and links to raw data. Some days I'm almost overwhelmed with new reports. The graphics aren't as attractive as CDC's web site, but in general I think the UK does a better job than CDC in explaining nuances to the general public. I'll highlight 2 reports from this past week. Browse through if you are interested, but it's a definite rabbit hole for COVID nerds.
First is a January 26 report with some interesting mathematical modeling that attempted to determine the numbers of adults who would have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from either vaccination or infection. Not surprisingly, the older age groups with positive testing likely would have been due to vaccination. Another portion of the report looked at children 8 - 15 years of age where of course relatively little of the antibody positivity would have been due to vaccination. This type of analysis is important in understanding new methods to track pandemic/endemic activity.
Friday's report, which generally includes the big picture infection survey for the week, also had a nice report on the BA.2 variant risk assessment; this is the omicron variant getting a fair amount of media attention now. They have a lot of background data elsewhere, but their one-pager is a nice overview comparing the BA.2 variant to BA.1, the original omicron variant. They expressed moderate confidence that there is evidence of community growth advantage for BA.2 in more than one country (Denmark seems to be the country with a lot of BA.2 at the moment). However, they felt only low confidence that increased transmissibility of BA.2 explains this growth advantage. Also with low confidence, they saw no evidence that BA.2 was more able to evade the immune system (i.e. vaccines or monoclonal antibody treatments less effective) compared to BA.1. They had insufficient data to comment on whether infection severity is different. For now, BA.2 is yet another variant to keep an eye on.